Paul A. Roth

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 thought that history must make some forced choice with regard to the type of science it is and an associated explanatory form. The discussion that follows sketches the alternative forms of explanation between which historians were to pick, and indicates why each proves unsatisfactory. Examination of these issues allows identification of a conception of historical explanation that does not require the metaphysical and epistemological assumptions that engender previous dichotomous characterizations.

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 views about the relation between philosophy and empirical inquiry. Goldman raises, if only unwittingly, the question of what philosophy per se contributes to the encounter. The way in which Goldman's work problematizes the claim that philosophy forms a working liaison with the cognitive and social sciences is revealed by examining two sets of distinctions prominent in Goldman's analyses in this volume. I trace how each pair of terms—philosophy versus science, individual versus social—is used by Goldman and suggest that it is less clear than one would like how these key notions are or could be distinguished from one another. Doubts about these distinctions, at least as Goldman employs them, suggest more general concerns regarding Goldman's style of naturalism and the status of philosophy as a source of knowledge. Liaisons: philosophy meets the cognitive and social sciences , A. Goldman. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992.

Like the positivists, Fuller is concerned to demarcate and systematically evaluate scientific claims and practices. Fuller corrects and reforms the positivist enterprise in light of his sociological naturalism. What Fuller's analysis brings to the fore is how the naturalization of epistemology makes the power‐knowledge relation into an epistemological issue. Yet, in his writings. Fuller is radically divided with respect to how to react to this fact. Specifically, Fuller vacillates between, on the one hand, a concern for democratizing norms and, on the other hand, a Machiavellian impulse for the maximization of the norms of knowledge production. I argue that his commitment to being both a democratizer and a Machiavellian is inconsistent, and, moreover, that his argument for democratizing normative pursuits rules out, in fact, his more Machiavellian proclivities regarding how most efficiently to realize the norms of knowledge production.