Naturalized Epistemology And/As Historicism: a Brief Introduction

Journal of the Philosophy of History 6 (2012) 299–303 brill.com/jph

Naturalized Epistemology and/as Historicism: A Brief Introduction

Mark Bevir Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley, USA [email protected]

Herman Paul Department of History, Leiden University, the Netherlands [email protected]

From its very beginning, naturalized epistemology has been associated with the specter of relativism. From the days of W.V.O. Quine onwards, attempts to naturalize epistemology – that is, attempts to treat (philosophical) theories of knowledge as continuous with other (scientifĳic) theories about the workings of the world – have been criticized for their potentially relativistic implications. Scientifĳic theories, after all, are subject to all sorts of change: they can be revised in the lights of new insights, adjusted to new fĳindings, or at some point discarded as falsifĳied. If epistemological claims are theories of knowledge in much the same way that scientifĳic explanations are theories – that is, not a priori truths, but a posteriori hypotheses formulated in an attempt at explaining the world – then must such epistemological theories also be regarded as subject to historical change? Do epistemolo- gies change, grow, develop, and evolve just like scientifĳic theories? Much of the fear expressed in these questions stemmed from commit- ment to a type of “fĳirst philosophy” that considered itself to be elevated above the stream of history. That should come as no surprise: charges of relativism are often articulated by those who are most anxious not to drown in a “morass of history,” or, in less metaphorical language, most fearful of the contingencies and exigencies of history. As Richard J. Bernstein and others have shown, “relativism” and “objectivism” are closely related, not only in so far as the former position rejects the latter, but also in so far as the former (relativism) is what those committed to the latter (objectivism) most

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012 DOI: 10.1163/18722636-12341234 300 M. Bevir, H. Paul / Journal of the Philosophy of History 6 (2012) 299–303 desperately seek to avoid. Fear of relativism, then, often stems from what Bernstein calls the “Cartesian anxiety.” Those who, like René Descartes, hope to fĳind “some fĳixed point, some stable rock” for their epistemological projects, are inevitably plagued by the specter of historical change – “the dread or madness and chaos where nothing is fĳixed, where we can neither touch bottom nor support ourselves on the surface.”1 Almost thirty years after Bernstein’s analysis, this clash between objec- tivists and relativists, so prevalent in the 1980s, has lost much of its appeal. The objectivist position typical of the kind of philosophy that naturalized epistemology sought to query has few defenders anymore, primarily (though not exclusively) because the either/or logic that underlay the Car- tesian anxiety has efffectively been challenged on postfoundationalist grounds. Postfoundationalism does not imply, however, that the aforemen- tioned question about historical change – to what extent do epistemological theories change just as scientifĳic theories do? – can be put aside. Although, on postfoundationalist premises, both the search for a supra- historical Archimedean point and the corresponding fear of “madness and chaos” no longer make sense, there are still the questions of to what extent, in what way, and with what results natural epistemologists see theories of knowledge as changing over time. In this issue, we should like to raise this question, no longer in terms of relativism, but rather in terms of historicism. Although historicism, apart from being a period and style concept,2 has sometimes been used as syn- onymous to relativism, and therefore been attacked by the same “fĳirst phi- losophers” who bitterly complained about relativism,3 historicism has traditionally served as a diffferent type of warning sign. Especially in the many contentious early and mid twentieth-debates known as the Krise des Historismus, historicism usually served as a marker of excess. What many European thinkers at that time experienced as threatening was not historical change as such, but rather an overload of it. The problem they perceived was that the “stream of history” became a “flood,” or that a slowly flowing

1) Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), p. 18. 2) One recent example is Frederick C. Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 3) A typical instance is that of Carl Page, Philosophical Historicism and the Betrayal of First Philosophy (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995).