History, Historicity and Science is another collaboration between Joseph Margolis and Tom Rockmore, following in the line of The Philosophy of Interpretation, The Heidegger Case and The Philosophical Challenge of September 11.  In this case, the collaboration has yielded an edited anthology of essays on the subject of reconciliation between the supposed invariance of discovered scientific regularity and the contingence and changeability of the histories within which discovery takes place.  The question is whether historicity may be coherently incorporated as an intrinsic dimension of scientific reason, or whether admitting history as any more than external and incidental is destructive of science's essential claims.  The mandate for the anthology stems from Margolis's conviction that the solution to the puzzle lies in a constructivist historicism.  Constructivist historicism would regard any item of our cognitive 'furniture' (concepts, epistemic norms, even necessities) as an artifact of an actual community's interpretive activity.  The constructivist part here asserts that rather than being transcendentally given, cognitive abilities are emergent as part of the practices of a community, and are 'put together' by various socially-supported acts of interpretation.  The historicist part claims that this process does not occur in an originary moment, but rather unfolds over the life of the community in time.  This leaves us with the paradox that our judgements of truth occur only in our historical social world, while yet the grounds on which we judge are themselves products of that history.  To many in the philosophy of science, and more widely in philosophy and in science, this seems to be a version of scepticism about science's epistemic claims.  Margolis argues that this is mistaken: the claim of constructivist historicism is deflationary, but leaves room for artifactual epistemic competences to nevertheless be genuine epistemic competences.  The 'good fight', then, is to counter the arguments that deny this while fleshing out the plausibility of historicism.  To this end, the essays collected here approach various aspects of the theme, out of the specific research projects of their authors.

Both Margolis and Rockmore have an essay of their own included in the collection.  In his, Margolis returns to the issue of incommensurability and, among others, the famous essay of Davidson's on the topic.  To some extent, this is old ground, for Margolis and for many others, but the essay does provide as a sustained excursus on the problems Margolis finds in Putnam's and Davidson's attacks on Kuhn's and Feyerabend's account of science.  After pointing out the problems with Davidson's egregious assimilation of incommensurability, untranslatability and unintelligibility, Margolis goes on to show how Kuhn's epistemic incommensurabilities can be understood by extension from various benign incommensurabilities, such as those of bilinguality.  He concludes by noting that any position that wishes to avoid commitment to some version of objectivism will not be able to eliminate incommensurabilities.  Rockmore's paper takes on the Kuhnian claim that scientists of different times (and different theories) live in different worlds.  Contrary to popular disparagement of this claim, he concludes that in fact it is the relativist's multiple worlds that we can know, and the singly independent world is the one that cannot be known.  Much of the essay is taken up with interpreting Kuhn's comments on 'other worlds' and then attempting to explain how claims of progress are consistent with this notion.

Beside the editors' contributions, there are six more essays, in topic areas such as philosophy of physics, psychology, and history, as well as Continental philosophy of science, sociology of knowledge and an examination of scientific rationality in the Kant and Hegel.  This last topic is presented by Angelica Nuzzo, and in her essay, she traces the relationship between reason and history through an examination of the relationship of truth and error in the work of Kant and Hegel.  She tries to show how, in Hegel's dialectic, scientific rationality is constituted by a process that necessarily relates history with reason.  In his essay concerning the nature of concepts in physics, Michel Paty attempts to resolve the tension between the objective aim of those concepts and their construction through historical unfolding.  He intends to bring about this resolution by examining the problem of the subjectivity of knowledge: in short, the problem that, even if about an external world, knowledge is meaningful only through a subject, in this case, the physicist, which is embedded in social and cultural relationships.  Christopher Norris, in an essay on theory change and the logic of enquiry, proposes ways in which analytic philosophy of science could benefit from Continental philosophy of science.  Until recently at least, analytic philosophy has doggedly pursued an extensionalist account of truth and meaning (and with little success as, for example, Margolis would argue).  Norris suggests this has deprived the analytic tradition of resources to be found in the Continental tradition, particularly in the projects of Husserl and Bachelard. 

One essay not directly addressing the philosophy of science is David Carr's essay on the reality of history.  In it, Carr defends what he calls the 'continuity theory', which asserts a continuity between the narrative form of history's telling and the reality of historical events, from charges that historical narrative is at odds with the experience of time in the events of history and that it cannot be made to square with the requirements of truth-telling.  The background issue here concerns the widespread scepticism about history's reality, since if history is 'mere' story-telling then there is no point at all in theorizing the historicity of scientific rationality.  Also on a slight tangent is Hugh Lacey's essay, which approaches the theme of the anthology more from the direction of sociology of knowledge.  Lacey devotes a portion of his essay to challenging the presuppositions that deny the historicity of scientific practices, but then turns to a case study of applied practice in agricultural science.  His aim is to highlight the way in which scientific practices reflect 'the value-outlooks of their practitioners and enabling institutions, and the interests served by their products'.  Finally, Rom Harré teams up with psychologist Fathali Moghaddam to critically examine the ahistorical stance of social psychology.  If instead of 'eternal' laws of behavior, the basic features of psychological understanding were changeable and subject to history, how would social psychology be possible?  Moghaddam and Harré identify a number of issues – the criteria or method needed to sort out the order of traces of the past, what historically-sensitive criteria for social events must look like, and accounts of the processes of social change – that must be considered.

Apart from the last essay mentioned, most of these are aimed at the specialist in philosophy of science, mainly addressed to the details of struggles in that discipline, and all are high-toned and fairly technical.  The Harré and Moghaddam essay might be of some benefit to the psychology practitioner who is questioning the foundations of their discipline, and may serve to spark a new course of study for some.  Overall, the anthology is another challenging and incisive effort from Margolis and Rockmore.

© 2007 George Williamson

George Williamson, Ph.D., Department of Philosophy, University of Saskatchewan

Categories: Philosophical