What Is Radical Historicism?

Historicism

Turner’s very title, “Not So Radical Historicism,” suggests that I am trying and failing to defend a problematizing form of critique. He ends with the same suggestion, contrasting my substantive analysis of consciousness with Nietzsche and Foucault’s ability to find new things to problematize and relativize. Although Turner suggests I fail to be “radical” in this way, he himself clearly opposes “radical” critique as philosophically implausible. Throughout, Turner is, therefore, pressing two lines of attack. He argues, first, that I fail to defend ungrounded and problematizing critique, for I end up appealing to substantive commitments. And he argues, second, that ungrounded and problematizing critique is philosophically implausible.

Contrary to what Turner suggests, I agree entirely with this second argument. I think that the idea of an ungrounded problematizing genealogical stance is implausible. This ungrounded genealogical stance either collapses into a pernicious relativism or it has to rely at least tacitly on substantive commitments. Clearly, therefore, I am not trying to defend this stance in the way Turner suggests. Furthermore, because I am not trying to defend a “radical” problematizing critique, I can hardly be said to fail to do so. Contrary to Turner’s first line of attack, my historicism cannot have failed to be “radical” if I did not intend it to be “radical” in the relevant sense. Far from trying to defend an ungrounded idea of critique, I am trying to show how a particular set of substantive commitments might provide grounds for critique.

I want to use this opportunity, therefore, to make it emphatically clear that radical historicism is the set of substantive philosophical commitments that arise from applying historicism even to the principles that governed earlier historicisms. Radical historicism is “radical” in the literal sense of “applying to its own roots,” not in the sense of being ungrounded and problematizing everything, nor in a somewhat empty political sense. The relevant philosophical commitments include the nominalism, contingency, and contestability I discussed early in “Historicism and Critique” and also the historicist epistemology and historical ontology I described later therein.

Turner and I disagree sharply not about the implausibility of ungrounded critique but, rather, about the reasonableness of my historicist epistemology—according to which judgments of objectivity are always seen as being made in a historical context—and my historical ontology—according to which the social world consists of fluid practices that arise out of concrete activity. These disagreements inform many of Turner’s specific comments on my analysis of critique.

My historicist epistemology implies that judgments about truth are inevitably historically situated. To say something is objectively true is, in other words, to say that it is objective for us in our historical situation. A true or objective proposition is one that is loosely speaking part of the best account of the world currently on offer. Beliefs become objectively valid not by being grounded on experiences or reasons that are allegedly undeniable, but instead through the process of comparing rival accounts of the world. In the social sciences, this process of comparison might consist in part of seeing how good a job each account can do of explaining its rivals.

Turner suggests that this historicist epistemology is “relativistic.” I think much depends on what is meant by “relativistic.” On one hand, I accept that part of the point of any historicist epistemology is to deny that we can have access to Truth rather than truth, that is, to unquestionable certainties rather than things we judge to be objectively valid. But if relativism is just the rejection of unquestionable certainties, there is nothing wrong with it. We will only worry about such relativism if we believe that objective knowledge can be, and perhaps must be, True in a foundationalist sense. As I do not believe in such Truth, I do not see a problem in rejecting it.

On the other hand, Turner might understand “relativism” to be the inability to decide between any rival truth claims. In that case, however, I fail to see why he thinks my views are relativistic. I believe that we can certainly decide between some, if not all, rival truth claims by locating them in rival theories or webs of belief that we can then compare in terms of certain criteria and perhaps by their ability to narrate one another. Turner is right to suggest that all such appeals to a comparison or choice among theories face a problem of regress. My own view is that this regress ends in a bedrock composed largely of the facts that are agreed in a given context.

As I did not discuss these details in “Historicism and Critique,” however, I do not want to defend them here. ² I want only to observe that the vast majority of philosophy of science rejects claims about unquestionable certainty, looks instead to accounts of theory choice, and sometimes even appeals to the ability of rival theories to make sense of one another. ³ Indeed, the lack of certainty is a commonplace among not only philosophers of science but also scientists themselves. As Richard Feynman (1999, 146) famously put it, “Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty—some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain.” Contrary to what Turner suggests, therefore, there is nothing particularly novel or controversial about the substantive epistemological commitments on which I base my analysis of critique. Those commitments are, on the contrary, somewhat commonplace. The only alternative to them seems to be an increasingly dubious faith in certainty.

This faith in certainty seems increasingly dubious in large part due to the rise of meaning holism. Meaning holism implies that the truth conditions of a single proposition necessarily depend on a wider context such as a paradigm, web of beliefs, or language game. ⁴ My historical ontology, like my historicist epistemology, draws on this meaning holism. Given that people make the social world by acting in accord with their conscious, subconscious, and unconscious beliefs and desires, holism then implies that these beliefs are themselves socially constructed as part of a wider web of beliefs. Social objects, such as “the working-class” or “democracy,” do not resemble natural kinds with their intrinsic properties and objective boundaries. Rather, holism points to a historical ontology according to which social objects are products of particular webs of belief or language games (compare Hacking 2004).

Although Turner does not discuss ontology explicitly, ontological issues are important for understanding our different views of critique. Here, my historical ontology implies that social objects typically have fuzzy boundaries. The terms of social science—such as “the working-class” and “democracy”—are typically pragmatic ones, rather than terms that refer to natural kinds. When social scientists say that these terms refer to this set of objects but not that set, they can justify their decision only by reference to their descriptive and explanatory purposes.

Critique

I have discussed three general issues that form the background to my specific responses to Turner’s comments on my analysis of critique. First, whereas Turner often seems to think that I am trying to defend genealogy conceived as a mode of critique divorced from substantive philosophical commitments, I am actually trying to identify a set of substantive philosophical commitments on which to ground genealogy. Second, whereas Turner seems to think that any valid philosophical commitments must refer to something more than “objective for us,” I think that “objective for us” is all we can have. Third, whereas Turner suggests that social concepts can refer to real kinds, I think these kinds have a historical ontology so social concepts are inherently pragmatic.

My analysis of critique distinguished between genealogy, historical ontology, and ideology critique. On genealogy, Turner suggests that citing origins is not a valid form of critique and that the critical force of a genealogy rests on external judgments about what is true or good. Because I am defending a set of substantive commitments, not groundless critique, the general tenor of these suggestions does not trouble me. Not only do I accept that genealogy involves truth commitments, I am specifically attempting to highlight some of the relevant commitments, arguing that a genealogy involves commitment to radical historicism and to the truth of the history it tells.

Nonetheless, I do not quite agree with Turner that the critical force of a genealogy is external and unrelated to the story it tells about the origins of the ideas that it probes. The critical force is not external to the genealogy because, on my account, the historicism is built into the genealogical stance and because the particular history the genealogy tells is right there in front of the reader.

I agree with Turner that there are many cases in which genealogies of the origins of ideas have no critical effect on those ideas. But, nonetheless, there are times when a genealogical study of the origins of the ideas is a critique of those ideas. Turner himself seems to allow that genealogies can be critical when the authority of the relevant ideas derives from their origins, as with revealed truths. I would add that genealogies can also be critical if the content (but not necessarily the authority) of the relevant ideas is tied to an account of the origins of those ideas.

Suppose, for example, that I am a liberal and that I believe a particular account of the origins of liberalism. If I get convinced by an alternative account of those origins, I change my beliefs. That change in my beliefs is in itself evidence of the critical effect of the genealogy. To deny that the genealogy has this critical effect would be mistakenly to fixate on moral beliefs at the expense of historical, empirical, and other beliefs. Besides, it is, in addition, quite possible that the change in my beliefs about the origins and history of liberalism might lead to a corresponding change, no matter how slight, in my other beliefs, including perhaps my moral beliefs. Given that meaning holism implies that our beliefs only make sense in webs of belief, a change in one part of that web is always likely to have ripple effects in other parts of the web.

Let me turn now to historical ontology. Turner seems to accept my analysis of unfounded concepts. He just complains that it is a “mystery” why we need a genealogy of such concepts. Part of my response is to say that we do not need genealogy. After all, I do distinguish between genealogy and historical ontology. Equally, however, I would argue that genealogies can often help to reveal the unfounded nature of a concept. The role of the genealogy here echoes my comments on the ripple effects of a change in belief. Consider a genealogy that explores how people came to believe that wine was “healthy, French, and egalitarian.” If a reader already rejected that concept of wine, they would not need the genealogy to show them that the concept was unfounded. But if a reader held that concept of wine, the genealogy might convince them that the relevant concept of wine was unfounded.

When Turner looks at what I call pragmatic concepts, he seems to accept that many social concepts are reifications that do not capture natural kinds. He even says that the idea of democracy as a natural kind is absent from the literature. ⁵ Yet, Turner then goes on to imagine that social scientists might adjust the definition of democracy and other relevant terms until, through a process of a trial and error, they had a predictive concept that might enable them to conclude and so to predict that democracies do not go to war with one another. In my view, however, there is a tension between seeing social science concepts as pragmatic and seeing them as genuinely predictive.

Social scientists assign causal or predictive power to concepts such as democracy by at least tacitly reifying them so as to treat them as if they had essences. The implicit claim is that there is something about democracy (its essence) that explains its other properties (not going to war with other democracies). The claim is that “democracy” is a real kind such that irrespective of time and space, democracies do not go to war with one another. The claim “democracies do not go to war” is given causal or predictive power, in other words, precisely because social scientists tacitly understand “democracy” in reified times as having core properties that generate a social logic operating apart from historical contingencies.

A historical ontology leads to a view of social science concepts as pragmatic. This view of social science concepts should make us far more suspicious of reifications, social logics, and causal and predictive claims than Turner seems to be. ⁶ If the concepts are just pragmatic ones, there is no social logic to be unpacked. Either the logic works by quasi-definition as a kind of tautology; we are defining democracies so as to build the logic into the concept. Or the logic is a pattern in the data, where the explanation of that pattern lies in the particular explanations for a series of contingent historical cases, not a macro-level causal process.

Finally, Turner seems even less happy with my analysis of ideology critique. I suggest that a version of ideology critique can work by appealing to rogue pro-attitudes that illegitimately influence the beliefs people hold or at least the beliefs they express. Turner’s first complaint is that we need to know in advance that the beliefs are false. But we do not. On the contrary, I define ideological beliefs as beliefs that are motivated by rogue pro-attitudes irrespective of their truth or falsity.

Turner’s other complaint is that my concept of rogue pro-attitudes involves an appeal to a substantive analysis of proper consciousness—an analysis that he thinks is incompatible with the genealogical stance. But, to repeat myself, because I am defending substantive commitments, not groundless critique, there is no reason why I should not appeal to a substantive analysis of consciousness. Such an analysis is not in contradiction with the genealogical stance as I elucidate it.

No doubt, however, I need reasons for my substantive analysis of consciousness. My analysis of a proper consciousness is not a normative account of the beliefs people should strive to hold. It is, rather, an analysis of the presumptions embedded in the way we interpret others. ⁷ The process of interpretation involves presumptions or norms of, for example, conscious and consistent beliefs. The point is not that people normally will hold such beliefs. It is that the interpretation of language and action depends on these norms as background assumptions even when an interpreter ends up ascribing subconscious, unconscious, or inconsistent beliefs to someone.