Christopher Hookway

The term “holism” refers to a variety of positions which have in common a resistance to understanding larger unities as merely the sum of their parts, and an insistence that we cannot explain or understand the parts without treating them as belonging to such larger wholes. Some of these issues concern explanation (see explanation). It is argued, for example, that facts about social classes are not reducible to facts about the beliefs and actions of the agents who belong to them; or it is claimed that we only understand the actions of individuals by locating them in social roles or systems of social meanings.

'Naturalism' is a controversial label in philosophy; it can express the rejection of all things supernatural and the refusal to embrace a priori rationalism. And it can also be presented as a manifestation of scientism, the refusal to draw any distinctions between philosophy and the sciences. One origin of contemporary debates about naturalism goes back to century‐old debates about psychologism in logic. John Stuart Mill, among others, claimed that psychology could provide theoretical foundations for research in logic. Quine argued that the relations between experience and our beliefs were a causal matter that could be best studied in psychology. The philosophical problems that we face include epistemological questions about how we can answer skepticism, logical questions about the normative standards we should adopt in our reasoning and inquiry, and metaphysical issues concerning the nature of necessity and questions about universals and laws.

My initial education in philosophy was in Oxford and in the philosophy of ‘ordinary language’ and the philosophy of language. My heroes were Wittgenstein and H.P Grice. I was intrigued by showing how metaphysical or ontological theories could be disposed of as lacking meaning. While I was studying for an M.A. at the University of East Anglia, I was taught by Martin Hollis who led me to read C.I. Lewis’s Mind and The World Order. The book was a challenge and I doubt that I understood all of it. The footnotes to that book took me to Peirce’s writings and later to spending a year at Harvard writing a book on his work. His writings and using him as a teacher in how we should do philosophy have occupied most of my...

Whether the interpretations made by social scientists of the thoughts, utterances and actions of other people, including those from an alien culture or a different period in history, are objectively correct, whether the forms of explanation they employ conform to those of the natural sciences, and whether values have a role in arriving at the theory that delivers the interpretations, are the main questions addressed by the contributors to this volume. Of particular importance in the discussion of the issues are developments in the philosophy of language and mind. The eight essays converge on the themes of intentionality, realism and theory choice, reflecting the amount of attention being given to these matters when this book was first published in 1980. Together they make a distinguished contribution to discussion in the area and serve to underline the importance of intellectual collaboration on such discussion between philosophy and the social sciences