The Routledge Handbook of Causality and Causal Methods, 2025
• Causal explanations are often required to satisfy certain criteria, such as being tied to lawli... more • Causal explanations are often required to satisfy certain criteria, such as being tied to lawlike generalization, that are not applicable to narrative explanations. • Fields such as evolutionary biology offer explanations that are causal in character, and that are in the form of a narrative. • In a narrative explanation, causal indeterminacy refers to the fact that whether event has a causal role in the sequence of explanatory interest is unknowable in principle, but its relevance becomes known once some later event in that sequence occurs.
This paper provides a concise overview and summary of the positions on facts, events, and realism... more This paper provides a concise overview and summary of the positions on facts, events, and realism in the philosophy of history as developed in my work. This summary is then used to clarify and resolve confusions on these points found in various essays contained in the volume The Poverty of Anti-Realism.
This forum on Whose History? Which Reality? examines issues concerning realism, anti-realism, and... more This forum on Whose History? Which Reality? examines issues concerning realism, anti-realism, and irrealism in the writing of histories. The idea for the forum sprang from the Currie/Swaim-DeWulf/Roth exchange as well as the subsequent discussion piece about that exchange by Mitrović in this journal in 2022.1 We (the editors) wondered whether there was more to the debate than covered in this exchange and in particular asked ourselves whether new perspectives on the issues commonly associated with realism, anti-realism, and irrealism would show that such indeed is the case. To this end we invited a select group of international scholars to write short pieces for this forum. We also asked the contributors to provide commentaries on some of the other papers submitted for the forum to enhance the debate. We selected from among the responses that were submitted several for inclusion in this forum. The forum is not meant as an overview of the realism-anti-realism controversy, nor is it meant as some final say on the matter. Crispin Wright once wrote that when one calls oneself a realist or antirealist one at best has scraped one's
As explicated in Matthieu Queloz’s ground-breaking book, The Practical Origin of Ideas: Genealogy... more As explicated in Matthieu Queloz’s ground-breaking book, The Practical Origin of Ideas: Genealogy as Conceptual Reverse-Engineering, a genealogical method promises a distinctive type of naturalist origin story about norms. Yet conceptual inheritances come freighted. The dead hand of all past generations often weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. To relieve pressures bequeathed by troubled conceptual heritages, Queloz proposes a novel strategy by which to “reverse-engineer” concepts. This approach promises both to explain what proves worth valuing in received modes of thinking as well as to provide guidance regarding how to refine and improve conceptual kluges. But depicting historical relations of power/knowledge proves not to be the game afoot for Queloz. For in his hands, ‘practical’ reflects a purely presentist perspective. Present interests thus determine how the label ‘practical’ applies. From that perspective one then crafts a retrospective account of genesis—a genealogy. This relentlessly presentist perspective reveals that the subtitle of Queloz’s book stands in an unacknowledged but revealing tension with the main title. For while imagined genealogies look back from the present to identify a genesis, reverse engineering prescribes for a better future. This naturalism thus promises to retain for epistemology an explicitly evaluative and prescriptive role. But how can a naturalism transcend being something other than descriptive? Queloz’s understanding of naturalism bakes into the construction of any promised genealogy a teleology, one unknowable to those in the past (if only because not actual) but one which Queloz nonetheless takes as a means to improving on our understanding.
The Philosophical Project of Carnap and Quine, 2023
What did Quine take himself to be contributing to the debate about meaning with regard to his cla... more What did Quine take himself to be contributing to the debate about meaning with regard to his claim about the indeterminacy of translation? This chapter offers a reconsideration of what to take as Quine's target in tracking the evolution of his debate with Carnap that crystallizes in the indeterminacy thesis. Quine, I claim, ultimately realizes that the only explanatory function a theory of meaning could serve would be to assume the presence of antecedent features that then permit a systematic determination delimiting the set of meaningful terms and meaningful statements. Such a theory explains because it provides non-accidental, indeed determinate reasons for membership in that set. This specific assumption therefore attributes a special metaphysical status to meaning. lt is metaphysical because it takes such features as in place prior to any empirical inquiry and in a way that can be tested for but not disconfirmed by evidence. This chapter documents Quine's efforts over time to articulate and specify how this issue about the nature of meaning separates him from Carnap.
The Routledge Companion to Historical Theory, ed. C. van den Akker, 2022
This is an overview of the origins and evolution of what has come to be known as analytical philo... more This is an overview of the origins and evolution of what has come to be known as analytical philosophy of history.
How did I come to write about the problems that I do? Certain accidents of fate determinatively i... more How did I come to write about the problems that I do? Certain accidents of fate determinatively impacted both my enduring intellectual interests as well as my opportunities to pursue them. Philosophy proved to provide an academic home that accommodated my peculiar interests. In this regard, a quote from White’s ‘Burden of History’ captured a challenge that I long sought to address: ‘We choose our past in the same way we choose our future’. Fashioning a philosophical rationale for this view guided much of my writing. Philosophers are not arbiters of matters of fact. But a defining feature of philosophy involves worries about how to avoid making weaker arguments appear the stronger. Rationality as I understand the notion requires making inferential structure explicit. My efforts to ‘revive’ analytical philosophy of history as with much of what I have written or hope to write reflect ongoing attempts to reconcile a sense of the contingency of what passes for rationality and a belief that some arguments are better than others. In this regard, reimagining logic to include a narrative form permits a rethinking of whether or not the ‘Burden of History’ proves unique to historiography. I argue not.
Roth's The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation (hereafter PSHE) addresses questions... more Roth's The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation (hereafter PSHE) addresses questions about the semantic structure and the related logic of narrative explanation by initially sorting objections into two categories: metaphysical and methodological. Metaphysical considerations about historical explanation unsurprisingly tie to some notion of realism. More specifically, a type of realism about the fixity of past historical events-the past imagined on the model of immutable and unchanging dioramas-can be thought to constrain narrative explanation by requiring that histories must aggregate. In the end, there can be only one. But this proves impossible to reconcile with what Roth takes to be an epistemological consequence of historiographic practice, namely the existence of multiple, incompatible histories. On the one hand realism, as traditionally conceived, unduly narrows the field of possible histories to those that prove mutually compatible. On the other hand, anti-realism typically offers no good accounts of what constrains histories. So, the apparent metaphysical options contribute to the initially noted dilemma regarding narrative as a form of explanation. The former imposes too strong a constraint on historical explanation, and the latter too weak. In sum, a key to Roth's redemption of narrative as a form of explanation involves rejecting a philosophical assumption about the metaphysics of history that posits a forced choice between realism and anti-realism. The book's defense of narrative as a form of explanation proceeds moreover from a specific epistemological perspective on historiography. This takes it that like sailors adrift on the sea, inquirers never get to do more than tinker with the theoretical raft that keeps them afloat on the shifting tides of experience. From this perspective, irrealism as developed in Chapter 3 of Roth's PSHE and deployed throughout the rest of the book argues that an assumed forced choice between the aggregation implied by realism and the frictionless spinning in a void often associated with anti-realism proves false. Irrealism thus constitutes neither an argument against realism nor need it do so. Rather, it articulates an alternative metaphysical account that accords best with what Roth also takes as the epistemic position of theorizers. Irrealism serves to accommodate an epistemology that eschews the myth of the given or anything akin to the analytic-synthetic distinction. In short, irrealism rationalizes historical practice by establishing why, on the one the hand, historical narratives can be expected to take incompatible forms but, on the other hand, they remain constrained by experience.
This article provides a survey and analysis of Danto's influential work in the philosophy of hist... more This article provides a survey and analysis of Danto's influential work in the philosophy of history.
Roth has written extensively on the philosophy of social science, philosophy of history, and the ... more Roth has written extensively on the philosophy of social science, philosophy of history, and the history of analytic philosophy. His most recent book is The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation (Northwestern, 2019). Thank you, Paul, for this substantive contribution. (Interested readers can find further discussion of Neil Gross's sociological treatment of Rorty and the history of analytic philosophy in these earlier posts; link, link.) BY PAUL ROTH Born to Run: Reflections on Neil Gross, Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher "I am sometime told, by critics from both ends of the political spectrum, that my views are so weird as to be merely frivolous. They suspect that I will say anything to get a gasp, that I am just amusing myself by contradicting everybody else. This hurts.. .. Perhaps this bit of autobiography will make clear that, even if my views about the relation of philosophy and politics are odd, they were not adopted for frivolous Understanding Society is an academic blog by Daniel Little that explores a series of topics in the philosophy of social science and the workings of the social world. Published continuously since 2007, the blog has treated a wide range of topics, from the nature of causal mechanisms to the idea of emergence to the political dynamics of right-wing extremism to the causes of largescale technological disaster. Readers should consider the blog an example of "opensource philosophy". It is an experiment in thinking, one idea at a time.
Stephen Turner and the Philosophy of the Social, 2021
Stephen Turner, scholar that he is of the history of the social sciences, deeply appreciates how ... more Stephen Turner, scholar that he is of the history of the social sciences, deeply appreciates how the history of social science stands littered with failed theories, ones that aspired to formulate a science of the social. But why? A key insight guiding his work from early to late has been a keen appreciation of a need to clarify what such a science is a science of. That is, Turner almost alone among the leading social theorists of the last several decades understood that resolving prospects for a science of the social required first achieving clarity regarding the constituent elements of any such explanation. His guiding question is: Just what is it for something to be both social and yet sufficiently thing-like so there can be something for some science to explain? In tracking how his concerns refocus and evolve in the several decades that span the time from his first book to his most recent with respect to the question of what makes explananda social, one achieves a synoptic view of how debate regarding the idea of a social science reshapes as it moves into the twenty-first century.
Alex Rosenberg's latest book purports to establish that narrative history cannot have any epistem... more Alex Rosenberg's latest book purports to establish that narrative history cannot have any epistemic value. Rosenberg argues not for the replacement of narrative history by something more science-like, but rather the end of histories understood as an account of human doings under a certain description. This review critiques three of his main arguments: 1) narrative history must root its explanations in folk psychology, 2) there are no beliefs nor desires guiding human action, and 3) historical narratives are morally and ethically pernicious. Rosenberg's book reprises themes about action explanation he first rehearsed 40 years ago, albeit with neuroscience rather than sociobiology now "preempting" explanations that trade on folk psychological notions. Although Rosenberg's argument strategy has not altered, the review develops a number of reasons as to why his approach now lacks any plausibility as a strategy for explaining histories, much less a successful one.
Kalle Pihlainen’s book reworks seven essays published over the last dozen years. Pihlainen’s Pref... more Kalle Pihlainen’s book reworks seven essays published over the last dozen years. Pihlainen’s Preface and Hayden White’s Foreword articulate a cri de coeur. Both fear that something important has been missed. White’s Foreword somewhat cryptically characterizes Pihlainen’s book as “metacritical,” and locates Pihlainen in the role of being a “serious reader” for the community of theorists of history. What does it mean to be a “serious” reader? White never says. But following White’s hint, Pihlainen can be read as updating Marx’s conception of the task of unmasking sources of alienation by focusing on the reasons for the estrangement of histories from a wider audience. For him, “the core case is that the ‘historical’ (situated) nature of history itself needs to be acknowledged” (p. xiv). It remains unacknowledged so long as the source of meaning in history continues to be displaced. For even those who emphasize narrative form
tend to talk as if meanings were imposed by some factor other than human intervention, as if form magically imbues content with significance. But this is one more symptom, if such is needed, of collective bad faith, a denial that only people make meaning. By taking disembodied literary forms as repositories of significance, responsibility for meaning is once again deflected or deferred. In this key regard, Pihlainen’s claim to place “decided emphasis on its [historical theory’s] ethical-political momentum” (p. xv) signals that the issues he intends to foreground are not epistemological or discursive. Pihlainen rightly suspects that all the talk of “narrativism” and “discourse” serves only to evade confronting the truly difficult moral and political challenges that writing represents. His various chapters identify these evasions and the challenges that remain.
The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Philosophy, Ed. P. Rawling & P. Wilson, 2019
This paper argues that philosophical skepticism about the existence of language famously articul... more This paper argues that philosophical skepticism about the existence of language famously articulated by Davidson—“there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed”—presupposes and has its roots in Quine’s criticisms of Carnap’s views on linguistic frameworks. Specifically, this paper examines the role of Carnap’s Principle of Tolerance in his account of linguistic frameworks, and reasons for Quine’s rejection of it. There exists a close link between Carnap’s advocacy of The Principle of Tolerance and his way of conceiving the relation of the Principle of Tolerance to metaphysics, practical reason, and pragmatics. Carnap’s emphasis assumes that practical choices are there to be made, once metaphysical constraints have been lifted. But if one sees, as does Quine, choices guided from the outset by pragmatic notions, the insistence that logic should not be based on prior prohibitions proves idle. I argue that there exists no prior (to framework formulation) sorting of the logical and the physical. This distinction achieves its clarity after a framework has been formulated. Frameworks make no claim to explain distinctions of this sort; rather, a virtue of a framework lies in making the distinctions precise. From Quine’s standpoint then, to imagine that a choice of Wissenschaftslogik somehow escapes such prior constraints would appear hopelessly naive. This in turn has sweeping consequences for how can conceive of a language insofar as the very notion of a language assumes some sort of framework. The argument does not mean to diminish the novelty and importance of Davidson’s claim, but to clarify and strengthen the character of the argument that it presupposes
This conversation originated in a plenary session organized by Ewa Domańska and María Inés La Gre... more This conversation originated in a plenary session organized by Ewa Domańska and María Inés La Greca under the same title of 'Globalizing Hayden White' at the III International Network for Theory of History Conference 'Place and Displacement: The Spacing of History' held at Södertörn University, Stockholm, in August 2018. In order to pay homage to Hayden White's life work 5 months after his passing we knew that what was needed-and what he himself would have wanted-was a vibrant intellectual exchange. Our 'celebra-tion by discussion' contains elaborated and revised versions of the presentations by scholars from China (Xin Chen), Latin America (María Inés La Greca, Veronica Tozzi Thompson), United States (Paul Roth), Western (Kalle Pihlainen) and East-Central Europe (Ewa Domańska). We took this opportunity of gathering scholars who represent different parts of the world, different cultures and approaches to reflect on White's ideas in a global context. Our interest was in discussing how his work has been read and used (or even misread and misused) and how it has influenced theoretical discussions in different parts of the globe. Rather than just offering an account as experts, we mainly wanted to reflect on the current state of our field and the ways that White's inheritance might and should be carried forward in the future.
The title of Robert Doran's collection of essays on Hayden White proves provocative and evocative... more The title of Robert Doran's collection of essays on Hayden White proves provocative and evocative. Provocative because it claims to mark a move within philosophy that pivots on the work of Hayden White, and this despite the fact that White himself explicitly resists inclusion within such a classification, that is, as a philosopher of history. Indeed, another contributor, Arthur Danto, had as of 1995 declared passé the whole subfield of philosophy of history. Doran situates White, then, in a niche White rejects and in any case one largely abandoned by those who do academic philosophy. Thus a question that this title evokes concerns why—whatever philosophy of history happens to be before Hayden White— after him it becomes a topic of philosophical lack of interest, one pursued almost exclusively by those not associated with departments of philosophy. Given White's professional travails, his acquaintance with another undisciplined academic, Richard Rorty, and his long-standing friendship with preeminent philosophers of history such as Louis Mink, one might well assume that White eschews Doran's disciplinary labeling for a reason. In this regard, reframing him as this book's title does invites a worry that, if only unwittingly, the book elides discussion of why certain positions excite not merely disagreement but prompt rather a type of professional shunning. In failing to confront White's reception (or rather lack thereof) by historians and his position (or rather lack thereof) within philosophy, Doran passes over in silence a highly salient aspect of White's work.
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Papers by Paul A. Roth
• Fields such as evolutionary biology offer explanations that are causal in character, and that are in the form of a narrative.
• In a narrative explanation, causal indeterminacy refers to the fact that whether event has a causal role in the sequence of explanatory interest is unknowable in principle, but its relevance becomes known once some later event in that sequence occurs.
tend to talk as if meanings were imposed by some factor other than human intervention, as if form magically imbues content with significance. But this is one more symptom, if such is needed, of collective bad faith, a denial that only people make meaning. By taking disembodied literary forms as repositories of significance, responsibility for meaning is once again deflected or deferred. In this key regard, Pihlainen’s claim to place “decided emphasis on its [historical theory’s] ethical-political momentum” (p. xv) signals that the issues he intends to foreground are not epistemological or discursive. Pihlainen rightly suspects that all the talk of “narrativism” and “discourse” serves only to evade confronting the truly difficult moral and political challenges that writing represents. His various chapters identify these evasions and the challenges that remain.
There exists a close link between Carnap’s advocacy of The Principle of Tolerance and his way of conceiving the relation of the Principle of Tolerance to metaphysics, practical reason, and pragmatics. Carnap’s emphasis assumes that practical choices are there to be made, once metaphysical constraints have been lifted. But if one sees, as does Quine, choices guided from the outset by pragmatic notions, the insistence that logic should not be based on prior prohibitions proves idle. I argue that there exists no prior (to framework formulation) sorting of the logical and the physical. This distinction achieves its clarity after a framework has been formulated. Frameworks make no claim to explain distinctions of this sort; rather, a virtue of a framework lies in making the distinctions precise. From Quine’s standpoint then, to imagine that a choice of Wissenschaftslogik somehow escapes such prior constraints would appear hopelessly naive. This in turn has sweeping consequences for how can conceive of a language insofar as the very notion of a language assumes some sort of framework. The argument does not mean to diminish the novelty and importance of Davidson’s claim, but to clarify and strengthen the character of the argument that it presupposes