What (Good) is Historical

Epistemology? Thomas Sturm reflects on a conference on historical epistemology, held at the

MPIWG in July 2008, which brought together historians and philosophers of science.

• AUG 31, 2008 • Thomas Sturm •

• DEPT. I

Philosophical epistemology aims to clarify what knowledge is, whether we possess

any of it, and how we can justify our knowledge claims, including scientific ones.

While epistemology is a strong branch of current philosophy, its universalistic

pretensions have often been criticized. In particular, it has been suggested that

knowledge is situated in contexts (biological, social, historical, material) and that

epistemology cannot afford to ignore these contexts. One such challenge, which has

recently attracted many historians of science, has been named “historical

epistemology”. Yet there are several different versions of this approach. The

conference aimed to clarify and evaluate these in talks and discussions with

internationally leading historians of epistemology and philosophers and historians of

science. The conference attracted over 120 guests from Europe, America, and Asia,

who work in disciplines as diverse as philosophy, history of science, physics, geology,

economics, sociology, psychology, art history, and philology.

The guiding task was to clarify what versions of historical epistemology exist and the

pros and cons each of them presents. What kind of historical enterprise is historical

epistemology? What are its basic assumptions, and what are their rationales?

Moreover, in what sense is such a focus on epistemic categories and practices itself a

form of epistemology (or philosophy of science)? As papers and discussions were

based on studies about specific topics that exemplify or test one or another version of

historical epistemology, the conference covered a wide variety of issues. These

included the historicity of epistemological categories and standards (such as the

replication of experiments in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the relation

between perception and judgment, or different models of explanation and causal

inference); the historicity of epistemic objects, that is, the “birth, life, and death” of

real or apparent objects of research (like phlogiston, the electron, memory, or the

economy); and models of scientific development, which were either guided by a neo-

Kantian framework or tried to deal with alleged cases of incommensurability by

means of theories of concepts from recent cognitive science.

The way the program was organized reflected three versions of historical

epistemology, as they are practiced by researchers at the MPIWG. Each has its own

points of contact to philosophical epistemology and the philosophy of science: (1)

According to Lorraine Daston, historical epistemology raises “the Kantian question

about the preconditions that make thinking this or that idea possible” (1994, 284), but

views these preconditions as thoroughly historical. Thus, not only our knowledge and

evidence changes or grows throughout history, but our understanding of what can

count as knowledge can be historicized as well. (2) Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s version,

again, focuses strongly upon the material – especially experimental and technological

– conditions under which scientific knowledge develops, and claims that this goes

along with a shift away from studying the cognitive subject’s conceptual grasp of

objects towards a “reflection on the relation between object and concept, which starts

from the object to be known” (2007, 11f. transl. TS). This touches strongly on the

realism/anti-realism debate in the philosophy of science. (3) Jürgen Renn views

historical epistemology as an historically founded theory of long-term developments

of scientific knowledge. This addresses the philosophical issue of scientific progress,

but pursues it in the form of a naturalistic epistemology centered on an empirical

explanation – based on models of cognitive science – of how scientists come to know

certain things.

These versions of historical epistemology are not strictly competitive, but

complementary. They can also overlap. For instance, as became apparent in the

debates over epistemic things, their “lives” are often connected with issues of long-

term scientific developments. That certain objects become interesting for researchers

at some points, and forgotten or completely ignored at others, for reasons that may not

look entirely rational, raises the question as to whether scientific developments

actually do entail – to use Kuhn’s term – “revolutionary” shifts. Likewise, the

question as to whether certain steps in long-term scientific developments are

legitimate cannot be answered independently of what one believes, or what the

relevant actors believed, to be rational procedures.

This has an important consequence. Historical epistemology is destined to involve

second-order considerations: One cannot simply reconstruct the development of

scientific knowledge as such. There must also be a parallel program of reconstructing

what the agents thought were permissible or recommendable steps, or how they

understood such concepts as knowledge, evidence, observation, probability,

objectivity, and proof. This understanding of historical epistemology converges also

with Michael Friedman’s neo-Kantian approach: He argued that in order to solve

Kuhnian problems of revolutionary gaps in scientific developments, during, say, the

Einsteinian revolution, one should study not merely the history of the relevant

research, but also the philosophical frameworks that guided certain important steps in

that revolution.

Several philosophers at the conference, however, tried to establish a different

connection to the history of science. They were all inclined towards naturalism, the

view that epistemology should use the empirical sciences to understand how

knowledge grows and can be improved (and should give up attempting to look for a

priori presuppositions of knowledge). Peter Barker, Michael Heidelberger, Philip

Kitcher, and Sandra Mitchell defended this approach. Kitcher even introduced a new

version of historical epistemology, claiming that philosophers abandon a static view

of knowledge and its justification, adopting instead a dynamic picture of science,

looking to history for reliable methods of revising beliefs. That does not necessarily

imply a subordination of historical epistemology to naturalized epistemology. As

Mitchell noted, the kind of naturalistic epistemologist who accepts that science

changes historically must accept that his or her own naturalistic conceptions of

science also can, or even should, continue to change as well: “If epistemology has a

history, it also has a future.” That, however, invites a further question: Can this

approach explain scientific change without using neokantian assumptions or without

losing all substantive naturalistic ingredients?