Michal Hubálek

In light of the recent efforts to resuscitate a form of historical realism by Branko Mitrović and others, this essay situates their efforts in between past and present debates not only about historical realism and anti-realism, but also about the scientific status of historiography. In the conviction that we can and should learn from our past, we present a genealogy of the idea of Universal History, starting from Kant, as it is also here where a certain dualism between empirical and philosophical historiography was introduced. Our analysis eventually brings us to the radical rejection of Universal History by Louis Mink, and especially then Paul Roth, who draws substantial epistemological and metaphysical conclusions from this rejection. Roth’s work is often considered to be controversial since he makes a case not only for the plurality of historiographical methods, but for the very plurality of pasts, too. So, we show that Roth’s often misinterpreted appeals to methodological intersectionality and metaphysical multiplicity must be always understood from within his naturalism. We moreover show that Roth, contra the realists in question, constructively works with the adaptive shifts that the theory and philosophy of history made in the 20th century, namely we identify three Rothian starting points or steps: restrospectivism, irrealism, and the already-mentioned naturalism. So, when taken altogether, our essay points at a possible new path which the future philosophy of history might take as its own – a path beyond the beaten paths of historical realism.

In this essay, I present Quine’s fragmented and often forgotten views on writing history. However, this needs to be done in conjunction with an examination of his notion of science as our “total world-picture.” Quine elegantly avoids the task of specifying a demarcation criterion of science. The result is to position science as a Wittgensteinian language game that gradually expanded from its purpose of predicting our experiences and became socio-historically institutionalized set of practices. Thus, this essay has two aims; (i) I analyze Quine’s idiosyncratic, post-positivist concept of science with a particular focus on his inclusion of sciences that are traditionally labeled as soft or social. Then, (ii) I eventually indicate how Quine deals with historical inquiry. When taken together, this essay can also be read as a case study analysis of Quine’s take on all non-experimental modes of scientific inquiry, and, more broadly, his special account of naturalism and pragmatism.

This book provides a fresh and ecumenic understanding of naturalism for contemporary philosophers and scientists who, while accepting naturalism as a standard for doing philosophy and science, understand it often very differently. It also demonstrates that to see naturalism in opposition to socio-historical approaches is an unwarranted as well as unwanted scheme for our overall conception of empirical inquiry. By bringing together naturalism and historicism, this book provides a unique perspective on the philosophy of science that is of interest not only to philosophers, but also those interested in the history of science and the sociology of scientific knowledge.

Recent discussions of Artificial Intelligence (AI) safety often invoke the orthogonality thesis—the idea that intelligence and final goals can be independent variables, allowing for the possibility of radically alien AI agents. This paper challenges this view by examining the relationship between language, intentionality, and rational agency against the background of how we now think about Large Language Models (LLMs). Drawing on Robert Brandom’s normative inferentialism and accounts of LLMs as role-playing dialogue agents, we argue that the linguistic competence demonstrated by LLMs suggests significant constraints on their artificial agency. We contend that participation in human discursive practices, which has an inherent normative dimension, may bind specific artificial agents to forms of rationality that are continuous with human reasoning. By analysing recent work on LLM linguistic behaviour, we demonstrate how these systems engage with human normative practices in ways that complicate AI sceptics’ dismissal of LLM capabilities and AI safety theorists’ speculations about future AI agents. We defend Brandom’s approach against charges of insufficient naturalism that could be put forward by the AI safety theorist camp while arguing that his account of language and rationality as inherently social practices provides crucial insights into the nature and potential limits of artificial agency. Our analysis suggests that the development of language-capable AI systems may be constrained by the normative structure of human discursive practices in ways that bind specific quadrants of the space of possible artificial minds.

In this essay, I examine the usage of the term “just-so story.” I attempt to show that just-so storytelling can be seen as an epistemic concept that, in various ways, tackles the epistemological and methodological problems relating to evolutionary explanations qua historical/narrative explanations. I identify two main, yet mutually exclusive, strategies of employing the concept of a just-so story: a negative strategy and a positive strategy. Subsequently, I argue that these strategies do not satisfactorily capture the core of the “original” meaning advanced by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin at the end of the 1970s. I revisit the foundation(s) of their anti-adaptationist critique in order to reframe it as a critique of distinctive methodological manners and epistemic maxims related to historical inquiry. Last but not least, I suggest that contemporary evolutionary thinkers have two conceptually different options: they can either adhere to the “original” meaning of the term “just-so story” or accept that “just-so story” is a term equivalent to “implausible narrative explanation.”