Paul A. Roth

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.

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 causes thus seems to imply some degree of normative involvement in causal explanation. Mark Risjord opts for full normative involvement while David Henderson insistently denies a role to norms in explanation. Stueber occupies an intermediate position here. I question just whether there exists some "special" problem regarding norms, at least in the form which, I take it, all three of the authors I discuss assume there to be one. Key Words: reasons • causes • norms • rules • explanation.

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 our position in the world is just like his. Our very epistemological enterprise, therefore, and the psychology wherein it is a component chapter, and the whole of natural science wherein psychology is a component book—all this is our own construction or projection from stimulations like those we were meting out to our epistemological subject. There is thus reciprocal containment, though containment in different senses: epistemology in natural science and natural science in epistemology.

History has been disparaged since the late 19th century for not conforming to norms of scientific explanation. Nonetheless, as a matter of fact a work of history upends the regnant philosophical conception of science in the second part of the 20th century. Yet despite its impact, Kuhn’s Structure has failed to motivate philosophers to ponder why works of history should be capable of exerting rational influence on an understanding of philosophy of science. But all this constitutes a great irony and a mystery. The mystery consists of the persistence of a complete lack of interest in efforts to theorize historical explanation. Fundamental questions regarding why an historical account could have any rational influence remain not merely unanswered, but unasked. The irony arises from the fact that analytic philosophy of history went into an eclipse where it remains until this day just around the time that the influence of Kuhn’s great work began to make itself felt. This paper highlights puzzles long ignored regarding the challenges a work of history managed to pose to the epistemic authority of science, and what this might imply generally for the place of philosophy of history vis-à-vis the problems of philosophy.

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 apparently discordant evidence. One consequence of this has been the suggestion that the analysis of meaning somehow replaces or supplants that played by evidence qua fact. This dispute impacts in parallel ways the turf wars between philosophers of science and practitioners of science studies as well as disputes in historiography between literary theorists and those not so kindly disposed. The parallels suggest why historiographic debate has stalled for three decades.