Martin Kusch

This introduction to the special issue 'Are Social Sciences Special?' proposes the concept of S-debates, or debates over the specialness of the social sciences. We argue that these debates arose regularly and cyclically since the institutionalisation of social sciences in 19th and 20th centuries and used a repertoire of arguments that can be traced back to the German-speaking debate covered by Martin Kusch in the article in this issue. While philosophers have typically tackled these debates as participants, no intervention ever led to a consensus. This indicates the need for a sociology of science approach that examines why these debates arise, their cultural and political stakes, and what the participants gain from arguing for or against the specialness of social sciences. Awareness of why S-debates ebb and flow and why they may be irresolvable helps us understand their role in contemporary social sciences and yields lessons for those wishing to revive them

Psychologists and philosophers have assumed that psychological knowledge is knowledge about, and held by, the individual mind. _Psychological Knowledge_ challenges these views. It argues that bodies of psychological knowledge are social institutions like money or the monarchy, and that mental states are social artefacts like coins or crowns. Martin Kusch takes on arguments of alternative proposals, shows what is wrong with them, and demonstrates how his own social-philosophical approach constitutes an advance. We see that exists a substantial natural amount of philosophical theorising, a body of work that tries to determine the nature and structure of folk psychology. An introduction to the workings of constuctivism, _Psychological Knowledge_ is an insightful introduction to the history of psychology and the recent philosophy of mind.

Three core commitments run through Kornblith's work in epistemology. First, epistemologists should investigate knowledge itself rather than the concept of knowledge. Second, knowledge is a natural kind. Third, knowledge is reliably produced true belief. These commitments are related in several ways, and they are intended to provide mutual support for each other. In this chapter we argue that, when we subject them to detailed scrutiny, they have some quite surprising results. Kornblith should be open to a promiscuous pluralism about knowledge that, among other things, threatens his first core commitment and opens the door to non-factive and relativistic conceptions of knowledge. Moreover, it is not clear that Kornblith can preserve his reliabilist picture of knowledge, and he may be forced to accept a form of relativism that goes beyond what he himself seems willing to accept.

Knowledge by Agreement defends the ideas that knowledge is a social status (like money, or marriage), and that knowledge is primarily the possession of groups rather than individuals. Part I develops a new theory of testimony. It breaks with the traditional view according to which testimony is not, except accidentally, a generative source of knowledge. One important consequence of the new theory is a rejection of attempts to globally justify trust in the words of others. Part II proposes a communitarian theory of empirical knowledge. Martin Kusch argues that empirical belief can acquire the status of knowledge only by being shared with others, and that all empirical beliefs presuppose social institutions. As a result all knowledge is essentially political. Part III defends some of the controversial premises and consequences of Parts I and II: the community-dependence of normativity, epistemological and semantic relativism, anti-realism, and a social conception of objectivity. Martin Kusch's bold approach to epistemology is a challenge to philosophy and will arouse interest in the wider academic world.

This paper is a response to two conflicting interpretations of the place of the sociology of knowledge and epistemic relativism in Logical Empiricism: the interpretations put forward by Thomas Uebel (Philosophy of Science 67:138–150, 2000) and David Bloor (The Enigma of the Aerofoil: Rival Theories in Aerodynamics, 1909–1930. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2011). I agree with Bloor and Uebel that the sociology of knowledge was a central concern for Frank; and I am convinced by Uebel’s arguments that the same is true for Neurath. I side with Bloor—against Uebel—in maintaining that Frank committed himself to relativism. I try to show the same for Neurath. Still, I disagree with important aspects of Bloor’s rendering of Frank’s relativism.

Dieser Aufsatz entwickelt eine neue Interpretation von Wittgensteins ‚Vorlesungen über religiösen Glauben‘ (=VRG). Diese Interpretation lässt sich in fünf Thesen zusammenfassen: (1) VRG zufolge gibt es keine Inkommensurabilität zwischen religiösen und anderen Diskursen. (2) Die VRG erlauben, dass ein nicht-religiöser Mensch, ohne sich zu bekehren, die propositionale Einstellung und den Inhalt des religiösen Glaubens verstehen kann. (3) Ein nicht-religiöser Mensch kann Gläubige kritisieren: (a) auf der Basis der Standards der fraglichen Religion, (b) auf der Grundlage von geteilten allgemeinen Prinzipien (z. B., dass Selbstbetrug zu vermeiden ist), und (c) mit Verweis auf Prinzipien, die der nicht-religiöse Mensch mit den Gläubigen nicht teilt. (4) Die VRG schließen allerdings aus, dass ein nicht-religiöser Mensch die propositionale Einstellung des religiösen Glaubens an sich angreifen kann.Zumindest kann dies nicht aufgrund von Standards geschehen, die nicht-religiösen Menschen und Gläubigen gemeinsam sind.Und zuletzt (5), ist für den Wittgenstein der VRG ein ‚Relativismus der Distanz‘ eine plausible Reaktion auf den Mangel an religiösen und nicht-religiösen Menschen gemeinsamen Standards.

This paper offers an analysis of three types of relativism in the historiography of medicine. Three authors—Andrew Cunningham, Nicholas Jewson, and Annemarie Mol—are presented as paradigmatic instances of these three versions. I first present thumbnail sketches of some of the mentioned authors’ best-known work. Subsequently, I situate them both relative to familiar relativistic positions in the philosophy and sociology of the (natural) sciences, and relative to a ‘spectrum of relativistic positions’ that I outline. The main upshot of the paper is do identify the main differences and commonalities of the three varieties of ‘historiographical medical relativism’. I defend the authors only insofar as I show that they are not per se committed to “equal-validity relativism”.

Relativism is often motivated in terms of certain types of disagreement. In this paper, we survey the philosophical debates over two such types: faultless disagreement in the case of gustatory conflict, and fundamental disagreement in the case of epistemic conflict. Each of the two discussions makes use of a (largely) implicit conception of judgement: brute judgement in the case of faultless disagreement, and rule-governed judgement in the case of fundamental disagreement. We show that the prevalent accounts work with unreasonably high levels of idealization. We defend two claims. First, philosophical discussions of disagreement need to be de-idealized. Second, once a less idealized account of disagreement is available, both our conception of judgement and our understanding of relativism need to be revised. Our example is a case study in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge: Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s classic Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985). This case study gives a less idealized account of disagreement that conceptualizes judgements as situated (rather than brute or rule-governed). We argue that this conception can and should be applied to cases of gustatory and epistemic disagreement. The payoff will be a reformulation of relativism in terms of rationally resolvable yet contingent disagreements.

No other recent book in Anglophone philosophy has attracted as much criticism and has found so few friends as Saul Kripke's "Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language". Amongst its critics, one finds the very top of the philosophical profession. Yet, it is rightly counted amongst the books that students of philosophy, at least in the Anglo-American world, have to read at some point in their education. Enormously influential, it has given rise to debates that strike at the very heart of contemporary philosophy of mind and language. In this major new interpretation, Martin Kusch defends Kripke's account against the numerous weighty objections that have been put forward over the past twenty years and argues that none of them is decisive. He shows that many critiques are based on misunderstandings of Kripke's reasoning; that many attacks can be blocked by refining and developing Kripke's position; and that many alternative proposals turn out either to be unworkable or to be disguised variants of the view they are meant to replace. Kusch argues that the apparent simplicity of Kripke's text is deceptive and that a fresh reading gives Kripke's overall argument a new strength.

Psychologists and philosophers have assumed that psychological knowledge is knowledge about, and held by, the individual mind. _Psychological Knowledge_ challenges these views. It argues that bodies of psychological knowledge are social institutions like money or the monarchy, and that mental states are social artefacts like coins or crowns. Martin Kusch takes on arguments of alternative proposals, shows what is wrong with them, and demonstrates how his own social-philosophical approach constitutes an advance. We see that exists a substantial natural amount of philosophical theorising, a body of work that tries to determine the nature and structure of folk psychology. An introduction to the workings of constuctivism, _Psychological Knowledge_ is an insightful introduction to the history of psychology and the recent philosophy of mind.

One could say of relativism what Hermann Ebbinghaus once observed with respect to psychology: to wit, that it has a “long past but a short history”. Although relativistic motifs have always played a significant role in philosophy, their systematic investigation–and thus the explicit formulation of different forms and strengths of relativism–is a child only of the twentieth century. Normative forms of relativism go further and deny that there are any absolutely true or absolutely correct beliefs or standards. Given pluralism, relativism is compatible with the idea that our current system or bundle is without an existing alternative. Moreover, pluralism permits the relativist to be highly selective in choosing those systems or bundles with respect to which relativism applies. Groundlessness is rarely formulated as a distinct ingredient of epistemic relativism. But it is sometimes invoked in arguments meant to establish the truth of relativism. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.

The main impetus for organizing this event was the publication, in 2011, of Philip Pettit’s and Christian List’s book, *Group Agency*. List and Pettit argue that interpreting institutions like commercial corporations, governments, political parties, trade unions, churches, and universities as group agents offers a better understanding of their internal working and their effects on social life. Pettit and List base their account of group agency on a so-called “functionalist account of agency” which assumes that an agent is constituted by a method of transforming representational and motivational states into actions. They reject essentialist conceptions of collective willing by claiming that group attitudes supervene on the individual attitudes of the group members.The invited speakers were asked to consider the following issues arising out of List’s and Pettit’s work: Can and should we consider groups as agents? What normative commitments come with such an assumption? What model of agen ..

Debates over relativism are as old as philosophy itself. Since the late nineteenth century, relativism has also been a controversial topic in many of the social and cultural sciences. And yet, relativism has not been a central topic of research in the history of philosophy or the history of the social sciences. This collection seeks to remedy this situation by studying the emergence of modern forms of relativism as they unfolded in the German lands during the "long nineteenth century"—from the Enlightenment to National Socialism. It focuses on relativist and anti-relativist ideas and arguments in four contexts: history, science, epistemology, and politics. The Emergence of Relativism will be of interest to those studying nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy, German idealism, and history and philosophy of science, as well as those in related disciplines such as sociology and anthropology.

This paper seeks to widen the dialogue between the “epistemology of peer disagreement” and the epistemology informed by Wittgenstein’s last notebooks, later edited as On Certainty. The paper defends the following theses: not all certainties are groundless; many of them are beliefs; and they do not have a common essence. An epistemic peer need not share all of my certainties. Which response to a disagreement over a certainty is called for, depends on the type of certainty in question. Sometimes a form of relativism is the right response. Reasonable, mutually recognized peer disagreement over a certainty is possible.—The paper thus addresses both interpretative and systematic issues. It uses Wittgenstein as a resource for thinking about peer disagreement over certainties.

Relativism is often motivated in terms of certain types of disagreement. In this paper, we survey the philosophical debates over two such types: faultless disagreement in the case of gustatory conflict, and fundamental disagreement in the case of epistemic conflict. Each of the two discussions makes use of a implicit conception of judgement: brute judgement in the case of faultless disagreement, and rule-governed judgement in the case of fundamental disagreement. We show that the prevalent accounts work with unreasonably high levels of idealization. We defend two claims. First, philosophical discussions of disagreement need to be de-idealized. Second, once a less idealized account of disagreement is available, both our conception of judgement and our understanding of relativism need to be revised. Our example is a case study in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge: Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s classic Leviathan and the Air-Pump. This case study gives a less idealized account of disagreement that conceptualizes judgements as situated. We argue that this conception can and should be applied to cases of gustatory and epistemic disagreement. The payoff will be a reformulation of relativism in terms of rationally resolvable yet contingent disagreements.