•  69
    4. three dogmas (more or less) of explanation
    History and Theory 47 (1). 2008.
    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 …Read more
  •  13
    Who needs paradigms?
    Metaphilosophy 15 (3-4): 225-238. 1984.
  •  46
    To claim that Hayden White has yet to be read seriously as a philosopher of history might seem false on the face of it. But do tropes and the rest provide any epistemic rationale for differing representations of historical events found in histories? As an explanation of White’s influence on philosophy of history, such a proffered emphasis only generates a puzzle with regard to taking White seriously, and not an answer to the question of why his efforts should be worthy of any philosophical atten…Read more
  •  834
    The Pasts
    History and Theory 51 (3): 313-339. 2012.
    ABSTRACTThis essay offers a reconfiguration of the possibility‐space of positions regarding the metaphysics and epistemology associated with historical knowledge. A tradition within analytic philosophy from Danto to Dummett attempts to answer questions about the reality of the past on the basis of two shared assumptions. The first takes individual statements as the relevant unit of semantic and philosophical analysis. The second presumes that variants of realism and antirealism about the past ex…Read more
  •  18
    Interpretation as explanation
    In David R. Hiley, James Bohman & Richard Shusterman (eds.), The Interpretive turn: philosophy, science, culture, Cornell University Press. pp. 179--196. 1991.
  •  26
    The Full Hempel (review)
    History and Theory 38 (2): 249-263. 1999.
    Book reviewed in this article: The Logic of Historical Explanation by Clayton Roberts
  •  75
    Siegel on naturalized epistemology and natural science
    Philosophy of Science 50 (3): 482-493. 1983.
    What is the relation of epistemology, understood as the study of the evaluation of knowledge claims, and empirical psychology, understood as the study of the causal generation of a person's beliefs? Quine maintains that the relation is one of “mutual containment”.Epistemology in its new setting, conversely, is contained in natural science, as a chapter of psychology. … We are studying how the human subject of our study posits bodies and projects his physics from his data, and we appreciate that …Read more
  •  143
    Review of C. Mantzavinos, Naturalistic Hermeneutics (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2006 (2). 2006.
  • Naturalism without Fears
    In Stephen P. Turner & Mark W. Risjord (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Anthropology and Sociology, Elsevier. pp. 683--708. 2006.
  •  5
    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 epist…Read more
  • The object of understanding
    In K. R. Stueber & H. H. Kogaler (eds.), Empathy and Agency: The Problem of Understanding in the Human Sciences, Boulder: Westview Press. pp. 243--269. 2000.
  •  62
    This paper surveys the parallel fates of the notion of the empirical in philosophy of science in the 20th century and the notion of experience as evidence in one important line of debate in historiography/philosophy of history. The focus concerns the presumably crucial role some notion of the empirical plays in the assessment of knowledge claims. The significance of 'the empirical' disappears on the assumption that theories either determine what counts as experience or explain away any apparentl…Read more
  •  134
    Holocaust studies: what is to be learned?
    with Mark S. Peacock
    History of the Human Sciences 17 (2-3): 1-13. 2004.
  •  137
    The philosophy of history: An agenda
    with Frank Ankersmit, Mark Bevir, Aviezer Tucker, and Alison Wylie
    Journal of the Philosophy of History 1 (1): 1-9. 2007.
    The Founding declaration of the journal.
  •  33
    Microfoundations Without Foundations: Comments on Little
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 34 (S1): 57-64. 1996.
  •  63
    Kitcher's two cultures
    Philosophy of the Social Sciences 33 (3): 386-405. 2003.
  •  51
    What makes for a good explanation of a person’s actions? Their reasons, or soa natural reply goes. But how do reasons function as part of explanations, that is, within an account of the causes of action? Here philosophers divide concerning the logical relation in which reasons stand to actions. For, tradition holds, reasons evaluatively characterized must be causally inert, inasmuch as the normative features cannot be found in any account of the empirical/descriptive. To countenance reasons as c…Read more
  •  32
    Alvin Goldman's recent collection (Goldman, 1992) includes many of the important and seminal contributions made by him over the last three decades to epistemology, philosophy of mind, and analytic metaphysics. Goldman is an acknowledged leader in efforts to put material from cognitive and social science to good philosophical use. This is the “liaison” which Goldman takes his own work to exemplify and advance. Yet the essays contained in Liaisons chart an important evolution in Goldman's own view…Read more
  •  22
    The anti-social epistemology of narrative experiments
    Social Epistemology 5 (4). 1991.
    No abstract
  •  29
    New Philosophy of Social Science: Problems of Indeterminacy
    Metaphilosophy 26 (4): 440-448. 1995.
    This article defends methodological and theoretical pluralism in the social sciences. While pluralistic, such a philosophy of social science is both pragmatic and normative. Only by facing the problems of such pluralism, including how to resolve the potential conflicts between various methods and theories, is it possible to discover appropriate criteria of adequacy for social scientific explanations and interpretations. So conceived, the social sciences do not give us fixed and universal feature…Read more