Paul A. Roth

As a Popperian, Ian C. Jarvie takes falsifiability to be a defining characteristic of rationality. This suggests that any disagreement about the truth or falsity of a particular belief that can be settled by further evidence should be rationally resolvable, at least in the following sense. Niceties about probabilities aside, one should be able to specify under what conditions, that is, given what evidence, one would surrender that belief. Put another way, if a belief will not be given up no matter what evidence one might ever confront, then this establishes that belief as mere dogma.

What ought to count as an explanation? Such normative questions—what “ought to be” the case?—typically mark the domain that those with a type of philosophical aspiration call their own. Debates in the philosophy of history have for too long been marred by bad advice from just such aspirants. The recurrent suggestion has been that historians have a particular need for a theory of explanation since they seem to have none of their own. But neither the study of the natural sciences nor the study of narrative compels or even makes plausible the view that it will be possible to adduce the norms of explanation, either in history or elsewhere, in advance of identifying theories that explain. I readily concede to Stueber, Carr, and FORLAND the use of a certain vocabulary when speaking of others. But it is one thing to point to a pervasive habit of explaining behavior in certain terms. It is quite another to document that these explanations have any value as explanations.What apart from habit or philosophical dogma establishes any of their proposals as explanatory? Explanation by invoking the myth of the shared should be replaced by explanations that have empirical content.

This book develops a philosophical structure for historical explanation that resolves disputes about the scientific status of history that have persisted since the nineteenth century. It does this by showing why historical explanations must take the form of a narrative and by making their logic explicit. The books formulates a unique positive account of the logic of narrative explanations. This logic reveals how the rational evaluation of narrative explanation becomes possible. The book also develops a nonrealist (irrealist) metaphysics and epistemology of history--that is, it argues that there exists no one fixed past but many pasts. It includes a novel reading of Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, displaying how Kuhn offers a narrative explanation of theory change in science. The book situates narrative explanations within a naturalistic framework. Naturalism regards all canons of rational inquiry as evolving and contingent. The book also argues for the general philosophical significance of historical explanation. The first four chapters defuse methodological and the metaphysical objections to narrative explanations. The final three chapters explore how narrative explanations relate to other sciences. It will be of interest to researchers in historiography, theory of history, philosophy of history, philosophy of science, philosophy of social science, and epistemology"--Provided by publisher.

Kalle Pihlainen’s book reworks seven essays published over the last dozen years. Pihlainen’s Preface and Hayden White’s Foreword articulate a cri de cœur. Both fear that something important has been missed. White’s Foreword somewhat cryptically characterizes Pihlainen’s book as “metacritical,” and locates Pihlainen in the role of being a “serious reader” for the community of theorists of history. What does it mean to be a “serious” reader? White never says. But following White’s hint, Pihlainen can be read as updating Marx’s conception of the task of unmasking sources of alienation by focusing on the reasons for the estrangement of histories from a wider audience. For him, “the core case is that the ‘historical’ nature of history itself needs to be acknowledged”. It remains unacknowledged so long as the source of meaning in history continues to be displaced. For even those who emphasize narrative form tend to talk as if meanings were imposed by some factor other than human intervention, as if form magically imbues content with significance. But this is one more symptom, if such is needed, of collective bad faith, a denial that only people make meaning. By taking disembodied literary forms as repositories of significance, responsibility for meaning is once again deflected or deferred. In this key regard, Pihlainen’s claim to place “decided emphasis on its [historical theory’s] ethical-political momentum” signals that the issues he intends to foreground are not epistemological or discursive. Pihlainen rightly suspects that all the talk of “narrativism” and “discourse” serves only to evade confronting the truly difficult moral and political challenges that writing represents. His various chapters identify these evasions and the challenges that remain.

ABSTRACTJohn Searle's most recent effort to account for human social institutions claims to provide a synthesis of the explanatory and the normative while simultaneously dismissing as confused and wrongheaded theorists who held otherwise. Searle, although doubtless alert to the usual considerations for separating the normative and the explanatory projects, announces at the outset that he conceives of matters quite differently. Searle's reason for reconceiving the field rests on his claim that both ends can be achieved by a single “underlying principle of social ontology”. This principle, he maintains, proves basic both to any explanation of how the social arises and sustains itself as well as to all justifications of core common norms, for example, human rights. His approach transforms what previously appeared to be ontological/explanatory questions completely into semantic/conceptual issues. By situating language as constitutive of the social, and intentionality as a necessary conceptual precursor to language, Searle claims to join by semantic necessity philosophical projects that the philosophical tradition that he rejects held distinct. Searle's notion of the social comes for free once one has language as a conventional cloak for prelinguistic, semantically well‐formed intentional contents, individual and collective. But upon examination, Searle's key argument for displacement of the tradition depends upon the viability of his linguistic mechanism, and that in turn requires prelinguistic necessity for all forms of intentionality. But he can produce no compelling connection, conceptual or empirical, to establish the role that collective intentionality supposedly must play.

Roth contends that the controversy in the philosophy of the social sciences over the canons of rationality is the product of the mistaken belief in methodological exclusivism. Drawing on work in contemporary epistemology by W.V.O. Quine, Richard Rorty and Paul Feyerabend, he argues that no single theory of human behavior has methodological priority. He demonstrates how rejecting the notion of universal norms of social inquiry neither reduces epistemology to empirical psychology nor entails epistemological nihilism. He also traces the false presupposition that modeling the social science on the natural sciences is the best method for inquiring into human affairs, examines and rejects specific formulations of methodological exclusivism; and advocates methodological pluralism, which incorporates both a type of methodological anarchism and a commitment to Quinean-style holism and empiricism. ISBN 0-8014-1941-7: $26.95.