The disappearance of the empirical: Some reflections on contemporary culture theory and historiography

Journal of the Philosophy of History

Volumn 1, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 271-292

  Roth, Paul A ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

Culture Theory; Experience; Historiography; Joan Scott; Toews; Zammito

Indexed keywords

EID: 62449098817     PISSN: 1872261X     EISSN: 18722636     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1163/187226307X229362     Document Type: Article

References (24)

1. As Quine famously remarks regarding the analytic/synthetic distinction, "The two dogmas are, indeed, at root identical." W. V. Quine, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" in From a Logical Point of View, 2nd rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA; Harvard University Press, 1980), 41. If no notion of experience can be carved out untainted by prior beliefs about the constitution of the world, the same considerations apply, mutatis mutandis, to efforts to isolate a notion of meaning immune from change due to changes in experience. Put another way, foundational notions of meaning or of experience stand or fall together. I return to this point below
2. I thank Mark Bevir for emphasizing this linkage to me and for suggestions about the phrasing of this point
3. See my "The Full Hempel: Review essay of Clayton Roberts, The Logic of Historical Explanation", History & Theory, 38 (May 1999), 249-263
4. C. G. Hempel, "Problems and Changes in the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning" in R. Ammerman (ed.), Classics of Analytic Philosophy (Indianopolis, IN: Hackett, 1990), 227
5. As Quine recognizes and post-Kuhnian debate documents, the notion of empirical equivalence for entire theories proves elusive. This constitutes no problem for Quine, but rather just marks an interesting consequence of a false faith put in the notion of the empirical as an epistemic arbiter of scientific knowledge. In practice, again as Quine recognizes, scientists selectively narrow their focus. That is, holism does not make unworkable anything in scientific (as opposed to traditional epistemological) inquiry. "All we really need in the way of holism... is to appreciate that empirical content is shared by the statements of science in clusters and cannot for the most part be sorted out them. Practically the relevant cluster is indeed never the whole of science...." W. V. Quine, "Foreword, 1980" in From a Logical Point of View, 2nd rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA; Harvard University Press, 1980), viii
6. In this regard, Quine's statement in "Epistemology Naturalized" that "Two cardinal tenets of empiricism remained unassailable, however, and so remain to this day" (75) must be read in light of his reconfiguration of the relationship between epistemology and science. W. V. Quine, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969)
7. See, for example, the following essays by Hacking: "World-Making by Kind-Making" in M. Douglas and D. Hull (eds.), How Classification Works (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992), 180-238
8. "Goodman's New Riddle Is Pre-Humian", Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 46 (1993), 229-243
9. "On Kripke's and Goodman's Uses of 'Grue'", Philosophy, 68 (1993), 269-295
10. "Quine's Natural Kinds" in R. Gibson (ed.), Perspectives on Quine, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 129-142
11. "Natural Kinds: Rosy Dawn, Scholastic Twilight", forthcoming in A. O'Hear (ed.), Philosophy of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
12. differ from one finds in Andrew Pickering's Constructing Quarks (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986)
13. Both of these accounts, moreover, appear to be relatively "internal" histories - they do not look much beyond the scientific communities. Thus, these can be contrasted with, e.g., Steve Shapin and Simon Schaffer's Leviathan and the Air Pump (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), which takes the background beliefs against which experience individual beliefs an be assessed in light of experience to include a great many beliefs one has as part of a specific culture and ones which appear in any specification of the theory under evaluation. But this makes the "unit of empirical significance" culture-sized. In saying this, I acknowledge some discomfort in moving from theories conceived of as linguistic entities to cultures so conceived. As I indicate in what follows, the question of the relevant "unit" being assessed has become increasingly diffuse and problematic. I find no general answer to the question of how to bound or otherwise specify the unit in which to embed the epistemic evaluation of a specific scientific claim. Debates need to proceed on a case by case basis, in this regard
14. Gabrielle M. Spiegel, "History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages", Speculum, 65 (1990), 59-86
15. John E. Toews, "Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreducibility of Experience", American Historical Review, 92 (October 1987), 879-907
16. John H. Zammito, "Are We Being Theoretical Yet? The New Historicism, the New Philosophy of History, and 'Practicing Historians'", Journal of Modern History, 65 (December 1993), 783-814
17. See also Zammito's "Reading 'Experience': The Debate in Intellectual History among Scott, Toews, and LaCapra" in Paula M. L. Moya and M. R. Hames-García (eds.), Rechiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 279-311
18. See especially essays in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, ed. I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970)
19. Zammito, "Are We Being Theoretical Yet?", op. cit., 793
20. John Zammito, A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Post-positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 1
21. Frank Ankersmit pursues the implications of some of these same concerns for historiography. See his "The Linguistic Turn: Literary Theory and Historical Theory" in F.R. Ankersmit, Historical Representation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 29-74
22. See Donald Davidson's "The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme" in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984)
23. Joan W. Scott, "The Evidence of Experience" in Terrence J. McDonald (ed.), The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1996), 379-406. The essay was first published in the journal Critical Inquiry in 1991
24. I owe the emphasis and much of the phrasing of the last two sentences to points made to me by Mark Bevir