This is one of the seminal articles of the pragmatist tradition where C.S. Peirce sets out his doctrine of doubt and belief --and their relationship to inquiry and clarity of our concepts. Originally published in the Popular Science Monthly; and widely available in reprints and collections of Peirce's writings.

John Searle's Speech Acts made a highly original contribution to work in the philosophy of language. Expression and Meaning is a direct successor, concerned to develop and refine the account presented in Searle's earlier work, and to extend its application to other modes of discourse such as metaphor, fiction, reference, and indirect speech arts. Searle also presents a rational taxonomy of types of speech acts and explores the relation between the meanings of sentences and the contexts of their utterance. The (...) book points forward to a larger theme implicit in these problems - the basis certain features of speech have in the intentionality of mind, and even more generally, the relation of the philosophy of language to the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis essay offers a reconfiguration of the possibility‐space of positions regarding the metaphysics and epistemology associated with historical knowledge. A tradition within analytic philosophy from Danto to Dummett attempts to answer questions about the reality of the past on the basis of two shared assumptions. The first takes individual statements as the relevant unit of semantic and philosophical analysis. The second presumes that variants of realism and antirealism about the past exhaust the metaphysical options . This essay argues that both (...) of these assumptions should be rejected. It develops as an alternative an irrealist account of history, a view based in part on work by Leon Goldstein and Ian Hacking. On an irrealist view, historical claims ought to be treated as subject to the same conditions and caveats that apply to any theory of empirical or scientific knowledge. Irrealism argues for pasts as made and not found. The argument emphasizes the priority of classification over perception in the order of understanding and so verification. Because nothing a priori anchors practices of classification, no sense can be attached to claims that some single structure must or does determine what events take place in human history. Irrealism denies to realism the very intelligibility of any imagined view from nowhere, that is, a determinately configured past subsisting sub specie aeternitatis. A plurality of pasts exists because constituting a past always depends to some degree on socially mediated negotiations of a fit between descriptions and experience. (shrink)

In the last 2500 years, since the beginnings in ancient Greece of the literary genre we call “history,” the relationship between history and law has been very close. True, the Greek word historia is derived from medical language, but the argumentative ability it implied was related to the judicial sphere. History, as Arnaldo Momigliano emphasized some years ago, emerged as an independent intellectual activity at the intersection of medicine and rhetoric. Following the example of the former, the historian analyzed specific (...) cases and situations looking for their natural causes; following the prescriptions of the latter—a technique, or an art, born in tribunals—he communicated the results of his inquiry.2Within the classical tradition, historical writing had to display a feature the Greeks called enargeia, and the Romans, evidential in narrtatione: the ability to convey a vivid representation of characters and situations. The historian, like the lawyer, was expected to make a convincing argument by communicating the illusion of reality, not by exhibiting proofs collected either by himself or by others.3 Collecting proofs was, until the mid-eighteenth century, an activity practiced by antiquarians and erudite, not by historians.4 When, in his Traité des differentes sortes de preuves qui servent à établir la vérité he l’histoire , the erudite Jesuit Henri Griffet compared the historian to a judge who carefully evaluates proofs and witnesses, he was expressing a still-unaddressed intellectual need. Only a few years later Edward Gibbon published his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the first work that effectively combined historical narrative with an antiquarian approach.5 2. See Arnaldo Momigliano, ”History between Medicine and Rhetoric,” Ottavo contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico, trans. Riccardo Di Donato , pp. 14-25.3. See Ginzburg, “Montrer et citer.”4. See Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” Contributo alla storia degli studi classici , pp. 67-106.5. See Henri Griffet, Traité des differentes sortes de preuves qui servent à établir la vérité de l’histoire, 2d ed. . Allen Johnson, in his Historian and Historical Evidence , speaks of the Traité as “the most significant book on method after Mabillon’s De re diplomatic” . See also Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” p. 81, and Ginzburg, “Just One Witness.” On Gibbon, see Momilgiano, Sesto contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico , pp. 231-84. Carlo Ginzburg is Franklin D. Murphy Professor of Italian Renaissance Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. His two most recent books are Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath and Il giudice e lo storico. (shrink)

John Searle's Speech Acts made a highly original contribution to work in the philosophy of language. Expression and Meaning is a direct successor, concerned to develop and refine the account presented in Searle's earlier work, and to extend its application to other modes of discourse such as metaphor, fiction, reference, and indirect speech arts. Searle also presents a rational taxonomy of types of speech acts and explores the relation between the meanings of sentences and the contexts of their utterance. The (...) book points forward to a larger theme implicit in these problems - the basis certain features of speech have in the intentionality of mind, and even more generally, the relation of the philosophy of language to the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

“ The doubtful story of successive events.” With this contemptuous phrase1 Bernard Bosanquet brushed aside the claim of history to be considered a study deserving the attention of a thoughtful mind. Unsatisfactory in form, because never rising above uncertainty; unsatisfactory in matter, because always concerned with the transitory, the successive, the merely particular as opposed to the universal; a chronicle of small beer, and an untrustworthy chronicle at that. Yet Bosanquet was well read in history; he had taught it as (...) a young man at Oxford, and his first published work had been a translation of a recent German book on the Athenian constitution; he knew that a vast amount of the world's best genius in the last hundred years had been devoted to historical studies; and when, late in life, he asked himself what it came to, that was all he could say. (shrink)

ABSTRACTRheinberger's brief history brings into sharp profile the importance of history of science for a philosophical understanding of historical practice. Rheinberger presents thought about the nature of science by leading scientists and their interpreters over the course of the twentieth century as emphasizing increasingly the local and developmental character of their learning practices, thus making the conception of knowledge dependent upon historical experience, “historicizing epistemology.” Linking his account of thought about science to his own work on “experimental systems,” I draw (...) extensive parallels with other work in the local history of science and consider the epistemological implications both for the relation between history and philosophy of science and between history and theory more broadly. In doing so, I suggest that the long‐standing gap between the natural sciences and history as a “human science” has been significantly bridged by the insistence upon the local, mediated, indeed “historicized epistemology” of actual science. (shrink)