Paul A. Roth

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.

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.