Paul A. Roth

Riddles of induction – old or new, Hume’s or Goodman’s – pose unanswered challenges to assumptions that experiences logically legitimate expectations or classifications. The challenges apply both to folk beliefs and to scientific ones. In particular, Goodman’s ‘new riddle’ famously confounds efforts to specify how additional experiences confirm the rightness of currently preferred ways of organizing objects, i.e. our favored theories of what kinds there are.1 His riddle serves to emphasize that neither logic nor experience certifies accepted groupings of objects into kinds.2 Hacking strongly endorses Goodman’s riddle and its chief consequences – nature does not dictate any organizing scheme to us, and different schemes need have no connection to one another.

This article explores and attempts to resolve some issues that arise when psychoanalytic explanations are construed as a type of historical or narrative explanation. The chief problem is this: If one rejects the claim of narratives to verisimilitude, this appears to divorce the notion of explanation from that of truth. The author examines, in particular, Donald Spence's attempt to deal with the relation of narrative explanations and truth. In his critique of Spence's distinction between narrative truth and historical truth, the author develops some suggestions regarding the role of truth in narrative explanations.

Like the positivists, Fuller is concerned to demarcate and systematically evaluate scientific claims and practices. Fuller corrects and reforms the positivist enterprise in light of his sociological naturalism. What Fuller's analysis brings to the fore is how the naturalization of epistemology makes the power?knowledge relation into an epistemological issue. Yet, in his writings. Fuller is radically divided with respect to how to react to this fact. Specifically, Fuller vacillates between, on the one hand, a concern for democratizing norms and, on the other hand, a Machiavellian impulse for the maximization of the norms of knowledge production. I argue that his commitment to being both a democratizer and a Machiavellian is inconsistent, and, moreover, that his argument for democratizing normative pursuits rules out, in fact, his more Machiavellian proclivities regarding how most efficiently to realize the norms of knowledge production

For the better part of the 20th century, expositions of issues regarding historical explanation followed a predictable format, one that took as given the nonequivalence of explanations in history and philosophical models of scientific explanation. Ironically, at the present time, the philosophical point of note concerns how the notion of science has itself changed. Debates about explanation in turn need to adapt to this. This prompts the question of whether anything now still makes plausible the thought that history must make some forced choice with regard to the type of science it is and an associated explanatory form. The discussion that follows sketches the alternative forms of explanation between which historians were to pick, and indicates why each proves unsatisfactory. Examination of these issues allows identification of a conception of historical explanation that does not require the metaphysical and epistemological assumptions that engender previous dichotomous characterizations.