Abstract
Historians must be sensitive to the alienness of the past. Insofar as they are concerned with their actors’ reasoning, they must (through open-minded empirical investigation) find out how their actors thought, and not assume that they thought like us. This is familiar historiographical advice, but pushed too far it can be brought to conflict with rather weak assumptions about what historians must presuppose if they are to interpret their actors at all. The present paper sketches those assumptions, and argues that the influential ‘Strong Program’ in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK) falls foul of them. We do not argue from the correctness of the assumptions to the falsity of SSK. Rather, we note the incompatibility, and then show how SSK theorists’ tendency to take interpretation for granted blinds them—and perhaps their readers—to the existence of the conflict.
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Notes
To say that an inferential move is illegitimate by x’s lights is not to say that it seems illegitimate to x; and to say that a move seems illegitimate to x is not to say that it is illegitimate by x’s lights. (If, through sloppy calculation, I come to believe that 23 + 56 is 89, then I am wrong by own lights.)
For a principled defence, see Child (1994), pp. 57–62, and works by Davidson and McDowell cited therein.
Kripke (1982).
At first sight it is tempting to deny that such wonky interpretations will be compatible with the actor’s other behaviour. What if the student had said, in circumstances C, ‘and for the benefit of eves-dropping philosophers, obviously I mean x + y to take the same value in all circumstances’? But in fact this is no help. Once we are willing to entertain wonky hypotheses about what somebody means, it doesn’t matter what he says. To maintain the last wonky hypothesis, add another: that the student means all circumstances by ‘all circumstances’, except in circumstances C, when he means...
‘Empathic reasoning’ is not a phrase used by Davidson. However, his principle of charity ‘directs the interpreter to translate or interpret so as to read some of his own standards of truth into the pattern of sentences held true by the speaker’, and those standards include not only correctness (an external measure) but also consistency (Davidson 2001b, p. 148). Naturally speakers are not to be regarded as infallible: ‘once the theory begins to take shape it makes sense to accept intelligible error and to make allowance for the relative likelihood of various kinds of mistake’ (Davidson 2001a, p. 136). Responding to criticism from David Lewis, Davidson further concedes that one should allow for ‘explicable error... right from the beginning [of one’s interpretative project]’ (Davidson 2001a, p. 282). Davidson’s consistency principle, then, appears to be that an interpretative hypothesis is implausible insofar as the beliefs it ascribes are unintelligibly inconsistent—and this sits rather naturally with our talk of empathic reasoning. That Davidson attempts a transcendental move is easily shown: ‘the only, and therefore unimpeachable, method available to the interpreter automatically puts the speaker’s beliefs in accord with the standards of logic of the interpreter’; and ‘what we, as interpreters, must take [the speaker’s beliefs] to be is what they in fact are’ (Davidson 2001b, pp. 150–151).
I suspect that some such argument could be made to work, but proving so is beyond the scope of the paper.
Barnes (1974), p. 75.
Bloor (1992), p. 135. (Emphasis in the original.)
Boghossian (2006), p. 117.
Bloor (1992), p. 135.
See, e.g., Bloor (1991), p. 12.
Ibid., p. 179.
Barnes and Bloor (1982), p. 23.
Bloor (1991), p. 12.
Ibid., p. 8.
Ibid., p. 177.
Bloor (1992), p. 131. (Emphasis in the original.)
Bloor (1991), p. 12.
Ibid., pp. 9–11.
Although to the extent that the initial physical picture is incomplete qua physical picture, one may succeed in filling it in by making inferences that proceed via intentional state attributions.
In speaking of assigning intentional tags to physical states, I do not mean to imply that there is no objectively correct way of doing this. Let us suppose that there is. Then it will be an objective fact that a particular assignment of intentional tags to physical states constitutes the best interpretation of the actors; and there will be a straightforward sense in which the physical facts taken together determine the intentional ones. That is a metaphysical possibility we can afford to grant, thanks to the following epistemic point: to know the physical facts is not ipso facto to know which interpretation is objectively correct. Given the physical facts, the interpreter who wishes to discover the objectively correct interpretation can do no better than to follow the procedure described (sketchily) in the main text.
Bloor (1996), p. 850.
Barnes (1981), p. 482.
Bloor (1997), p. 19. (Emphasis in original.)
Barnes (1981), p. 481. (My emphasis.)
Bloor (2007), pp. 211–212.
Ibid., p. 212.
Bloor (1991), p. 165.
He we use ‘string’ in a broad sense, to cover strings of sounds as well as strings of (written) symbols.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Daniel Elstein, Adrian Haddock, Nick Jardine, Martin Kusch, Florian Steinberger and seminar audiences in Cambridge and Belfast for valuable feedback on talks and drafts ancestral to this paper. I am grateful also for the constructive criticism of an anonymous referee.
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Tosh, N. Relativism about Reasons. Philosophia 36, 465–482 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-008-9139-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-008-9139-3