1
What is Historical Epistemology?
NOTE: This is an early version of paper that was translated into German and published as: “Was ist historische
Epistemologie?“ In Nach Feierabend. Ed. M. Hagner and C. Hirschi. Zurich ,Berlin: Diaphanes, 2013, pp. 123‐
144. Please quote or refer to the German version of this paper
Omar W. Nasim
Longum iter est per praecepta, breve et efficax per exempla
Seneca
Historical epistemology has been one remarkably influential approach to the
history of science. Some of the most widely read authors have been its
practitioners, and their works have been of interest to philosophers, historians of
science, historians of art, gender studies, sociologists of science, and cultural
theorists. And recently a succession of international conferences has taken place,
all aiming to get a better grasp on historical epistemology.1 So what is it?
Before we address this question, however, we must begin by sketching a
particular landscape of relationships that have existed between philosophy and
history. Doing so will provide the necessary perspective in order to delimit my
* This essay is based on my Habilitationsvortrag delivered at the ETH‐Zurich, Oct.
2nd, 2012. I would like to gratefully acknowledge the useful comments made by
Michael Hagner, and the two anonymous referees.
1 These international conferences have included one at Columbia University
(October 10‐11, 2008); at the Institute of Philosophy, Leuven University, Belgium
(December 10‐12, 2009); another at the MPIWG in Berlin (July 24‐26, 2008); and
“Epistemologie und Geschichte” at the MPIWG in Berlin (December 9‐11, 2010).
The last two have resulted in publications, the former as a special issue of
Erkenntnis, 2011, 75, edited by Thomas Sturm and Uljana Feest; and the last has
been released as a MPIWG pre‐print (434) with the title, “Epistemology and
History: From Bachelard and Canguilhem to Today’s History of Science,” edited by
Henning Schmidgen, Peter Schoettler and Jean‐Francois Braunstein.
2
answer to the main question. But it will also permit us to understand the standard
landscape into which historical epistemology has been typically placed and
subsequently judged. Exploring some of the different features on this landscape—
between philosophy and history—will also enable me to collect issues that will be
flagged and addressed by my succeeding account of what historical epistemology
is. In the second section I will lay out some of the relevant characteristics of the
French background to historical epistemology. Then by using an example, like the
emergence of probability, I will focus in the third section on the broad
characteristics of recent work in historical epistemology. And finally, in the fourth
section I will end with my contribution to the main question. Since there has
recently been so much written about historical epistemology, my contribution is
the result of a survey of the literature, and provides the broad outlines of what I
take to be some of the commonly accepted features in the literature. As a result,
the divergent threads to be found in this sizeable literature will not be directly
addressed, or their mention will be limited to the footnotes. I will however take
head on the following challenges: articulating the differences between historical
epistemology and history of epistemology; the relationship between the former
and epistemology itself; historical epistemology and the history of ideas; and I will
also address the applicability of the genetic and naturalistic fallacies to historical
epistemology.
I. Philosophy and History, in History
Aristotle argued that history has for its domain the particulars, while
philosophy studies the universal.2 Against this long and multifaceted tradition, the
2 See Aristotle’s Poetics (9, 1451a, 36‐38, 1451b, 1‐10; 23, 1459a, 22‐29). In the
main, however, Aristotle was concerned more with a defense against Plato on
3
seventeenth century saw the introduction of an experimental philosophy aided by
philosophical instruments in the service of a natural philosophy.3 But while natural
philosophy investigated particulars, it still had not completely dispensed with first
principles and universal laws; in fact, it remained positively imbued with
metaphysics. By the time we get to the nineteenth century—and thus in the midst
of the second scientific revolution—things are quite different, and this thanks to
two significant transformations: the near complete transformation of traditional
natural philosophy into modern natural science, making the latter professionally
and epistemologically distinct from philosophy; and second, the rise of a new kind
of history, a historicism that claims to go beyond the particulars even though it
relies on them to became a methodologically general science.
In the first case, the arrival of natural science on the scene helped to carve
out a new identity, profession, and a unique domain of inquiry that no longer
overlapped with philosophy and its concerns, as it once had done. As a result,
forced outside of philosophy itself was not only the most successful form of the
human epistemic enterprise (namely, the natural sciences), but also one of the
most temporal, situated, and empirical components of the philosophical repertoire.
It was Kant who helped to articulate philosophy’s task in this milieu. Philosophy in
his hands becomes the study of universal and apriori conditions and regulations
poetry, than with providing a systematic account of history. For Aristotle on the
nature of philosophy, D. K. Modrak, “Aristotle on the difference between
Mathematics and Physics and First Philosophy,” Apeiron, 1989, 22: 121–139; 2009;
M. V. Wedin, “The Science and Axioms of Being,” Anagnostopoulos, 2009, pp. 125–
143.
3 See Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the AirPump: Hobbes, Boyle,
and the Experimental Life, Princeton University Press, 1985; Peter Dear,
Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and its Ambitions, 15001700,
Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001.
4
that make a science possible in the first place; a task that must remain outside of
the domain of scientific inquiry itself, since the latter’s proper operation depends
on taking for granted those very concepts and categories which are in question for
the philosopher. No longer would it be in the preview of one and the same domain
of inquiry to study the natural world and to study the study of the natural world, as
many—like Descartes or Newton—had previously done.4
This separation is not only well exemplified by the invention of the
neologism “scientist” (in contradistinction to “natural philosopher” and “artist”) by
William Whewell in the summer of 1833,5 but also by the fact that Whewell made
it a point to first write the History of the Inductive Sciences (in 3 volumes), and then
and only then to write the Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (in 2 volume). It was
only in this way, thought Whewell, that we can extract the logic of justification
from the context of discovery: the is did most certainly imply the ought. The
thinking was that if we go inductively from the particulars that exemplify the
canonical discoveries of scientists in the past, then we can get to the generalities
and thus the precepts that must guide science today. The past of scientific progress
is a how‐to‐manual for scientists today. And just like any how‐to‐manual its
normativity lies in the conditional (as opposed to the categorical) inference that if
4 See essays in the volume edited by Tom Sorell, G. A. J. Rogers, and Jill Kraye,
Scientia in Early Modern Philosophy: SeventeenthCentury Thinkers on
Demonstrative Knowledge from First Principles, Springer, 2010; Peter R. Anstey,
John Locke and Natural Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2011; Daniel Garber,
Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992; and
William R. Shea, The Magic of Numbers and Motion: The Scientific Career of Rene
Descartes, Canton, Mass: Science History Publications, 1991. Also see the review
essay by Gary Hatfield, “The Importance of the History of Science for the
Philosophy in General,” Synthese, 1996, 106: 113‐128.
5 Laura Synder, The Philosophical Breakfast Club: Four Remarkable Friends Who
Transformed Science and Changed the World, Broadway Books, 2011.
5
an expert has already successfully accomplished Φ by doing a, b, and c, and if one
wishes to accomplish the same, then one too ought to do a, b, and c. In fact, before
the advent of historicism, this view of history’s task—to provide an exemplar for
correct action and thought—finds its roots in ancient writings.6 But what makes
Whewell’s work ostensibly historicist in tendency is his overall insistence in
keeping history methodologically independent of philosophy, while making
philosophy inextricably dependent on history and its methods. Thus with the
decisive separation of science from philosophy in the nineteenth century, it is
history that comes in to fill the newly formed gap between the two.
With its newly developed tools and techniques, historicism came to be seen
as a powerful method for the Geisteswissenchaften.7 It was precisely because
Whewell recognized the power of the historical method that he used it to help him
formulate one of the earliest philosophies of science, a discipline that appears only
after the separation of science from philosophy.8 At the same time, however, we
6 See George H. Nadel, “Philosophy of History Before Historicism,” History and
Theory, 3: 291‐315.
7 See for example, Windelband, “Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft,” Strassburg
Universitaet: Gelegenheitsschriften, 189296, Strassbourg, 1896, 15‐41; and Dilthey,
“Der Aufbau der geschtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften,” Abhandlungen
der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, PhilosophischHistorische Klasse,
Berlin 1910, 1‐123. Also see, Peter Hanns Reill, The German Enlightenment and the
Rise of Historicism, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975; Dwight Lee and
Robert N. Beck, “The Meaning of ‘Historicism,’” American Historical Review, 1954,
59: 568‐77; Friedrich Meinecke, Die Entstehung des Historismus, 2 vols., Munich
and Berlin, 1936.
8 One of the very first works in the philosophy of science, as a distinct discipline,
was written by one of Whewell’s closest friends, Sir John Herschel; that is, his A
Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, 1831. The work, in fact,
not only reads like a manual, but it has been argued, is a manual, see Marvin Paul
Bolt, John Herschel’s Natural Philosophy: On the Knowing of Nature and the Nature
of Knowing in EarlyNineteenth Century Britain, a doctoral dissertation submitted
6
have the exceptional phenomena of systems of thought that are conceptually
reliant on a general history that is intrinsically philosophical, such as in the tomes
of Hegel, Comte, and Marx. For all their differences, history in the hands of these
thinkers is rational and teleological, and is governed by universals. And in sharp
contrast to Whewell’s inductive use of the history of the sciences as a series of
particular exemplars, philosophical history is not only regarded as imbued with
logic (deductive and dialectical), but is also therefore intrinsically normative and
axiological. By bringing time and logic so closely together, Hegel was able to give a
central place to the philosophy of history.9 With the inevitable march of time we
can only come closer and closer to the Truth. The very progress of science is a
necessary function of history; and in so far as history is philosophy, science once
again becomes subsumed under philosophy.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, scientifically minded
philosophers inspired by the dazzling successes of the natural sciences, attempted
to make philosophy itself into an science, without allowing it to intrude on the
latter’s domain of inquiry. By arguing for hard fast distinctions between analytic
and synthetic statements, empirical and non‐empirical knowledge, and eschewing
any cross over between the two by means of Kant’s synthetic a priori, philosophers
succeeded—for a time, at least—to demarcate their own distinct domain of subject
matter from the empirical sciences. While the sciences might be said to deal with
the empirical, the time‐dependent, and what is, it is the domain of philosophy to
study the non‐empirical, the timeless, and what must be and what should be. The
to the Program in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Notre
Dame, 1998. 9 See F. C. Beiser, “Hegel’s Historicism,” The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, edited
by F. C. Beiser, Cambride University Press, 1993, pp. 270‐300.
7
motivation for these distinctions arose partly in light of a strong reaction by early
twentieth century philosophers against psychologism, and, more generally
speaking, against naturalisms of all sorts, including historicism.10
Apart from thus distinguishing philosophy from science, philosophers once
again, and in reaction to Hegelianism, separated philosophy sharply and explicitly
from other empirical disciplines, including history.11 By this time, in fact,
philosophers began to accuse those who had naturalized philosophy, in some way
or other, of having committed two major fallacies; fallacies which were also used
(and continue to be used) to attack the employment of historical methods in
philosophy. One was the genetic fallacy, where deducing the logical validity of a
theory or proposition from information about its origins is deemed logically
unacceptable. Hans Reichenbach’s separation between the contexts of discovery
from the context of justification is precisely meant to avoid this first kind of fallacy.
And the second is the naturalistic fallacy, which is committed when what is or was
the case is used to imply what ought to be the case. Such critiques by early
twentieth century, scientifically minded philosophers were certainly indicative of a
more general trend against naturalism in philosophy.
In the twentieth century “scientific philosophy” was quick to catch on
among German, Austrian, Polish, and British philosophers; and it is the direct
10 It should be noted however analytic philosophy’s relationship to naturalism has
remained a complex and indecisive one, right from the start. See Martin Kusch,
Psychologism: A Case Study in the Sociology of Philosophical Knowledge, Routledge,
1995; but especially Philip Kitcher, “The Naturalists Return,” Philosophical Review,
1992, 101: 53‐114.
11 For more on Hegel and analytic philosophy, see Peter Hylton, “Hegel and
Analytic Philosophy,” The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, edited by F. C. Beiser,
Cambride University Press, 1993, pp. 445‐486, and the essays edited by Angelica
Nuzzo, Hegel and the Analytic Tradition, London: Continuum, 2010.
8
ancestor of the dominant model of philosophy today in the Anglo‐Saxon world;
namely, analytic philosophy.12 The hallmark of this approach, at least when it first
began on its programmatic path, was that rather than focus on everyday natural
languages, philosophers were tasked with the analysis of scientific statements by
translating them into formal languages made possible thanks to newly developed
logical tools and methods. The analysis of these statements would reveal opaque
or unwarranted assumptions on the part of science, especially with regard to such
notions as existence, time, space, cause, matter, and mind. The task of the
philosopher became a purely second‐order task, having for its domain the first‐
order statements of physical theory. As such, philosophy might be kept from
making statements directly about the empirical world. One might go as far as to
say that some luminaries of this approach, like Reichenbach and Rudolf Carnap, at
one time or another, considered it their philosophical duty to expose and clarify
the constitutive and regulative principles, and thus, the a priori framework that
makes the empirical statements of a physical theory possible. It is in this light, and
inspired by the model of geometry and its modern axiomatic method, that
Reichenbach formulated his notion of the relative a priori.13
12 For more on this tradition in philosophy see the now classic collection of essays
by Juliet Floyd and Sanford Shieh (eds.), Future Pasts: The Analytic Tradition in
TwentiethCentury Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2001, and also the essays
in Anat Biletzki and Anat Matar (eds.), The Story of Analytic Philosophy: Plot and
Heroes, London and New York: Routledge, 1998.
13 See Samet Bagce, “Reichenbach on the relative a priori and the context of
discovery/justification distinction,” Synthese, 2011, 181: 79‐93; Michael Friedman,
Reconsidering Logical Positivism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; V.
Peckhaus, “Psychologism and the Distinction Between Discovery and Justification,”
in J. Schikore and F. Steinle (eds.), Revisiting Discovery and Justification, Dordrecht:
Springer, 96‐116; and Thomas Uebel, “De‐Synthesizing the Relative A priori,”
Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 2012, 43: 7‐17.
9
At this time the newly formed philosophy of science begins to flourish,
while the enthusiasm that once existed for the history of philosophy wanes. In fact
the distinctions that were being established and stabilized within the tradition of
analytic philosophy (re‐)shaped these two domains—philosophy of science and
history of science—in specific ways. First, with respect to the pursuit of the history
of philosophy, many in the analytic tradition have excluded it from the activity of
philosophy, proper.14 This is because what came to define the scope of analytic
philosophy was a set of definite problems canonized by the likes of Bertrand
Russell and G. E. Moore, like the problem of the external world, the problem of
induction, or the problem of other minds.15 As such, philosophy, much like science,
becomes a problem‐solving enterprise; and if history can at all be conceived of as
being a part of philosophy it must contribute to this project. In this light, the value
of the history was found in (or limited to) its rational reconstruction of bygone
arguments in order to evaluate them in light of (supposedly) the same set of
problems that philosophers today are concerned with. The problems, arguments,
statements, and concepts employed are presumed to be ahistorical, general, and
universal; and thus there is little inclination to question the similarity or identity of
the concepts, statements, and problems used in another time and place. Present
problems of philosophy are also the problems of yesteryear, and solutions to these
problems, whether from deep in the past or fresh off the press, are all assessed
14 But see discussion and analysis in Hans‐Johann Glock, “Analytic Philosophy and
History: A Mismatch?” Mind, 2008, 117: 867‐897. For recent and positive views on
the relationship also see essays in T. Sorell and G. A. J. Rogers (eds.), Analytic
Philosophy and History of Philosophy, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005.
15 Bertrand Russell, Problems of Philosophy, 1912, G. E. Moore, Some Main Problems
of Philosophy, 1953 (originally a set of lectures from 1910‐11), and William James,
Some Problems of Philosophy, 1911.
10
equally and according to the same standards and methods. In this context,
however, what often goes unacknowledged is that these same standards and
methods, namely modern logical and linguistic analysis, were themselves devised
and developed at a very particular time and place—in fact, there is no functional
polyadic logic before Frege or Russell.
The view just outlined has been called the “pen‐pal” approach to the history
of philosophy. Or as two historians have put it, analytic philosophers treat X, where
X is some great long dead philosopher, “as an absent colleague…on an extended
leave of absence.”16 Considering the early aspirations (or pretensions) of analytic
philosophy in becoming an exact science, this comportment to history should come
as no surprise. For one often finds that those scientists who write the history of
their own discipline tend to embrace anachronism, articulating histories that
happen to neatly progress and develop steadily, rationally, and surely to the most
recent and polished form of science today.17 Foucault refers to this latter history as
one that uses a “recurrential analysis” and regards it to be an exercise within and
internal to the sciences themselves, especially in the case of those that have
reached a high level of formalism.18 In a similar vein, then, many from the analytic
tradition too have written their own histories as a story of progress and success.19
16 Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology, Harvard University Press, 2002, pp. 6, 27, 55,
56; and G. P. Baker and P. M. S. Hacker, Language, Sense and Nonsense, Oxford:
Blackwell, 1984, p. 4.
17 But for an antidote to this common generalization see, L. Daston, “The Sciences
of the Archive,” Osiris, 2012, 27: 156‐187.
18 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Routledge, 2002, p. 209. In this
regard, Foucault cites here Michel Serres’ Hermes ou la communication, p. 78.
19 A good example is Michael Dummett, Origins of Analytic Philosophy, Harvard
University Press, 1993. In sharp contrast see the historically sensitive work of
11
But while one can easily understand why science might approach its history in
these terms, it is much harder to grant the same to philosophy. To be sure, the
problem whether philosophy has in fact progressed is a recent one, which not only
first arises in attempts to make philosophy a kind of science, but also by the way
analytic philosophy has tended to write its own history—that is, as a science.20
In so far as analytic philosophy of science is concerned, it has been for the
most part a normative enterprise: it decides what sorts of concepts, statements,
arguments, and methods are or are not permissible within the sciences. Its
relationship to history, at least initially, might be summarized by quoting from the
Hans Sluga, Gottlob Frege, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980. But perhaps an even
better example than Dummett and of this anachronistic tendency is the award
winning two volume work by Scott Soames, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth
Century, Volume 1: the Dawn of Analysis, and Volume 2: The Age of Meaning,
Princeton University Press, 2003. The work was not only widely acclaimed, but
also widely criticized for its historiography. This is thus a good place to emphasize
that even within analytic philosophy there are many who are now taking its
history seriously. Just consider the following abridged list of those who heavily
criticized Soames’ teleological history: P. M. S. Hacker, “Soames’ History of Analytic
Philosophy,” The Philosophical Quarterly, 2006, 56: 121‐31; Christopher Pincock,
“History of Philosophical Analysis a Review of Soames,” Russell: The Journal of
Bertrand Russell Studies, 2005, 25: 168‐171; Scott Soames, “Reply to Pincock’s
Review,” Russell: The Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies, 2005, 25: 172‐177;
Christopher Pincock, “Rejoinder to Soames,” Russell: The Journal of Bertrand Russell
Studies, 2006, 26: 77‐86. In reply to Hacker, Soames says that the aim of his two
volumes was to construct “a history that was itself a piece of analytic philosophy in
its emphasis on analysis, reconstruction and criticism of arguments;” and this
required “a clear conception of what did, and what did not, constitute lasting
progress,” (in Soames, “Hacker’s Complaint,” The Philosophical Quarterly, 2006, 56,
p. 426).
20 See W. M. Urban, “Progress in Philosophy in the Last Quarter Century,” The
Philosophical Review, 1926, 35: 93‐123; T. C. Moody, “Progress in Philosphy,”
American Philosophical Quarterly, 1986, 23: 35‐46; and recently Eric Dietrich,
“There is No Progress in Philosophy,” Essays in Philosophy: Philosophy’s Future:
Science or Something Else?, 2011, 12: 329‐344 actually argues that because
philosophers deal with the very same problems that the pre‐Socratics did, there
can be no progress. See also, Gary Gutting, What Philosophers Know: Case Studies in
Recent Analytic Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, 2009.
12
Vienna Circle’s manifesto, wherein it is announced that from a
“Einheitswissenschaft” and “Kollektivarbeit”
“entspringt das Suchen nach einem neutralen Formelsystem, einer von den
Schlacken der historischen Sprachen befreiten Symbolik … Sauberkeit und
Klarheit werden angestrebt, dunkle Fernen und unergruendliche Tiefen
abgelehnt. In der Wissenschaft gibt es keine ‘Tiefen’; ueberall ist
Oberflaeche: Alles Erlebte bildet ein kompliziertes, nicht immer
ueberschaubares, oft nur im einzelnen fassbares Netz.”21
However, in the 1960s philosophers of science were directly challenged by
the work of Thomas Kuhn (and others like Paul Feyerabend) to open the doors
wide to the darkness and depth of the history of sciences, which instead went far
to make philosophy of science a lot more self‐reflexive.22 What precisely history of
science’s role is with respect to the philosophy of science has been a matter of
21 Rudolf Carnap, Hahns Hahn, Otto Neurath, “Wissenschaftliche Welftauffassung
der Wiener Kreis,” Wiener Kreis: Texte zur wissenschaftlichen Weltauffassung von,
Meiner Verlag, 2006, 11.
22 It was already in Hacking’s 1975 work, which I take up as an exemplary study in
the historical epistemology below, that he declared that “spaces of possibilities”
can “liberate us from the cycle of probability theories that has trapped us for so
long. This last feature has a familiar ring. The picture is, formally, the same as the
one used by the psychoanalysts and by the English philosophers of language.
‘Events preserved in memory only below the level of consciousness’, ‘rules of
language that lie deep below the surface’, and ‘a conceptual space determined by
forgotten precondtions’: all three have, of course, a common ancestor in Hegel”
(Hacking, The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas About
Probability, Induction, and Statistical Inference, 2nd edition, Cambridge University
Press, 2006 [1975], p. 16.
13
serious dispute.23 But there are at least two things that Kuhn helped to legitimate:
first, the use of history as (counter‐) evidence in the philosophy of science; and
secondly, with the introduction of the notion of a paradigm‐shift, a discontinuous
picture of science’s history becomes firmly rooted. This discontinuity has forced
philosophers of science to first acknowledge and access older and other forms of
science before they then can evaluate them. Philosophers of science, therefore,
have confronted (and continue to confront, to some extent or other) the question
of whether concepts, statements, and problems of science have remained the same
regardless of place and time. In some cases, then, getting the history right comes
before analysis in the philosophy of science. The irony, therefore, is that work in
analytic philosophy of science can often be more historically sensitive compared to
when analytic philosophers write their own history.
The landscape just outlined remains rough but it permits us to appreciate
the array of connections that have existed between philosophy, science, and
history, and thus it goes some ways in helping us to recognize the contingency of
these connections. Indeed, how one comes to formulate the connections between
any of these three will depend heavily on how one defines the parameters of
each—and there have been many different meanings attached to each, even in one
and the same tradition. At the same time, the landscape outlined permits us to
highlight and flag key points and issues related to these relationships just plotted.
Before I go on to contrast the foregoing landscape to historical epistemology then,
23 For a recent and excellent survey of these tensions see, Jutta Schickore, “More
Thoughts on HPS: Another 20 Years Later,” Perspectives on Science, 2011, 19: 453‐
481; also Larry Laudan, “Thoughts on HPS: 20 Years Later,” Studies in the History
and Philosophy of Science, 1989, 20: 9‐13; and see the collection of essays in S.
Mauskopf and T. Schmaltz (eds.), Integrating History and Philosophy of Science:
Problems and Prospects, Springer, 2012.
14
allow me to then clearly earmark the points and issues we should keep before us
as we continue. These are the relationships between the normative and
descriptive, between genesis and validity, between philosophy and history
(particularly when it comes to the sciences), and finally, the commitment to
timeless elements found or assumed when some philosophers write history. With
these in mind, the contours of historical epistemology will begin to emerge more
clearly.
II. The French Connection
Historical epistemology seems to originate in two different places at around the
same time. The first is out of what is essentially the Austrian context with the likes
of Ludwig Fleck, and which can be seen as a direct and contemporary response to
early analytic philosophers also in and around the same cultural and geographical
context.24 The second arises from another philosophical traditional or context
altogether; namely, a particular line of thinking about history of science and
philosophy to be found in Paris in the 1920s and 30s. It is only relatively recently
that this tradition was made to confront analytic philosophy. Due to considerations
of space, I have chosen to focus primarily on the second tradition.
Contextually, historical epistemology relates to a more general assumption
on the part of the French epistemological tradition, that knowledge can only be
adequately understood if studied in its historical development; this assumption
can in fact be traced to some influential French thinkers of the nineteenth‐century,
24 See Michael Hagner, “Perception, Knowledge, and Freedom in the Age of
Extremes: On the Historical Epistemology of Ludwick Fleck and Michael Polanyi,”
Studies in East European Thought, 2012, 64: 107‐120; and Hans‐Jörg Rheinberger,
Historische Epistemologie zur Einfuehrung, Junius Verlag, 2007.
15
like Auguste Comte and Antoine Cournot. But in so far as the twentieth century is
concerned, historical epistemology is connected to the Institut d’Histoire des
Sciences et Technique founded by Abel Rey in 1932 at the Sorbonne. It was Rey’s
successor at the chair and directorship of the institute, Gaston Bachelard, to whom
the label historical epistemologist was first applied.25 The label itself comes from
Georges Canguilhem, who was to be Bachelard’s successor to the same post at the
same institute in 1955. If we add Michel Foucault, who studied with Canguilhem,
we then will have the early institutional and philosophical legacy of historical
epistemology in France.26
My aim is not to provide the details of the different strands of this complex,
multifaceted and ever‐evolving French tradition.27 But since this tradition is
significant to contemporary work in historical epistemology, it is important to
underscore what I take to be important from it. First with regard to the influential
work of Bachelard, a crucial factor is his claim that history is epistemological
because its movement is also the movement from non‐science to science,
irrationality to rationality, and subjectivity to objectivity. This is epistemological
because as soon as the rapturous move from one to the other is made concepts,
beliefs, judgments, or objects are excluded while others are included as scientific,
25 D. Lecourt, L’Epistémologie historique de Gaston Bachelard, Paris: Vrin, 1969.
26 See Cristina Chimisso, “The Tribunal of Philosophy and its Norms: History and
Philosophy in Georges Canguilhem’s Historical Epistemology,” Studies in the
History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 2003, 34: 297‐327;
Also see, Peter Dews, “Foucault and the French Tradition of Historical
Epistemology,” History of European Ideas, 1992, 14: 347‐63; and Hans‐Jörg
Rheinberger, On Historicizing Epistemology: An Essay, Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2010.
27 For such an account see, Cristina Chimisso, Writing the History of the Mind:
Philosophy and Science in France, 1900 to 1960s, Ashgate, 2008.
16
rational, and objective. The results of this sharp break are thus also normative
because they determine what comes to count as science and what not—and all at a
civilizational level. But while Canguilhem largely agreed with Bachelard, he limits
himself specifically to the life sciences, and to particular concepts like norm,
pathos, health, or reflex. Canguilhem in fact advances one of the most compelling
cases for honing the history of science in on concepts, rather than on true theories
in which those concepts have operated. Secondly, like Bachelard, Canguilhem is
concerned with using the sciences of the present as a criterion or norm for
evaluating the history of science.
However, there are further significant differences between the two as well,
such as Canguilhem’s insistence that while there are discontinuities there are also
continuities in the history of science. These continuities, moreover, are not to be
surmised by way of formulations grounded in the “logic of history,” but by a close
study of the internal logic of some past theory or other. It is not enough, that is, to
simply expect, anticipate or assume continuity with past theories, and their
concepts, which seem to resemble or are developmentally linked to accepted
theories today. Instead, scientific concepts might be identified and isolated from
within even false theories or pseudoscientific theories of the past; and this stands
in sharp contradistinction to Bachelard. At the same time, however, Canguilhem is
not suggesting that concepts be taken out of their historical, social, and cultural
contexts, for that would be to treat the object of the history of science in the same
way science itself treats its objects, as context‐free. In Canguilhem’s understanding,
17
the domain of the history of science is a second‐order domain, which studies the
production of scientific knowledge as situated and contextualized phenomenon.28
Foucault contrasts his own approach to Bachelard’s and Canguilhem’s.
Unlike the latter two, he does not assume current science as a norm from which to
then judge the rest of the history of sciences with. This permits Foucault to take an
assumed corpus of knowledge, such as alchemy, and judge it according to its own
terms and conditions that allow it to see itself as a science. In contrast, therefore,
Foucault searches for the internal norms of a science of the past, rather than
imposing on that “science” standards from current science today—even if Foucault
is interested in the past for the light it can cast on the present. For our purposes
the most revealing way of putting the difference between Canguilhem and Foucault
is to say the latter is concerned with another level altogether. Canguilhem might be
interested with when and where a concept—regarded as true today even it be
couched in a false theory of yesteryear—might have emerged. But Foucault is after
specific historical conditions that make possible the application of the true or the
false to a statement in a particular place and time. The epistemological features of
Foucault’s history thus shift attention from evaluations external to a science at any
given time to a description of the space of possibilities at a particular time, which
condition specific formulations and concepts rather than others.
28 As Canguilhem puts it, when demarcating the subject‐matter of the history of
science, “Thus the history of sciences is the history of an object which is a history,
which has a history, whereas science is the science of an object which is not
history, which does not have a history” (in Canguilhem, “The Object of the History
of Science,” in Continental Philosophy of Science, edited by Gary Gutting, Blackwell
Publishing, 2005, pp. 198‐207. Along with Canguilhem’s essay, in this volume,
there is included an extremely helpful introduction to it by Hans‐Jörg Rheinberger,
“Reassessing the Historical Epistemology of Georges Canguilhem,” pp. 187‐197).
Also see, Rheinberger, An Epistemology of the Concrete: Twentiethcentury histories
of life, Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2010.
18
III. History of Epistemology by Example
Many have been inspired by Foucault and have attempted to further
develop some of these directions. Probably the most important is Ian Hacking,
especially in his influential book, The Emergence of Probability (1975). This is
noteworthy because apart from contributing in English to what was until then a
primarily French tradition, he is also an analytic philosopher of science. He has
been one of the most articulate practitioners of historical epistemology and has
been fundamental to what others have taken historical epistemology to be.29 One
of the most potent examples of this has been the use Hacking has made of
historical epistemology for the concept of probability, which has inspired an
influential body of work by such scholars as Lorenz Krueger, Lorraine Daston,
Theodore Porter, and others.30 It will be worth our while, therefore, to consider
29 In Hacking’s most sustained discussion as to what historical epistemology is,
demanded that it be relabeled, for good reasons, “historical meta‐epistemology,”
see “Historical Meta‐Epistemology,” Warheit und Geschichite, edited by Wolfgang
Carl and Loraine Daston, Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1999, pp. 53‐77. This never
really caught on, and so I stick in this essay with what has remained the dominant
label today, historical epistemology. It should also be noted here that soon after
Hacking would later come to subsume historical meta‐epistemology under the
more general heading of “historical ontology,” see Hacking, Historical Ontology,
Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 9.
30 Lorenz Krüger, L. Daston, M. Heidelberger, G. Gigerenzer & M. S. Morgan (eds),
The Probabilistic Revolution. 2 volumes, Cambridge, 1987; Krüger, Lorenz, G.
Gigerenzer et al.: The Empire of Chance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1989; Lorraine Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment, Princeton
Univeristy Press, 1988; Gerd Gigerenzer, Zeno Swijtink, Theodore Porter, Lorraine
Daston, John Beatty, and Lorenz Krüger, The Empire of Chance: How Probability
Changed Science and Everyday Life, Cambridge University Press, 1989; Theodore
Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking 18201900, Princeton University Press,
1986.
19
some features of historical epistemology by taking as our example Hacking on the
“emergence” of probability.31
The example kicks off with two fundamental observations about the modern
concept of probability, one has to do with the concept’s history and the other has
to do with the concept as it stands today. The first is that the modern concept of
probability did not exist before circa 1660. And the second is the widely
recognized peculiarity that the single term, probability, harbors two distinct
meanings: it can refer either to a degree of belief or certainty, or to statistical
frequencies. This duality has been the occasion of many general and specialist
disputes and theories; and the attempt to clarify this confusion has been one of the
central tasks of philosophers in the middle of the 20th century onwards.32 Rather
than attempting to dissolve this confusion by using logical analysis, we as good
historical epistemologists ask, Why does our current concept of probability have
this dual character? With some historical work and ingenuity, we discover that the
duality is a remnant trace of the concept’s emergence in the middle of the
seventeenth century, and that it reflects the conditions that made it possible in the
first place.
31 In this I also follow Lorraine Daston in her retrospective review, “The History of
Emergences, Ian Hacking: The Emergence of Probability …” Isis, 98: 801‐908.
32 See Rudolf Carnap, Logical Foundations of Probability, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1950; Carnap, “K.R. Popper on Probability and Induction”, The
Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, P.A. Schilpp (ed.), LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1963, 995–
998; Karl Popper, “The Propensity Interpretation of the Calculus of Probability”, S.
Körner (ed.), The Colston Papers, 1957, 9: 65–70; Karl Popper “The Propensity
interpretation of Probability”, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 1959,
10: 25–42; and see also, S. L. Zabell, “Carnap on Probability and Induction”, The
Cambridge Companion to Carnap, M. Friedman and R. Creath (eds.), Cambridge
University Press, 2007, 273‐294.
20
So what are these historical and conceptual conditions? The conditions
necessary for the emergence of our modern concept of probability are to be found
in the gradual transformation of a particular set of scholastic and pre‐modern
notions like opinion, evidence and sign. Each of these transformations has their
own, sometimes interrelated, histories. So for example it is only when things and
not just people can act as evidence that signs of nature can begin to be read—with
more and more frequency—in order to “probably” contribute to the formation of
an opinion, rather than demonstration. In addressing the emergence of a concept,
therefore, we as historians are forced to shift from the typical interest in the “high
sciences” like mathematics and astronomy, to the “low sciences” like medicine,
astrology, and alchemy where one finds opinion rather than demonstration (the
latter was thought to be the true method of knowledge by the scholastics). In any
case, when these pre‐modern notions—evidence, opinion, and sign—are suitably
evolved and modified by the middle of the 1600s, they become the conditions for
the emergence of a Janus‐faced concept of probability. When the modern concept
of probability emerges from out of this conceptual space of possibilities other
spaces of discourse, practices, objects, and problems are made possible and
determined by that new space; in fact, a new form of knowledge arises, one that is
no longer founded on the scholastic notion of demonstration but on a newly
formed notion of opinion. And when probability is further coupled with a novel
notion of cause, and the arrival of a distinct understanding of fact, the now classical
philosophical problem of induction, first formulated by Hume in 1739, becomes
possible.
This example concerns probability, one of the most central concepts to the
natural and social sciences today. Along similar lines others have engaged in
21
historical epistemological studies with other concepts just as basic to science as we
know it today, such as evidence, objectivity, and facts—these are what Hacking
calls “organizing concepts.”33 Other historical epistemologists have chosen rather
to focus on the emergence of entire “styles of reasoning,” such as the “psychiatric
style of reasoning,” or the style of reasoning associated with statistical thinking
and probability, or in the grounding of particular periods, communities, and
places.34 There have been studies done of concepts that are more local to certain
scientific practices, such as persons, organism and heredity.35 And, finally, there
have also been studies that target what have been called “epistemic things,” such
as the protein‐synthesis, genes, and electrons.36 Historical epistemology which
targets epistemic things, pioneered by Hans‐Jörg Rheinberger, are unique in that
they are not so much about systems of concepts as much as they are about
33 Hacking speaks at length about organizing concepts in “Historical Meta‐
Epistemology,” pp. 58‐65. See Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity, Zone
Books, 2007; Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in
the Sciences of Wealth and Society, University of Chicago Press, 1998.
34 Arnold Davidson, The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the
Formation of Concepts, Harvard University Press, 2001, p. 136; Hacking, The
Emergence of Probability, 2nd edition, Cambridge University Press, 2006 [1975],
and Hacking, The Taming of Chance, Cambridge University Press, 1990; and James
Elwick, Styles of Reasoning in the British Life Sciences: Shared Assumptions, 1820
1858, London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007.
35 Ian Hacking, “Making Up People,” Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy,
Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, ed. Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna,
and David E. Wellbery, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986, pp. 161‐171;
Hans‐Jörg Rheiberger and Staffan Müller‐Wille, Vererbung : Geschichte und Kultur
eines biologischen Konzepts Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2009.
36 Staffan Müller‐Wille and Hans‐Jörg Rheinberger, Das Gen im Zeitalter der
Postgenomik : eine wissenschaftshistorische Bestandsaufnahme. Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 2009; and T. Arabatzis, Representing Electrons: A Biographical
Approach to Theoretical Entities, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
2006.
22
“experimental systems.” The latter both materially shapes and conceptually
determines epistemic things; and it is from within these experimental systems, and
in conjunction with their “technical objects,” that novel and surprising results
emerge. As such, the focus on experimental systems (and “epistemic spaces”)
rather than on conceptual spaces of possibilities might be regarded as a reflection
of the material and practical turn that took place in the historiography of the
history of science in recent years. But it should also be noted that collections of
experimental systems contribute to an “experimental culture” which itself may
emerge, as might any epistemic space, under specific set of historical conditions.37
All in all, whether one is engaged with organizing concepts or local
concepts, epistemic things or styles of reasoning, Lorraine Daston’s description is
certainly apt: historical epistemology is the “history of emergence.” Granting the
many possible and actual differences, I believe some fruitful and illuminating
things can be said that are generally speaking common to all these kinds of studies
in historical epistemology. What I intend to do now is present the basic elements of
what constitutes historical epistemology in a way that accounts for similarities
rather than the differences among its practitioners.
37 For more on the experimental system see Hans‐Jörg Rheinberger,
Experimentalsysteme und epistemische Dinge : eine Geschichte der Proteinsynthese
im Reagenzglas. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2001; and Rheinberger, “Experimental
Systems: Historiality, Narration, and Deconstruction,” Science in Context, 1994, 7:
65‐81; more recently, Rheinberger, “Consistency from the Perspective of an
Experimental Systems Approach to the Sciences and their Epistemic Objects,”
Manuscrito, 2011, 34: 307‐321; and Michael Hagner, "Versuch über historische
Experimentalkulturen," Liechtensteiner Exkurse IV. Kontamination, ed. N. Haas / R.
Nägele / H.‐J. Rheinberger. Eggingen: Edition Isele, 83–102; Michael Hagner and
Hans‐Jörg Rheinberger. (Ed.). 1993. Die Experimentalisierung des Lebens.
Experimentalsysteme in den biologischen Wissenschaften 1850/1950. Berlin:
Akademie.
23
IV. BareBones of Historical Epistemology
With the foregoing example in mind, but not limited to it, it is time now to get to
the bare bones of what historical epistemology is. To begin with, some scientific
concept or style of reasoning is selected which seems to us today to be inevitable.
Historical epistemologists are not interested in long dead concepts or styles, but
with those that are active today—so active, in fact, that they tend to be taken for
granted. Secondly, the initial assumption is that scientific concepts or styles all
contain in them some trace of their origin. As Hacking puts it, “When there is a
radical transformation of ideas, whatever made the transformation possible leaves
its mark upon subsequent reasoning.”38 So thirdly, one wants to select concepts
that have emerged from out of some transformation in history, so that one can
determine whether or not before the period of transition there was such a concept
or style possible. The transformation need not be recognized as revolutionary or
radical at the time, but might even be gentle, gradual and piecemeal.39 As soon as
one has isolated such an historical target, then the Kantian question to ask is: What
are the conditions that have made this concept or style possible? And why at this
particular time in history have they emerged and not at another? It is in answering
these questions, by pursuing genuine historical research, that one, hopefully more
often than not, arrives at conditions that make a new concept or style emerge then
and there. Since the conditions of emergence are historical but at the same time
38 Ian Hacking, “How Should We Do the History of Statistics?” I & C, 1981, 8: 15‐26,
p. 17.
39 This is particularly so for “styles of reasoning,” according to Hacking, which
“comes into being by little microsocial interactions and negotiations,” (in “’Style’
for Historians and Philosophers,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science,
1992, 23: 1‐20, p. 10).
24
necessary for the emergence of a concept or style, we might say that the conditions
are contingently necessary; in fact these have been aptly referred to as the
“historical a priori.”40 There is, therefore, no need for atemporal or transhistorical
elements that can make this actual historical research relevant or worthwhile to
philosophers, particularly those who care for concepts and their clarification.41
Indeed, we have in historical epistemology a type of conceptual analysis, but one
that is historical rather than logical or linguistic.42
But, it might be asked, are historical actors and ideas inextricably
determined by historical a priori conditions of possibility? Is this, in other words, a
form of historical determinism? The answer is that it is not. The reason is that the
conditions that make the emergence of a novel style or concept possible are
necessary but not sufficient for its emergence at a particular time and place. So, for
instance: one can have two players at a chess board, who both know the rules, and
have all the pieces available to them, without there necessarily occurring a chess
game. In this case, it is the will to play the game on the part of both parties that
40 The term was first used by Husserl, then by Canguilhem to describe the result of
Foucault’s archeological method, and then is used by Foucault himself in his
Archeology of Knowledge; for the details of this heritage, see, David Hyder,
“Foucault, Cavailles, and Husserl on the Historical Epistemology of the Sciences,”
Perspective on Science, 2003, 11: 107‐129.
41 I stress actual historical work here because I wish to distinguish it from the
“imaginary” or “fictional” geneology employed by Bernard Williams, Truth and
Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy, Princeton University Press, 2002, p. 38.
42 After Hacking, this might be called “historical analytic.” But Hacking is also
hesitant to regard this as a kind of analysis, since there is apparently no breaking
up a concept into its constituent parts. However, in many ways, we do end up with
historically constituent parts of a concept, even if they are not their logical parts.
Just consider the case with probability examined and the role played by other
concepts like cause, fact, opinion and sign. Hacking, “Historical Meta‐
Epistemology,” pp. 62, 66.
25
would result in the game being played; the will on the part of both parties would
cause the game. The conditions of possibility are not causes, but only conditions.
Agency on the part of the historical actors remains, therefore, intact.43
Now, a similar word like “probable”, “fact”, or “objective” may have been
used before in another time and place in human history; but the point is that the
concept and its new contents cannot have existed before their emergence in that
new form, because the historical set of conditions that make it possible were not
present when the word was used at another period. In this regard, historical
epistemology is not the history of ideas, because: (a) the idea of a precursor or
anticipation so central to the history of ideas is entirely irrelevant; and (b) there is
no need to posit any transhistorical and essentially unchanging “unit‐idea” that
invariably appear and reappear in history.44 But it does share with the history of
ideas the commitment to interdisciplinary research.
To continue on to the last characteristic of historical epistemology, which is
also the one of the most trickiest, a brand new concept emerging at a particular
point in history may also signal the emergence of a new style of reasoning, as we
have just seen in the case of probability.45 But in other accounts, it is the style of
43 See James Elwick, “Layered History: Styles of Reasoning as Stratified Conditions
of Possibility,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 2012, 43: 619‐627, esp.
620.
44 For more on the unit‐idea in the history of ideas see the introduction to Arthur
Lovejoy’s, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea, Harvard
University Press, 1936. For a reappraisal see, Richard Macksey, “The History of
Ideas at 80,” MLN, 2002, 117: 1083‐1097. For more on the critique of the
precursor, see Canguilhem, “The Object of the History of Science,” pp. 205‐206.
45 This may be a good place for an important caveat. Ian Hacking has insisted in the
past that we keep separate his work and interest in “historical meta‐epistemology”
from the work on styles. It seems to have been Arnold Davidson that first brought
the two so close together, especially in the way I do here. As far as one can tell,
26
reasoning that first appears to emerge to make a concept possible. This is the case,
for example, with Arnold Davidson’s historical analysis of the concept of
perversion. Along with the style of reasoning associated with psychiatry, which
emerges as a result of the way it defines itself against pathology and physiology, a
whole set of new diseases are conceptually made possible, such as sexual
perversion; that is, for the first time diseases that are functional and at the same
not localizable are possible.46 In any case, the order of emergences—concept or
style—are two sides of the same coin, where in fact what often happens, as
Hacking puts it, “The style comes into being with instances although…the
according to Hacking, historical epistemology has to do with rigorous historical
research, and the other with what Hacking refers to as mythical “overarching
pictures of civilization.” However, the latter can surely be the work of an historian,
which it in fact is when Hacking elects to submit to A. C. Crombie’s “styles of
thinking.” The trouble is that Hacking’s Emergence of Probability can be read as
both a work in historical “meta‐epistemology” and as a work in styles; after all, it
examines the emergence of a concept and of number five in Crombie’s list.
Strangely enough, when Hacking describes a style of reasoning as introducing “a
great many novelties,” such as objects, evidence, sentences, laws, possibilities, he
does not at all mention concepts (“’Styles for Historians and Philosophers,” p. 11).
However, in the same place he insists that the work on styles is connected to
“objectivity,” going as far as to say that, “I am concerned with the way in which
objectivity comes into being” (10). This sounds exactly like what work in historical
meta‐epistemology ought to be. In fact in his paper on historical meta‐
epistemology he takes the concept of objectivity as his primary example. Another
difference between the two might lie in the fact that Hacking nowhere mentions
“positivities” when speaking about historical epistemology as he does with styles.
However, it would be strange to say that the emergence of a concept of evidence or
objectivity do not have with them resulting positivities, even if they may not
always be of the true or false sort. Recently, however, Hacking has come to accept
that “it was stupid to patent [styles of reasoning], and to restrict it to members of a
list.” In fact he says, Davidson was “right [to combine the two] and I was wrong”
(Hacking, “’Language, Truth, and Reason’ 30 years later,” Studies in History and
Philosophy of Science, 2012, 43: 599‐609.
46 Arnold Davidson, The Emergence of Sexuality, Harvard University Press, 2001.
27
recognition of something as new, even the naming of it, may solidify the style after
it has begun.”47
But whether we are dealing with the initial emergence of a concept or a
style, with them come internal rules and conditions that help to determine what
makes statements meaningful or not, and true or false. Historical epistemology is
therefore not in the business of evaluating the validity of theories, statements,
beliefs, practices, or concepts, but is rather concerned with revealing how these
made possible, or were made possible by, certain normative regimes. That notions
like objectivity, fact, probability, have in fact had and continue to have a normative
role to play is precisely what historical epistemology attempts to explain. Thus,
rather than taking the normative stance, historical epistemology is concerned with
what grounds the normative stance at any given period in history.48
Thus with regard to the naturalistic fallacy we might address it by stressing
that historical epistemologists are not interested in deducing a norm from a
description. The fallacy is entirely irrelevant to it, since historical epistemology
does not set out to make the relevant kind of prescriptive conclusions. To be sure,
historical epistemology most certainly may describe the emergence or activation of
a norm, such as when the notion of mechanical objectivity in the nineteenth
century brings with it a kind of system of values that go into reshaping the
scientific self.49 But we would not say that the authors of that study would then
prescribe these values. In the same vein, the authors are also not interested in
47 Hacking, “’Styles’ for Historians and Philosophers,” p. 11. 48 There is also the question, which will remain unexplored here, as to how
something maintains its normative stance over a period of time.
49 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity, Zone Books, 2007.
28
justifying (as true or false, as good or bad) the normative status objectivity—that it
is normative is simply taken for granted. What is not taken for granted are the
contingent but necessary conditions required for a norm to emerge and how it
might in turn contribute to the establishment of new norms; and this is no
deduction as much as it is a description.
It would seem therefore that the genetic fallacy is also inapplicable to
historical epistemology.50 Explaining the origins and genesis of a concept may
actually cast light on why we justify it or value it the way we do today but this is
not to say that the history or origins of the concept does justify or validate a
statement or content. The very question of justification or validation is beyond the
scope of historical epistemology—it does not logically evaluate arguments. Nor, it
should be said, does it attempt to access the psychological or cognitive conditions
of historical actors. Instead, it tries to explain the emergence of conceptual and
epistemic spaces that make certain kinds of evaluations possible rather than
others. In this sense it might be regarded as a second‐order discipline that is not
itself a normative enterprise, but which has for its domain normative enterprises
like philosophy and science. In fact, it is precisely for this reason that we might,
with Hacking, prefer to use the ugly label, “Historical Meta‐Epistemology.”
Moreover, as we have just outlined with regard to the skeptical problem of
induction, new philosophical problems can emerge. That is, some philosophical
problems are not timeless and do often contain traces of their origins in how today
50 The fallacy itself, of late, has been in a little bit of trouble. Very few people know
how to precisely state it, and some have also recently begun to find exceptions for
its plausible use. Thus it has been asked whether the genetic fallacy is really a
fallacy after all. See, Kevin C. Klement, “What Is Genetic Reasoning Not Fallacious?”
Argumentation, 2002, 16: 383‐400; Andrew C. Ward, “The Value of Genetic
Fallacies,” Informal Logic, 2010, 30: 1‐33.
29
they are formulated and constrained by their historical path dependences. Thus
one cannot simply compare historical epistemology to the history of epistemology
on the basis of which one helps to treat classic epistemological problems in
philosophy. This is because one, historical epistemology, is an activity that does
not assume the stability of the problem, while the other, history of epistemology,
does simply assume it. Historians of epistemology want to know how philosophers
in the past have attempted to solve the same epistemological problem that
troubles philosophers today. Historical epistemologists want to understand how
we got to formulate the problem the way we do now. It is not the job of historical
epistemology to answer problems of epistemology, but to show us how they have
become problems for us as philosophers today. As such, considering that the
formulation of a problem is a part of the activity of philosophy, then historical
epistemology too can be considered a way of doing philosophy.
Any attempt to evaluate historical epistemology, therefore, by how well it
treats epistemological problems is to misunderstand what it is.51 So even in an
attempt to supply the historical epistemology of the modern concept of belief, for
example, what it might have to say about belief will not directly address the
epistemological problem of what belief is, or how it is related to knowledge and
justification. Rather, historical epistemology will take the commonly accepted or
problematic features of the current notion of belief, and attempt to answer the
question: when did these features of belief first come to characterize it, and why?
Or when did this modern notion of belief first arise, and why? Answering these
sorts of questions will provide a historical analysis of the concept and will reveal
51 This has to be stressed because this is precisely what some have tried to do, see
Thomas Sturm, “Historical Epistemology or History of Epistemology? The Case of
the Relation Between Perception and Judgment,” Erkenntnis, 2011, 75: 303‐324.
30
the conceptual space required for the concept’s emergence, but it will not pretend
to solve current epistemological problems surrounding belief. It might, at best, go
into providing a kind of conceptual analysis for a concept, in the sense sketched
above, but not in the sense of supplying necessary and sufficient conditions for it.
As such, I do not believe that historical epistemology ought to replace the history
of epistemology or epistemology itself.
The family of practices and methods regarded to fall under the category of
historical epistemology outlined above have been rightly referred to by Foucault as
a history of the present, for they are committed to historically revealing,
philosophically relevant ways in which high‐profile concepts, styles of reasoning,
and epistemic things we today take for granted take the shape and dimensions that
they do. It does not, however, exhaust the different ways of doing the history of
science. Nor does it replace epistemology or the history of epistemology, but it can
fruitfully complement each by providing a kind of historical analysis of relevant
concepts and by pointing out path‐dependencies that have long been forgotten or
erased in each. In fact, the more that philosophical and scientific notions begin to
be regarded as inevitable, the more there will be a need for the application of
historical epistemology. For just as philosophy, as a second‐order discipline and by
means of logical and linguistic analysis, began to reveal hidden assumptions and
surreptitiously introduced notions in the sciences, so too has historical
epistemology begun by means of rigorous empirical research and study to disclose
connections and long forgotten conditions in not only the sciences but also in
philosophy and its history. Indeed, historical epistemology can aid philosophy to
recognize and form other kinds of correlations, without falling prey to grand
systems or to muddled associations. But historical epistemology is at its best when