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What is historicism?

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What is historicism?
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 INTERNATIONAL STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE, VOL. 13, NO. 3, 1999 275

ARTICLE

What is historicism?

ANDREW REYNOLDS
Department of Philosophy, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
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Abstract "Historicism" has become a ubiquitous and equivocal term. A classification is

given here of five separate uses of the term currently in vogue, each provided with a unique
qualifying adjective to help keep them distinct. I then offer a few objections to some of the more
radical conclusions which have been drawn by proponents of a specific version of historicism,
one associated with "postmodernism ". The positions of Rorty and Putnam are contrasted as
examples of strong and weak degrees of historicism, respectively.

1. Introduction
Historicism is a label that gets applied to a confusingly wide array of theses. One
motivation for writing this paper was to try to get a clearer grasp on what people might
mean when they use the term "historicism" and its cognates. For many people the term
is likely to bring to mind the position criticized by Karl Popper in his books The Poverty
of Historicism (1961) and The Open Society and its Enemies (1971). Popper's employment
of the term has added to the confusion, since the position he identifies by that label is
almost diametrically opposed to another usage already well established much in advance
of his own interest in the subject. Popper used the term to refer to the thesis that an
important object of the historical and social sciences is to make predictions about future
developments in political and social trends. But "historicism" had already been associ-
ated with the ideas of the 18th-century thinkers Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) and
Johann Herder (1744-1803). This earlier version of historicism arose in opposition to
the Enlightenment ideal of an ahistorical and universal rationality, the inspiration for
which was drawn from the growing successes of the natural sciences. Vico and Herder
emphasized the unique and particular over the universal, and the unpredictable over the
predictable. They were also less optimistic than their "modernist" counterparts about
the prospects for a progressive improvement in human circumstances by a simple
application of the principles of reason to the problems affecting individuals and nations.
It is clear that an element of this same skepticism remains a strong motivating force in
the current popularity of one particular form of historicism to be discussed here. A
second motivation of this paper was to address this skepticism, and to offer reasons why
some of the skeptical theses about science, objectivity, and knowledge in general that are
typically associated with "postmodernist" trends are unfounded.
0269-8595/99/030275-13 © 1999 Inter-University Foundation
 276 A. REYNOLDS

2. Classification of historicist theses

This section lays out a tentative classification of some commonly met varieties of
historicist positions. The classification itself is not intended to capture the historical
details of just who maintained what thesis and when, nor does it claim to be a proper
partitioning of the possible versions of historicism into mutually exclusive and exhaus-
tive categories. I do hope though that it will be helpful in allowing us to identify what
people might mean when they use the term "historicism" and "historicist". It is also
intended to display the varying strengths or degrees of radicalness of the different
versions in question. Once that is done, I will look more closely at the type of support
each version rests upon.
The first version maintains simply that:

(1) To be understood properly things must be considered within their historical contexts. This
is just the methodological rule required for all good history of philosophy and, as Kuhn
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argued, for good philosophy of science. I take it that it is really quite non-
contentious, relying only upon the observation that no thinker or writer operates within
a vacuum. Philosophers and scientists are always trained in a tradition of some kind and
are thinking in response to other traditions and thinkers. Because traditions and the
problems with which they deal change throughout time, one must become familiar with
them so as to better understand the thinker or thinkers in question. I propose to call this
"mundane historicism".
The next thesis is also a methodological one and states that,

(2) History has its own methods which are distinct from those of the natural sciences. This
thesis is associated with the 18th-century Italian Vico, the 19th-century German
Dilthey, and in our own time with the Oxford philosopher R. G. Collingwood. The
claim here is that whereas the natural sciences are concerned with very general trends
and repeatable phenomena, which can be explained by deduction from general laws,
history deals with highly contingent, unrepeatable and particular events. Moreover,
since the historian's object is to come to understand specifically human events, the
natural procedure is to try to understand the intentions of the agents involved and to
discern the significance of their actions for future events. This I will refer to as
"methodological historicism".
Philosophy of history since about the middle of this century was consumed with a
debate largely inspired by Hempel and his attempt to apply the deductive-nomological
model of scientific explanation to the social sciences and history (cf. Hempel, 1959).
According to that program explanations have the syntactic structure of argument forms
(either deductively valid or probabilistic), knowledge of the premises of which would
permit the prediction of the conclusion. Explanation is prediction (or predictability in
hindsight). Collingwood, among others, was deeply critical of this proposal. History is
just too complex and riddled with contingency for general laws to be of much utility,
they argued. Moreover, explanation in history requires a sympathetic understanding of
the motives of human agents; it is a hermeneutic activity. And while a foreknowledge of
an agent's motives might permit prediction of the agent's behavior, it is a well-known
adage that each particular act results in a multitude of unforeseeable reactions. History,
as it has become popular to emphasize of late, is a complex and chaotic system.
Our third thesis is also methodological in nature, but will be more familiar to those
acquainted with Popper's writings on the social sciences. It is the more metaphysical-
sounding claim that,
 WHAT IS HISTORICISM? 277

(3) There are to be found in history general laws, rhythms, or patterns. And with these the
social sciences can make predictions about the future. It should be immediately obvious that
this version of historicism is at odds with the last version. For what I have called
"methodological historicism" consists in the denial that one can make use of general
laws for prediction-making in history. In fact Popper drew a fair amount of flak from
historians and philosophers of history for using the label historicism to refer to a position
so at odds with what had already been known by that name for a hundred years or more.
Yet despite this I suspect that for the sake of having a convenient handle that will bring
readily to mind all the important associations, no better title can be found than
"Popperian historicism".
Of course, the position Popper had in mind was that of Hegel and Marx, whom he
characterized, not altogether unjustly of course, as being obsessed with the idea of
discerning in history general laws of development or "evolution". In fact, the 19th
century was rife with this kind of speculation about historical evolution, Herbert
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Spencer being perhaps the most popular writer on the subject. A common element in
such speculations is an organismic model of societies. Each nation, race or state is
perceived as a distinct unit playing its part in an overall pattern of unfolding or
development, just as individual cells differentiate themselves during embryological
development for the sake of the resulting organism. For Hegel, all former nations were
building up to the Prussian state in which the idea of freedom had achieved its final and
fully developed form.
We might also mention the founder of positivism, Auguste Comte, in this regard.
For his law of three stages of social-intellectual development is just such a kind of
general historical pattern. According to the law of three stages, humankind has passed
through three stages in its attempts to explain the natural world: first a theological stage,
in which events are ascribed to the divine will of supernatural agents; second, a
metaphysical stage which introduces unverifiable forces operating beneath the level of
observable phenomena; and lastly the positive, or "scientific", stage in which explana-
tions are properly restricted to the prediction and control of events by the observation
of correlations and regularities among surface appearances.
It would not be entirely strange to place Kuhn's thesis of scientific revolutions in
this category either. For what else does his dialectical theory of normal science-
crisis-revolution-new normal science represent if not a general pattern of historical
development. More will be said about the type of evolutionary theory it is most evocative
of in the final section.
While all the historicist theses we have seen so far were (chiefly) methodological,
the next two are less concerned with method than with epistemology and value theory.
The fourth thesis maintains that:

(4) Standards of rationality are not fixed and eternal, but change over time. We might place
Comte's theory of the three stages here also, even if he probably believed that the only
"correct" standard of rationality was to be found in the final positivistic stage. But two
more contemporary figures which I would argue fit this category are Ian Hacking and
Hilary Putnam. Hacking has drawn upon the research of the late historian of science A.
C. Crombie (1994) to point out that over time what he calls "styles of reasoning" have
changed. Some styles of reasoning, such as the symbology and numerology so important
to astrology and alchemy, have gradually died out (among scientists at least). Others,
such as statistical reasoning, are of much more recent invention and have truly
revolutionized how we understand and deal with the world about us. The lessons to be
 278 A. REYNOLDS

drawn from this extend beyond historiography to epistemology and our own self-under-
standing. For one it shows that we cannot rule out that currently acceptable forms of
reasoning will not be replaced by new forms. Secondly, it gives the lie to much of the
Enlightenment faith in a universal canon of rationality constraining all peoples at all
times. Modern attempts to fulfill the Leibnizian project of developing a calculus
ratiocinator, that is a precise and formal logic adequate for both deductive and inductive
reasoning, have failed. This failure, one of the most notable including that of the logical
positivist Rudolph Carnap to formulate a precise logic of induction, has led Putnam to
conclude that "There is no algorithm or mechanical procedure, no set of fixed ahistorical
'canons of scientific method,' which will lead us to the truth in every area, or in any ...,"
although he ends on the optimistic note that "there is the imperfect but necessary 'path'
of struggling for and testing one's ideals in practice, while conceding to others the right
to do the same" (Putnam, 1994, p. 195).1 Due to the nature of its subject I will refer
to this as the thesis of "epistemic historicism".
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Other contemporary thinkers who might seem to belong to this category are Kuhn,
Feyerabend, and Foucault (whose notion of episteme is the motivation for my choice of
label for this particular version of historicism). It should be said that unlike Kuhn and
Feyerabend neither Hacking nor Putnam has concluded that shifts in conceptions of
rationality over time lead to an incommensurability between the successive conceptions.
The same would seem to be true for Foucault as well.
Once we allow that reason is not some Platonic essence we can formalize into a
rigorous system of axioms and rules of inference binding on all rational agents for all
times, then some people are quick to point out that perhaps the "modernist" passion for
logical thought is just that, a fancy for one species of behavior among many possible
alternatives. In many ways this was what the Romantic reaction to modern science and
the Enlightenment, by people like Herder, was all about. The prospects of a pluralism
concerning rational behavior strikes many people as essentially more "democratic", and
leads us to the next and final version of historicism.
The fifth version of historicism is I believe the most interesting, largely because it
happens to be the most radical and currently the most popular among scholars of a wide
array of disciplines. It insists that, just as there are no eternal standards of rationality,

(5) There are no absolute ahistorical values of any kind, rather all ideals are local and relative
to a particular historical culture and period. An important question we will want to ask of
this claim is whether it is supposed to be a purely descriptive one, based upon inspection
of the historical record and anthropology, or a deep conceptual discovery revealed by a
philosophical analysis of some kind.
An immediate corollary from this claim is that all that we are inclined to identify
in our own culture as "knowledge" is really just a reflection of local culture, not an
accurate and objective representation of independent reality. As historian Michael
Stanford explains, historicism makes the claim that, "all social and cultural phenomena
are historically determined, and therefore have to be understood in terms of their own
age" (1998, p. 155). It is, of course, a position currently identified in general culture
with "postmodernism" and with "social constructivism" in philosophy of science. This
form of historicism is typically called "perspectivalist" or "relativist". Whereas epistemic
historicism still allowed hope for a convergence to objective knowledge and styles of
reasoning (cf. Hegel and Comte), this thesis draws the more radical conclusion that the
very concepts of "truth", "objectivity", "reason", "scientific knowledge", etc. are merely
social constructions favored by a particular culture at a particular time in history.
 WHAT IS HISTORICISM? 279

According to it we are cut off from all anchoring notions of objective reality and progress
and are left to float free in the vast, dark expanses of historical space. Because it purports
to apply to the entirety of a culture and its ideals I will call this "total historicism".
This is the thesis that the historian Aileen Kelly has in mind (1998a, p. 407), when
she describes historicism as "the denial of all suprahistorical absolutes and universal
historical goals". The history of humankind therefore is not the story of an ultimate
progress toward eternal truths. Rather is it the case that the ideals of the Enlightenment
philosophy reflect merely contingent and historically local values of a particular culture
bound by time and circumstance. "Total historicism", then, amounts to the relativiza-
tion or localization of truth to particular historical epochs (cf. Iggers (1969) on
"historicism" as ethical nihilism).
Postmodernism, as a project or attitude, is a rejection of the Enlightenment goal of
arranging society in accordance with its ideal of objective rationality. What it proposes
is a new, and supposedly "better", conception of human flourishing, one not so polluted
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with the ideology of liberal capitalism. That it is a predominantly political program is

apparent, as it must be if its own claims about the essentially ideological basis of all
systems of thought are to be followed through with consistency. It is worth noting too
that this skeptical thesis of total historicism is also incompatible with Popper's version
of historicism. Postmodernism as expressed by Lyotard is an "incredulity toward
metanarratives", of which Marxism and liberalism are two prime examples.

3. The strength of historicist claims

Upon what basis of suppon do these various historicist theses stand? As with any claim
there are two different sources of possible support. One is empirical or factual; the other
is conceptual. We shall see that of the various historicist claims, some draw their support
from appeals to history, while others rely upon conceptual arguments. The latter are
chiefly arguments about the nature of language and its ability (or inability) to represent
objects and events existing independently and externally to language.
"Mundane historicism" draws perhaps on both empirical and conceptual support.
One may contrast the results of ahistorical studies with those which take the historical
context of an idea or person into account, and show that the latter are to be preferred
for greater accuracy, depth, or a number of other virtues. But one may also claim that
the historically sensitive study is to be preferred on the basis of a plausibility argument,
in the absence of any actual comparison of results. (They just intuitively seem better.)
"Methodological historicism" almost surely rests upon a conceptual argument, to
the effect that given the distinct nature of their respective subject matters the social
sciences and natural sciences must follow distinct methods. History, for instance, is
surely not an experimental science; nor has it been unquestionably improved by the
adoption of quantitative methods. This does not, however, rule out the marshaling of
empirical evidence as well.
The search for general laws of history which lies at the heart of "Popperian
historicism" has traditionally relied upon both a purportedly empirical inspection of the
historical record and abstract arguments. Hegel's philosophy of history with its theory
of a dialectical logic driving events onward toward the final goal of the absolute is one
example of how both types of consideration can be combined.
"Epistemic historicism" relies largely upon historical (and anthropological) research
showing how styles of reasoning and ideas of rationality have undergone a rise and fall
in popularity and influence throughout the development of (chiefly European) civiliza-
 280 A. REYNOLDS

tion. At least that appears to be the motivation for Hacking's adoption of what I
am calling epistemic historicism. Putnam, on the other hand, seems to be guided by
further considerations arising from the failure of attempts to codify or to naturalize
reason. The prime example of the failure to formalize reason is Carnap's project of
inductive logic. Putnam has also argued against the plausibility of reducing the epistemic
to non-epistemic physicalist concepts for some time now.2 Our notions of rationality,
he has argued, are inextricably tied up with notions of value and of "human flourishing".
And if this is correct then different values and conceptions of the "good life"
will lead to different notions of rational conduct. For instance, game-theoretic
attempts to illuminate rational decision-making enshrine the particular ideal of "utility
maximization".
While very likely motivated by disillusionment with the outcome of events in the
20th century (for instance, the horror of two world wars, ethnic cleansing, threats to
traditional social units imposed by global capitalism, the widening gulf between rich and
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poor), "total historicism" is often defended on the basis of arguments about the nature
or essence of linguistic representation and/or linguistic practices purported to be central
to the activities of science, philosophy, and history (and in its most extreme form, to the
entire range of human activities—placed under the rubric of "discourse").
What are these arguments concerning the nature (or essence) of language? The
best-known claims are perhaps those associated with the French poststructuralist
philosopher Jacques Derrida, who insists that all language is self-referential, and
consequently that there is "nothing outside of the text". Despite what the label itself
may suggest, poststructuralism retains an important element of structuralist theory,
namely Saussure's theory of language and signs. According to this structuralist account
of language, all signs obtain their meaning or significance through a relationship of
"differences", that is through being differentiated from other signs. The upshot of this
is that no sign points beyond the linguistic structure to objects external to the structure,
so there is no reference to or representation of the external world. In Saussure's words,
"There are only differences". What pasrstructuralism rejects is the additional structural-
ist claim that different sign systems share a common underlying structure which in turn
allows for a kind of universal theorizing about disparate topics. Poststructuralists prefer
to emphasize the relationships of power that sustain systems and practices. This
penchant for pointing to the corrupting ideologies underlying many powerful and deeply
entrenched practices and institutions is a common bond shared with postmodernist
writers.

4. Critique of total historicism

The target of my criticisms here will not be the total historicist claim that we alone are
the source of all our values and ideas, and that they are therefore subject to change over
time; but rather two separate claims that are often associated with this idea about the
historicity of our values and ideas. The first is the claim that language is inherently
self-referential, and so cannot refer to objects or things in the external world. The
second is that all knowledge claims are tainted by ideology, and hence that there can be
no objective knowledge.
How good is the poststructuralist argument against the capacity for language to
point beyond itself to an external world of objects and events? Let us begin by noting
that it will only be as convincing as the linguistic model upon which it is based. That
model assumes that meaning as encapsulated in thought is entirely determined by the
 WHAT IS HISTORICISM? 281

speaker with no input from the external world of objects and events. Were this the only
theory of language or signs, a study known as semiotics or semiology, we might be more
inclined to accept it, at least provisionally while attempting to improve upon it. But as
it happens it is not the only semiotic theory available. A much richer one, in my opinion,
is that of the 19th-century scientist and logician, Charles Peirce. In Peirce's model signs
can and do refer to external objects and events. I do not wish to go into a discussion of
the quite intricate details of Peirce's semiotic theory here, but suffice it to say that it
combines the kind of representational capacity we desire with some of the genuinely
important insights of both structuralism and poststructuralism. One of these insights is
that meanings are not static, eternal platonic objects established once and for all time.
The meaning of a sign in Peirce's theory involves the form of conduct it inspires, and
this is always open to change and improvement. Meaning too then acquires a history
(and a future), and—what is the same thing—loses an essence. (Compare this to the
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Fregean theory of the "museum of meanings" so central to much of analytical philoso-

phy.) To paraphrase Peirce, "Meaning is always virtual", and yet refers to an external
world of publically observable objects and behaviors.
Were it in fact the case that the model of language shared by structuralism and
poststructuralism was correct, two things it seems would follow. First, the situation that
all of us would be in would be akin to that described by Putnam in his "brains in a vat"
thought experiment. Recall that the scenario envisaged there is that we are all supposed
to be disembodied brains sustained in vats and led to believe that our experiences of the
world and of one another are genuine, when in fact they are the manipulations of an evil
scientist who has hooked our brains up to very complex computers which only simulate
these experiences. Although we would each seem to be talking with one another and
referring to objects (trees and cats) in our shared external environment, in actuality our
experiences would be entirely solipsistic, since our words would not refer to trees and
cats and one another, but only to our brain images of trees, cats and other people. This
it seems to me is indistinguishable from the scenario in which the structuralist theory of
language places us. If we cannot refer to objects in a shared environment occupied by
us all, if our words only refer to other words or mental images, then we are little different
from brains in vats. And that seems absurd enough to suspect that the model of
language from which it follows is inadequate.3
The second thing that follows if the poststructuralists are right, is that since they
have managed somehow to obtain supposedly objective knowledge about the very essence
of language, then the possibility is opened up that we can exploit this possibility further
to obtain more objective knowledge. It does not really matter that the objective
knowledge in question here is only "internal" to the structure. The point is that if
objective knowledge is possible at all, if ideology can be overcome in this instance then
it cannot be a universal impediment to knowledge in general, contrary to what many
people have been claiming under the banners of poststructuralism and postmodernism.
The poststructuralist must either give up the claim that ideology is a universal impedi-
ment to knowledge or that the structuralist model of language is correct. In either case
the way is opened up for knowledge about the world.
Another error that seems widespread in postmodernist thinking is what I might call
(with tongue in cheek) the Marshall McLuhan fallacy: this is to assume that the medium
is the message. Some people have concluded, that is, that since all theorizing is "textual"
the world itself must be a text. If the medium of knowledge is linguistic or social then
so too must be the signal. A parody of this argument would go as follows: since all my
experience of the world is mediated through flesh of some sort (eyes, ears, fingertips,
 282 A. REYNO1X>S

etc.), then the world itself must be nothing but flesh too. Alan Musgrave (1999) makes
very persuasive objections to such lines of argument.
One of the chief problems with many postmodern critiques of science and knowl-
edge in general is that they focus exclusively on the representational aspects of what are
called knowledge practices. But as others have insisted before, Dewey at the start of this
century with his criticisms of the "spectator theory of knowledge" during the heyday of
logical empiricism, and more recently Ian Hacking, the trick is to pay attention to
experiment, to doing, to what Peirce called the "outer clash" of experience—and this
consequently will show why talk of people with different conceptual schemes living in
different "worlds" is so silly (or at least terribly one sided). For although we can say of
a modern capitalist industrialist and a contemporary South American Indian living in
the Amazon rainforest that they live in different worlds, no amount of such talk is going
to protect either of them from the other should they choose to fling their respective
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weapons at one another. Words and beliefs may make available a plurality of conceptual
worlds, but the world of causes is one.
Which brings us to some of the wilder claims of social constructivism. Let us
concede to the social constructivist that theories are social constructs, and that even the
very notion of a "fact" is as well, for without humans and social activities the notion of
a fact makes little sense; and so it goes, for example, for the notion of temperature, the
Fahrenheit and Celsius scales are both social constructs too—and which we choose to
use is a convention. But once we have these things in place, it does not follow at all that
on the scale we choose to use there is no fact of the matter about what the scale
reads—and yes how to read a scale, etc. are all social conventions too. But there is a fact
of the matter that the mercury is at one level rather than another. To repeat: the very
idea of a fact may be a social construction, but what the facts are—once we have our
language and practices in place—are not, at least not wholly.
Where exactly do the current versions of total historicism (social constructivism,
postmodernism) go astray? While I agree entirely with the insight about the origins of our
values (that they are created by humans, not by God or Nature or Reality), I believe that
many have confused this with a conclusion about the justification of those values. It was
typical for Enlightenment thinkers to suppose that origin and justification were one and
the same thing: to show that X is derived from God, or pure reason, or the senses, or
scientific method was to have shown it to be duly justified. The idea appears to be that
if a belief or idea could be shown to have the right lineage, a noble birth, then it was
shown to have a noble status. But once we admit that God is dead or that "reason",
"nature", or "scientific method" are not the monolithic eternal verities we once thought
them to be, the inclination seems to be to slide into a universal skepticism or nihilism.
In that sense the postmodernists are merely working with an uncritical assumption of the
modernist thinkers whose ideas they find so untenable. But so what if our notions of
method or rationality were not handed down to us etched in stone tablets? They can still
prove their worth instrumentally. The notions of science, truth, and reason, etc. are not
to be discarded tout court simply because their pedigrees are not divine.
The error being made here is, I would claim, a conflation of contingency with
arbitrariness. Opponents believe that having shown a particular belief X to be contin-
gent, that it was not necessarily fated from the outset of history that we would end up
believing X, is to have shown that the fact that we do believe X must be for entirely
arbitrary reasons. This is an all-or-nothing conception of epistemic legitimacy. It is as if
having recognized the bankruptcy of divine right justifications for absolute monarchies,
we were to judge all forms of government arbitrary and hence illegitimate. And perhaps
 WHAT IS HISTORICISM? 283

this anarchist analogy is not really that far off the mark as an analysis of the postmodern
psyche. (It certainly captures important features of Feyeraband's thinking for instance.)
But anarchism at least has some vision of how we are to proceed with our lives after the
dissolution of coercive institutions. What is unclear about a lot of what is said under the
banner of postmodernism is whether these critics of science and the Western tradition
in philosophy have any constructive suggestions for how we are to make progress within
the postmodem condition.

5. The historicism of Richard Rorty

One figure who is professedly postmodern in sympathies and offers some positive
suggestions about how we are to get on after we give up the notions of representing the
world is Richard Rorty. And it is to Rorty's credit that he has, at least on occasion,
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recognized that one should not conflate contingency with arbitrariness. Rather than
concentrate on the correspondence between individual sentences and the world, Rorty
focuses his attention on what he calls "vocabularies", which are roughly equivalent to
Wittgensteinian language games. Aristotelian physics was one vocabulary popular for a
long time, but then was replaced by a Galilean-Newtonian vocabulary (itself modified,
although not wholly replaced by, an Einsteinean one). There are similar alternative
vocabularies in use for political and social discourse (e.g. natural rights talk of early
liberalism, class warfare talk of Marxism). Rorty's chief point is that the world itself does
not tell us which vocabulary to use. "The world does not speak. Only we do" (Rorty,
1989, p. 6). However, he goes on to say, "The realization that the world does not tell
us what language games to play should not... lead us to say that a decision about which
to play is arbitrary ..." (Rorty, 1989). Why? Because the choice of which vocabulary to
use, according to Rorty, is not really a decision at all. Following Kuhn he sees the
transition from one vocabulary to another as something akin to a Gestalt switch, and
these are not governed by any application of criteria or rule-following at all. They just
happen, because one vocabulary simply strikes us as more attractive, more useful, or has
better propagandists.
But having said all this Rorty does not give up on the idea of making progress in
philosophy or in science or in culture in general. To be sure progress in science will be
purely instrumental, there will be no accumulative progression to the one true theory
about how the world really is. In this respect Rorty's philosophy draws a great deal from
the instrumentalist ideas of people like Kuhn and Dewey. Making progress is not about
approaching some absolute goal that exists independently of the particular vocabularies
we employ. It is just about making local progress, moving away from where we presently
are in a direction that we deem better relative to our current position.
But another essential feature of Rorty's writing is outwardly historicist. This
historicism is intimately linked to what he calls his "ironist" position. As he explains in
his own words, "Roughly, the ironist is a nominalist and historicist who strives to retain
a sense that the vocabulary of moral deliberation she uses is a product of history and
chance—of her having been born at a certain time in a certain place" (Rorty, 1998,
p. 307, footnote 2). It might be objected that although this ironist position may make
sense when applied at the level of the individual, it does not follow that it must likewise
be applicable to the vocabulary as a whole. For although we might grant that it is a
matter of history and chance (in some sense) that any one of us finds ourself bom into
the particular society and time we do, it does not follow that the things Rorty calls
vocabularies are born or created in the particular time and places they do wholly as a
 284 A. REYNOLDS

matter of time and chance. It was no chance accident, for instance, that Einstein's
theory of special relativity took on the shape it did. Einstein was working within the prior
tradition of Maxwellian electrodynamics and attempting to render that very successful
theory consistent with certain recalcitrant phenomena and results. While it may be true,
in other words, that history as we know it was not destined to fall out the way it did,
it is certainly not true that history is just one accident after another.
Surely Rorty would not disagree with this. And yet consider the following state-
ment: "The history of philosophy is the history of Gestalt-switches, not of the painstak-
ing carrying-out of research programs" (Rorty, 1998, p. 11). Granted, he is talking
about the history of philosophy here, but can its past be so easily disentangled from that
of science? The emphasis and universality which he places on Kuhnian-type Gestalt
switches in the histories of personal psychologies, therefore, is in deep tension with the
continuity of the history of ideas, as considered apart from the historical circumstances
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of individual persons. So while Rorty may not equate contingency with arbitrariness,
neither, in my opinion, does he give full recognition to the amount of criterion-based
activity that goes on during periods of intellectual revolution.
Rorty advocates that we stop privileging activities which purport to picture reality
as it really is, namely science and the analytical variety of philosophy which attempts to
emulate it, and pay greater respect to the imaginative activities of poets and writers of
fiction. For, he urges, the best hope for us citizens of liberal democracies to make further
progress (moral and philosophical) is not through more closely reasoned argumentation,
but through the use of creative (literary) imagination. It is the creative literary imagin-
ation which will provide us with the novel visions of how we might improve as
individuals and as societies. That is why Rorty finds the postmodern writings of people
like Derrida more interesting and valuable than the analytical philosophy still largely
practiced in most English-speaking countries. Rorty's suggestion relies upon the as-
sumption that the truth of statements and beliefs cannot consist in any kind of
meaningful correspondence with the way the world is (indeed this is supposed to be an
incoherent notion). This leaves us without any grounds for saying that certain state-
ments are "objectively" true. The most we can say is that certain of them command a
consensual agreement among members of specific communities. The goal of scientific
activity, as with any other human activity, is not "objectivity" but solidarity. And once
truth goes "immanent" in this way, Rorty urges that there is little reason to privilege one
form of human activity (science, analytical philosophy) over any other activity that
strives to create better communities and individuals.
Rorty is surely right to insist that we ought to value the humanities and literature
just as much as we do the "hard" sciences. But does the argument for this laudable
conclusion work? Other people have criticized Rorty's arguments about truth and
language—Putnam, for example—so I will not go over that ground here.4 There is in
fact quite a bit of common ground between Rorty and Putnam. But one way of stating
their difference is to say that where Rorty adopts a full-blown total historicism, Putnam
is willing to go no farther than epistemic historicism. It seems that what makes
Putnam most uncomfortable about Rorty's "ironist" position is its apparent relativist
implications. To avoid a similar implication of relativism in his own internalist position
Putnam has attempted to develop a workable notion of "idealized warranted assertabil-
ity". Such a grenzbegriff or "limiting notion" would place some boundaries on the thesis
of epistemic historicism. In a recent article Rorty faults Putnam for refusing to follow the
logic of his own anti-foundationalism and adopt a "consistently atheistic" position shaved
of such absolutes (Rorty, 1998, p. 62). Rorty urges us not to look to eternity but to the
 WHAT IS HISTORICISM? 285

future (p. 174)j Putnam, he suggests (pp. 62-63), in seeking a stand-in for universal
validity is doing just the opposite.
One of the things which now worries Putnam about the Peircean-type accounts of
truth and warranted assertability (those reliant upon the notion of convergence to some
future-situated limit), is that they seem destined to be anti-realist when it comes to
statements about the past. Rorty's position is that history, like any other inquiry, is
valuable to the extent that it allows us to deal with problems and questions in an entirely
instrumental fashion. And in fact this instrumentalist attitude toward history is enjoying
some popularity with historians and philosophers of history today.5 Which brings us to
the subject of speculative philosophy of history.

5.1 Rorty's speculative philosophy of history

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In the introduction to her recent collection of essays, Aileen Kelly (1998b, p. 4) writes
that despite various attempts to define the "postmodern" condition, "there is a consensus
that its basic component is an acceptance that we can no longer credibly anchor our values
in any universal ground, whether God, Reason, or History ..." Rorty is then mentioned
as one of the most notable of those espousing this new historicism. Accompanying these
developments within analytical or critical philosophy of history is a speculative picture
of history. As Kelly writes, "The view that reality is inherently fragmentary, history a
directionless flux, is the common ground of new theoretical developments across the
range of intellectual disciplines". She then goes on to mention (p. 11) the paleontologist
Stephen J. Gould's emphasis of contingency and the lack of ultimate directedness in
natural history. This is an interesting connection Kelly notes between the new picture
of history and recent developments in science and other disciplines. Nor has the
connection escaped the notice of Gould himself, as the following quote from a paper
co-authored with Niles Eldredge in the journal Nature bears witness:
[Contemporary science has massively substituted notions of indeterminacy,
historical contingency, chaos and punctuation for previous convictions about
gradual, progressive, predictable determinism. These transitions have occurred
in field after field; Kuhn's celebrated notion of scientific revolutions is, for
example, a punctuational theory for the history of scientific ideas. Punctuated
equilibrium, in this light, is only paleontology's contribution to a Zeitgeist, and
Zeitgeists, as (literally) transient ghosts of time, should never be trusted. Thus,
in developing punctuated equilibrium, we have either been toadies and pander-
ers to fashion, and therefore destined for history's ashheap, or we had a
spark of insight about nature's constitution. Only the punctuational and
unpredictable future can tell. (Gould & Eldredge, 1993, p. 227)
One way of understanding what the Rortian historicist-ironist is up to is to see her as
posing for cultural evolution the same question Gould has posed for biological evolution
(cf. Gould, 1989), i.e. Were we to play the tape of human history over again, how many
of our current social ideas and institutions would we see re-develop? How much, if any,
convergent evolution would there be in repeated trials of this experiment in human
historical evolution? Would we have science? Would it look the same? Would we still get
the atomic hypothesis, would mathematics look the same? Would our social and political
institutions look familiar? Would they even be conducive to scientific understanding and
research?
To suspect that the results would be wildly different each time is to take very seriously
 286 A. REYNOLDS

the idea that we really are just children of chance and history. History on this picture
begins to look like a random walk through time. One way of placing some subtle constraints
on this picture would be to see the walk as taking place on a slope. This would allow
for a wide range of play in the development of ideas and theories; yet by permitting a
subtle drift in the direction of development, it retains an important role for a reality
independent of and external to our social and epistemic systems. It would permit some
hope that at least some of our ideas and institutions, while perhaps not being inevitable
results of human history, are not quite freak accidents either.6
Now all of this is, of course, very speculative, and were it not for the fact that it appears
to be a picture at least implicitly endorsed by a growing number of people, it would be
merely idle speculation and of dubious importance.7 In closing, it bears repeating that
care should be taken not to confuse the plausible-sounding claim about the contingency
of social-cultural institutions with the very different pronouncement that they owe their
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existence to entirely arbitrary factors.8 Nor should we conclude from the contingency of
our history that there is no objective and independent reality involved in its winding and
weaving path. Any hope for improvements in the future direction of history would seem
to require a commitment to belief in just such an objective reality, independent—in some
crucial respects—of mind and language.

Acknowledgements
I would like to express my thanks to both the coordinators and participants of
the 25th Annual Philosophy of Science Conference at Dubrovnik, especially to Arun
Balasubramaniam, Dave Davies, and Dave Spurrett for helpful comments leading to
improvements to the paper. Christine Levecq also provided helpful comments and
suggestions. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
(SSHRC) is gratefully acknowledged for its financial assistance.

Notes
1. A word of caution is required, however, for Putnam writes: "Thus I agree with the subjectivist philosophers
that there is no fixed, ahistorical organon which defines what it is to be rational; but I don't conclude from
the fact that our conceptions of reason evolve in history, that reason itself can be (or evolve into) anything,
nor do I end up in some fancy mixture of cultural relativism and 'structuralism' like some French
philosophers. The dichotomy: either ahistorical unchanging canons of rationality or cultural relativism is a
dichotomy that I regard as outdated" (Putnam, 1981, p. x).
2. See, for example "Why reason can't be naturalized" in Putnam (1983).
3. It should be noted that Putnam himself does not read Derrida this way, cf. Putnam (1994, p. 341). But
despite this Derrida is often taken to have provided support for this position by enthusiastic readers.
4. Putnam's objection is that Rorty too quickly gives up on the idea of representation just because we cannot
step "outside" of our language to compare it with the objects we are attempting to describe. We need not
be able to do that just to refer to things outside of the language Putnam responds. See "The question of
realism" and "A comparison of something with something else" in Putnam (1994).
5. See, for instance, Jenkins (1995, 1997) for an application of Rorty's ideas to historiography. Southgate
(1996) also adopts a postmodernist attitude toward history, but without an explicit reliance upon Rorty's
ideas. Lorenz (1994) and Appleby et al. (1994) opt for Putnam's pragmatic realism.
6. James McAllister and Paul Thompson both suggested to me that this is one implication of Stuart
Kauffman's work on self-organizing systems, cf. Kauffman (1995).
7. Just as interest in analytical philosophy of history has dropped off, interest in speculative philosophy of
history has been increasing among many in the areas of literary theory and cultural studies. See Jenkins
(1997) for a sample.
8. Let me add that while I agree with the thesis that we alone are the source of our values, beliefs, etc., and
that these have changed throughout history, I do not accept the relativist thesis that these values must be
 WHAT IS HISTORICISM? 287

restricted in application to the particular historical periods or epochs whose interests they are said to reflect.
T o insist that would require an argument that one had cut up the past into its proper historical "chunks"
or periodizations, and that this preferred classification was no more "arbitrary" than any other. (In fact it
is a genuine question whether the past can be legitimately divided up into distinct periods.) Nor do I accept
the claim that many or all of our most cherished beliefs are held for "arbitrary" reasons. I do not even know
what it would mean to believe something for "arbitrary" reasons. The particular use of the notion of
arbitrariness by structuralists and poststructuralists is one I have difficulty understanding. Unless by
arbitrary they just mean contingent, and then it would seem that the points I have made here still stand.

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Note on contributor
Andrew Reynolds is an SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University.
His interests include general issues in the history and philosophy of science, pragmatism and Peirce, and the
philosophy of history. Correspondence: Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, University College of
Cape Breton, PO Box 5300, Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada B1P 6L2.

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