Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen

Methodologism outlines a new pragmatist approach to knowing and meaning. While knowing is typically defined as a state of some kind, such as possessing a true justified belief, I shall propose that knowing can, in general, be defined as a correct way of doing. This view applies to both the sciences and more mundane ways of knowing in our various forms of life. Also in historiography, knowing is understood as doing. The main focus in the methodologist philosophy of historiography should be to identify good and responsible ways of maintaining and advancing the conversation about the past, without an expectation of a settlement to any one view about the past. We need to ask: What are epistemologically responsible ways of practicing historiography? More specifically, what are the conditions and rules under which claims in historiography may be made, accepted, or rejected.

Kuhn famously rejects that science progresses towards a uniquely true account of the mind-independent world. Yet he states that science progresses. Progress comes down to improved problem-solving. It is important to realize that Kuhn talks about the progress of scientific knowledge. This raises the question of in what sense exactly problem-solving is knowledge. This chapter then has two main goals. The first is to explain Kuhn’s account of problem-solving as growth in knowledge by redefining knowledge as knowledge-how instead of knowledge-that. By linking the discourse of scientific progress to recent epistemological debates, I argue that knowledge-how ought to be understood as an ability, and therefore, scientific progress as an improved ability to solve problems and accomplish other tasks of scientific practice. The second goal of this chapter is to assess this notion of progress in relation to the recent debate on the nature of scientific progress, which has been reinvigorated by Bird’s (2007) paper. It will be shown that the epistemological and functional accounts of progress are, in fact, compatible if only the classical definition of knowledge is replaced by its understanding as knowledge-how. This results in a new, epistemological-functional conception of scientific progress.

This comment discusses Branko Mitrović’s view of historical anti-realism and realism. It identifies several interpretative errors and philosophical infelicities in Mitrović’s account, in particular regarding colligation, and realism itself. It is suggested that the debate between the realist and the anti-realist pertains to the statuses attributed to scientific and historical claims. Provided that anti-realism is not general skepticism about them, the burden of proof to show that such notions as ‘real,’ ‘fact,’ and ‘counterpart’ contribute to the philosophical discussion about the statuses of the claims rests on the shoulders of the realist. Furthermore, the realist should establish that the historian’s colligations can be uniquely correct and yet independent of the historian. This comment also is a plea for a more measured and rigorous philosophy of historiography.

Thomas Kuhn with his classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the most influential and widely read philosophers of the 20th century. Kuhn's claim that the meanings of scientific terms change is often taken to be refuted by recent advances in the philosophy of language. Meaning Changes challenges this interpretation showing that meaning change in Kuhn has multiple aspects: Semantic, mental and historical. The author describes the traditional view with clarity, but demonstrates that Kuhn's idea stems from his studies of history. The book explains how Kuhn's philosophy is supported by cognitive science and why meaning change is relevant to the history of ideas. It argues that Kuhn's case against Hilary Putnam's causal theory of reference constitutes serious criticism of the account. The book concludes by analysing Kuhn's 'historical perspective' in the coherentist epistemological framework, which regards the question of scientific progress ultimately as empirical. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars of the history and philosophy of science. It also is valuable reading to anybody interested in philosophy or scientific change.

Wilfrid Sellars’s suggestion that there are valid material inferences entails that validity is not limited to formal inferences. Because material inferences are expressed in ordinary language and deal with both conceptual and empirical matters, an interesting prospect unfolds: valid reasoning is irreducibly plural. However, it is not clear what the validity of inferences composed of non-logical and descriptive vocabulary means. I argue that it is better to speak of the legitimacy rather than the validity of material inferences. A material inference can be understood as legitimate when one has a pragmatic propriety to infer from an assertion A to an assertion B. Pragmatic propriety designates the social-normative entitlement of inferencing. Because pragmatic proprieties are discipline-specific and local, legitimate reasoning is plural. Nevertheless, the shared general feature of reasoning practices is to preserve and improve the coherence of one’s system of belief.

This paper examines how Hayden White and specifically Frank Ankersmit have attempted to develop the representationalist account of historiography. It is notable that both reject the copy theory of representation, but nevertheless commit to the idea that historiography produces representations. I argue that it would have been more advantageous to go yet one step further and reject representationalist language altogether on the level of narratives, as this implies that one is re-presenting a given object in one’s language in some sense. Narratives and other synthesizing expressions, such as colligatory notions, do not have such objects or references in the past itself, and therefore, it would be more appropriate to talk about constructed ‘presentations.’ In the end, I outline a non-representationalist alternative, according to which historiography is a form of discursive and argumentative practice

The causal theory of reference is often taken to provide a solution to the problems, such as incomparability and referential discontinuity, that the meaning-change thesis raised. I show that Kuhn successfully questioned the causal theory and Putnam's idea that reference is determined via the sameness relation of essences that holds between a sample and other members of a kind in all possible worlds. Putnam's single ‘essential' properties may be necessary but not sufficient to determine membership in a kind category. Kuhn argued that extension is fixed by similarity-dissimilarity relations that are liable to change in taxonomic reorganizations of science. *Received October 2009; revised January 2010. †To contact the author, please write to: Institute of Philosophy, University of Leiden, Martin de Vrieshof 4, 2300 RS Leiden, The Netherlands; e-mail: [email protected]

This essay is a response to four reviewers of my book Postnarrativist Philosophy of Historiography and to one detailed assessment of holism as studied in the book. I will focus on the following themes discussed by the reviewers: the debt to narrativism, representation and aboutness, truth, holism, internalism and externalism, argument, narrativity and rational pragmatism. In light of their critiques, I attempt to develop my non-representationalist account of historiography and move deeper into rational pragmatism.

Arthur Lovejoy’s history of unit-ideas and the history of concepts are often criticized for being historically insensitive forms of history-writing. Critics claim that one cannot find invariable ideas or concepts in several contexts or times in history without resorting to some distortion. One popular reaction is to reject the history of ideas and concepts altogether, and take linguistic entities as the main theoretical units. Another reaction is to try to make ideas or concepts context-sensitive and to see their histories as dynamic processes of transformation. The main argument in this paper is that we cannot abandon ideas or concepts as theoretical notions if we want to write an intelligible history of thought. They are needed for the categorization and classification of thinking, and in communication with contemporaries. Further, the criterion needed to subsume historical concepts under a general concept cannot be determined merely on the basis of their family resemblances, which allows variation without an end, since talk of the same concepts implies that they share something in common. I suggest that a concept in history should be seen to be composed of two components: the core of a concept and the margin of a concept. On the basis of this, we can develop a vocabulary for talking about conceptual changes. The main idea is that conceptual continuity requires the stability of the core of the concept, but not necessarily that of the margin, which is something that enables a description of context-specific features. If the core changes, we ought to see it as a conceptual replacement.

This paper examines Frank Ankersmit as a rationalist. I argue that there is a theory of rationality in Ankersmit, and that rationalism is an essential feature of his philosophy of history. It is salient that, according to Ankersmit, this theory of rationality can be discovered by a priori reasoning through analysing what the concept of representation entails. Ankersmit’s view is that Leibniz has best succeeded in defining what representation is. Further, Leibniz’s theory of representation, and the idea of rationality it entails, are understood to be applicable to history writing, too. The most important standard of rationality is scope. The historian is expected to maximize the scope of her representation, or to create a maximum distance between narrative statements and a narration. The attempts to maximize scope are hampered by other values which stand in opposition to it. For this reason, the historian has to, in effect, find the best possible compromises between two opposing forces – including as much diversity while maintaining as much order as possible, for example. However, no a priori reasoning, or philosophers at large, can in practice determine the most rational representation. This is achieved through historiographical debate and discourse by comparing one representation to its rivals. In the end, I pose some questions and challenges to Ankersmit’s theory of rationality.

Šešelja and Straßer’s critique fails to hit its target for two main reasons. First, the argument is not that Kuhn is a rationalist because he is a coherentist. Although Kuhn can be taken as a rationalist because of his commitment to epistemic values, coherence analysis provides a more comprehensive characterisation of cognitive process in scientific change than any of these values alone can offer. Further, we should understand Kuhn as characterising science as the best form of rationality we have outside logic, which rules out algorithmic rationality and allows non-cognitive factors to play a role in theory change. Second, Šešelja and Straßer overemphasise the importance of a priori reasoning in Kuhn, which was only an alternative to his earlier historical-empirical approach. My suggestion is that Kuhn’s neo-Kantian historical cognitivism integrates the earlier empirical and the later a-prioristic orientations. According to it, that any understanding of the world is preconditioned by some kind of mental module that is liable to change, detected as a discontinuity in the historical record of science.Keywords: Thomas S. Kuhn; Rationality; Scientific change; Coherentism; Kantianism; Correspondence theory of truth.

Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a classic, and it is certainly not forgotten. However, an essential aspect about it has been neglected. That is, Kuhn’s Structure is a book in philosophy of history in the sense that Structure attempts gives an account of historical events, focuses on the whole of the history of science and stipulates a structure of the history of science to explain historical events. Kuhn’s book and its contribution to the debates about the progress of science and the contingency and inevitability of the history of science shows why and how philosophy of history is relevant for the history and philosophy of science. Its successful integration of historical and philosophical aspects in one account makes it worthwhile reading also for philosophers of history in the twentieth-first century. In particular, it raises the question whether the historical record can justify philosophical views and comprehensive syntheses of the past.