•  4
    This chapter contains sections titled: Real Understanding The Experience Distant — Understanding Hawaiian‐style The Experience Near — Understanding Holocaust Perpetrators Conclusion Notes.
  •  7
    Redrawing the Lines: Analytic Philosophy, Deconstruction, and Literary Theory
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 49 (2): 180-182. 1991.
  •  15
    Corrigendum
    with Stephen Turner, Deborah Tollefsen, Mark Risjord, Kareem Khalifa, and David Henderson
    Philosophy of the Social Sciences 53 (2): 163-163. 2023.
  •  17
    Analytic Philosophy of History
    Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 37 (2): 351-374. 2016.
  •  54
    For almost half a century, the person most responsible for fomenting brouhahas regarding degrees of plasticity in the writing of histories has been Hayden White. Yet, despite the voluminous responses provoked by White’s work, almost no effort has been made to treat White’s writings in a systematic yet sympathetic way as a philosophy of history. Herman Paul’s book begins to remedy that lack and does so in a carefully considered and extremely scholarly fashion. In his relatively brief six chapters…Read more
  •  5
    The philosophical structure of historical explanation
    Northwestern University Press. 2020.
    This book develops a philosophical structure for historical explanation that resolves disputes about the scientific status of history that have persisted since the nineteenth century. It does this by showing why historical explanations must take the form of a narrative and by making their logic explicit. The books formulates a unique positive account of the logic of narrative explanations. This logic reveals how the rational evaluation of narrative explanation becomes possible. The book also dev…Read more
  •  38
    Real True Facts: A Reply to Currie and Swaim
    Journal of the Philosophy of History 16 (2): 207-225. 2022.
  •  1
    Book Review (review)
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 94 (C): 204-205. 2022.
  •  6
  •  2
    As a Popperian, Ian C. Jarvie takes falsifiability to be a defining characteristic of rationality. This suggests that any disagreement about the truth or falsity of a particular belief that can be settled by further evidence should be rationally resolvable, at least in the following sense. Niceties about probabilities aside, one should be able to specify under what conditions, that is, given what evidence, one would surrender that belief. Put another way, if a belief will not be given up no matt…Read more
  •  175
    Alex Rosenberg’s latest book purports to establish that narrative history cannot have any epistemic value. Rosenberg argues not for the replacement of narrative history by something more science-like, but rather the end of histories understood as an account of human doings under a certain description. This review critiques three of his main arguments: 1) narrative history must root its explanations in folk psychology, 2) there are no beliefs nor desires guiding human action, and 3) historical na…Read more
  •  5
    An Audience for History? Review Essay of Kalle Pihlainen’s The Work of History
    Journal of the Philosophy of History 14 (1): 81-92. 2018.
    Kalle Pihlainen’s book reworks seven essays published over the last dozen years. Pihlainen’s Preface and Hayden White’s Foreword articulate a cri de cœur. Both fear that something important has been missed. White’s Foreword somewhat cryptically characterizes Pihlainen’s book as “metacritical,” and locates Pihlainen in the role of being a “serious reader” for the community of theorists of history. What does it mean to be a “serious” reader? White never says. But following White’s hint, Pihlainen …Read more
  •  21
    Review of Jörn Rüsen, Diane Kerns and Katie Digan: Evidence and Meaning: A Theory of Historical Studies (review)
    with Mariana Imaz Sheinbaum
    Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 8 (2): 489-492. 2018.
  •  518
    How Narratives Explain
    Social Research: An International Quarterly 56. 1989.
  •  873
    Hearts of darkness: 'perpetrator history' and why there is no why
    History of the Human Sciences 17 (2-3): 211-251. 2004.
    Three theories contend as explanations of perpetrator behavior in the Holocaust as well as other cases of genocide: structural, intentional, and situational. Structural explanations emphasize the sense in which no single individual or choice accounts for the course of events. In opposition, intentional/cutltural accounts insist upon the genocides as intended outcomes, for how can one explain situations in which people ‘step up’ and repeatedly kill defenseless others in large numbers over sustain…Read more
  •  58
    The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of the Social Sciences (edited book)
    with Stephen P. Turner
    Wiley-Blackwell. 2003.
    _The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of the Social Sciences _collects newly commissioned essays that examine fundamental issues in the social sciences
  •  19
    This chapter contains sections titled: The Origins of the Philosophy of Social Science Winch's Triad The Legitimation of “Continental” Philosophy Enter Davidson Rational Choice: The Scientization of the Intentional Philosophy of Social Science Today Notes.
  • Special Issue: Selected Papers from the ENPOSS Meeting, Venice 3-4 September 2013
    with Julie Zahle, Byron Kaldis, Alban Bouvier, Eleonora Montuschi, James Bohman, Stephen Turner, Alison Wylie, and Jesus Zamora-Bonilla
    Philosophy of the Social Sciences 44 (1). 2014.
  •  150
    The purpose of this paper is to argue that the tactic of granting a fetus the legal status of a person will not, contrary to the expectations of opponents of abortion, provide grounds for a general prohibition on abortions. I begin by examining two arguments, one moral (J. J. Thomson's A Defense of Abortion) and the other legal (D. Regan's Rewriting Roe v. Wade), which grant the assumption that a fetus is a person and yet argue to the conclusion that abortion is permissible. However, both Thomso…Read more
  • Can Post-Newtonian Psychologists Find Happiness in a Pre-Paradigm Science?
    Journal of Mind and Behavior 16 (1): 87-98. 1995.
    This paper is a commentary on the essays by Faulconer , Leahey , Rawling , Slife , Vandenberg , and Williams . Whatever the differences among these essays, they nonetheless share a common concern with the image of science which Newton promulgated. What might be termed the Newtonian meta-paradigm is positivistic, in the contemporary sense. This meta-paradigm has survived the demise of the Newtonian paradigm in physics. Each of the authors in this volume, in turn, is concerned with how to expose, …Read more
  •  73
    Testing normative naturalism: The problem of scientific medicine
    with Ronald Munson
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 45 (2): 571-584. 1994.
    Laudan's normative naturalism' claims to account for the success of science by construing theories and other claims as methodological rules interpreted as defeasible hypothetical imperatives for securing cognitive ends. We ask two questions regarding the adequacy for medicine of Laudan's meta- methodology. First, although Laudan denies that general aims can be assigned to a science, we show that this is not the case for medicine. Second, we argue that Laudan's account yields mixed results as a t…Read more
  •  96
    Responses to 'in defense of relativism'
    with Robert Ackermann, Brian Baigrie, Harold I. Brown, Michael Cavanaugh, Paul Fox-Strangways, Gonzalo Munevar, Stephen David Ross, Philip Pettit, Frederick Schmitt, Stephen Turner, and Charles Wallis
    Social Epistemology 2 (3). 1988.
    No abstract
  •  2
    Meaning and Method in the Social Sciences (review)
    Noûs 27 (4): 530. 1993.
  •  54
    Essentially narrative explanations
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 62 (C): 42-50. 2017.
  •  35
    Symposium: Does Cross-Cultural Philosophy Stand in Need of a Hermeneutic Expansion?
    with Douglas L. Berger, Hans-Georg Moeller, and A. Raghuramaraju
    Journal of World Philosophies 2 (1): 121-143. 2017.
    Does cross-cultural philosophy stand in need of a hermeneutical expansion? In engaging with this question, the symposium focuses upon methodological issues salient to cross-cultural inquiry. Douglas L. Berger lays out the ground for the debate by arguing for a methodological approach, which is able to rectify the discipline’s colonial legacies and bridge the hermeneutical distance with its objects of study. From their own perspectives, Hans-Georg Moeller, Paul Roth and A. Raghuramaraju analyze w…Read more
  •  762
    The Epistemology of “Epistemology Naturalized”
    Dialectica 53 (2): 87-110. 1999.
    Quine's “Epistemology Naturalized” has become part of the canon in epistemology and excited a widespread revival of interest in naturalism. Yet the status accorded the essay is ironic, since both friends and foes of philosophical naturalism deny that Quine makes a plausible case that the methods of naturalism can accommodate the problems of epistemology.
  •  4
    Searleworld
    History and Theory 51 (1): 123-142. 2012.
    ABSTRACTJohn Searle's most recent effort to account for human social institutions claims to provide a synthesis of the explanatory and the normative while simultaneously dismissing as confused and wrongheaded theorists who held otherwise. Searle, although doubtless alert to the usual considerations for separating the normative and the explanatory projects, announces at the outset that he conceives of matters quite differently. Searle's reason for reconceiving the field rests on his claim that bo…Read more