-
13Review of Jonathan Gorman, Historical Judgement: The Limits of Historiographical Choice (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008 (8). 2008.
-
93On missing Neurath's boat: Some reflections on recent Quine literatureSynthese 61 (2): 205-231. 1984.
-
131Varieties and vagaries of historical explanationJournal of the Philosophy of History 2 (2): 214-226. 2008.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…Read more
-
2Michael Krausz, ed., Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 10 (2): 66-70. 1990.
-
24The epistemology of science after QuineIn Stathis Psillos & Martin Curd (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Science, Routledge. pp. 3. 2008.
-
22Hayden White in Philosophical Perspective: Review Essay of Herman Paul’s Hayden White: The Historical Imagination (review)Philosophy of the Social Sciences 44 (1): 102-111. 2014.For almost half a century, the person most responsible for fomenting brouhahas regarding degrees of plasticity in the writing of histories has been Hayden White. Yet, despite the voluminous responses provoked by White’s work, almost no effort has been made to treat White’s writings in a systematic yet sympathetic way as a philosophy of history. Herman Paul’s book begins to remedy that lack and does so in a carefully considered and extremely scholarly fashion. In his relatively brief six chapters…Read more
-
2A Rationalist Methodology for the Social Sciences (review)Philosophy of the Social Sciences 19 (1): 104-108. 1989.
-
St. Louis Roundtable on Philosophy of the Social SciencePhilosophy of the Social Sciences 32 (1): 3-91. 2002.
-
17Book Reviews : Objectivity, Empiricism and Truth. By R. H. Newell. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986. Pp. 124. $24.95 (cloth (review)Philosophy of the Social Sciences 19 (2): 244-247. 1989.
-
6Raymond Martin, "the past within us: An empirical approach to philosophy of history" (review)History and Theory 31 (2): 200. 1992.
-
490MistakesSynthese 136 (3): 389-408. 2003.A suggestion famously made by Peter Winch and carried through to present discussions holds that what constitutes the social as a kind consists of something shared – rules or practices commonly learned, internalized, or otherwise acquired by all members belonging to a society. This essays argues against the explanatory efficacy of appeals to this shared something as constitutive of a social kind by examining a violation of social norms or rules, viz., mistakes. I argue that an asymmetric relation…Read more
-
634. three dogmas (more or less) of explanationHistory 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
-
4Review of Robert Piercey, The Uses of the Past From Heidegger to Rorty: Doing Philosophy Historically (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2009 (10). 2009.
-
811The PastsHistory 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
-
48To 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
-
140What does the sociology of scientific knowledge explain?: or, when epistemological chickens come home to roostHistory of the Human Sciences 7 (1): 95-108. 1994.
-
Michael Krausz, ed., Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation (review)Philosophy in Review 10 66-70. 1990.
-
119The Full Hempel (review)History and Theory 38 (2): 249-263. 1999.Book reviewed in this article: The Logic of Historical Explanation by Clayton Roberts
-
17Interpretation as explanationIn David R. Hiley, James Bohman & Richard Shusterman (eds.), The Interpretive turn: philosophy, science, culture, Cornell University Press. pp. 179--196. 1991.
-
274Beyond understanding: the career of the concept of understanding in the human sciencesPhilosophy of the Social Sciences. forthcoming.
-
72Siegel on naturalized epistemology and natural sciencePhilosophy 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
-
8Book Reviews : Stewart Richards, ed. Philosophy and Sociology of Science: An Introduction. 2d ed. Blackwell, Oxford, 1987. Pp. 240, US$15.95 (paper (review)Philosophy of the Social Sciences 21 (1): 130-132. 1991.
-
134Review of C. Mantzavinos, Naturalistic Hermeneutics (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2006 (2). 2006.
-
Naturalism without FearsIn Stephen P. Turner & Mark W. Risjord (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Anthropology and Sociology, Elsevier. pp. 683--708. 2007.
-
The object of understandingIn 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.
-
4Roth 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
Santa Cruz, California, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Social Science |
20th Century Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Metaphilosophy |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Physical Science |