Rethinking History, 2014 3 Routledge

I % Taylor & Francis G ro u p

Vol. 18, No. 4, 613-619, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2014.892684

The current state of play in the theory and philosophy of

history: the Roth-Ankersm it controversy and beyond
Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen*

Helsinki Collegium fo r Advanced Studies (Eurias Fellow 2013-2014), The University o f

Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland; Department o f History o f Science and Ideas, The University o f
Oulu, Oulu, Finland

The Roth-Ankersmit controversy, which was published in this journal,

exemplifies the current state of play in the theory and philosophy of history.
Although it does so in very pronounced and sharp tones, it is nevertheless a telling
incident more generally. Paul Roth’s (2013) paper and Frank Ankersmit’s (2013)
reply (in a shorter and different form) were initially read at the inaugural
conference of the International Network for Theory of History. I am sure that I
was not the only one who could sense the tension in the air in that session. But
then again, it was not the only time when this happened, as I witnessed some very
shaip exchanges in a number of other sessions as well. Sometimes questions and
comments were not directed to the speakers but to some members of the
audience. What is more, in private discussions it dawned on me that scholars,
who represent different philosophical schools or orientations, sometimes found it
very difficult to communicate with each other.
All this is good news for the re-emerging theory and philosophy of history!
The explicit and implicit controversies show that the theory and philosophy of
history is a dynamic field currently in the (re)making. The conference last
summer was indeed the inaugural conference in the area that has not held any
meetings of this calibre for decades.
I have participated in a number of conferences in the philosophy of science and
in the history of science, and I must say that, in terms of scholarly exchanges, they
tend to be more mild-mannered. (Although the history of science conferences has
been more volatile. Is it something to do with historiography?) One no longer hears
of exchanges as, for example, in the ‘Afterword’ to the volume on a symposium on
the structure of scientific theories, held in Urbana, Illinois, in 1969, by Patrick
Suppes (1977, 648): ‘Collectively these factors have led increasing numbers of
philosophers of science to reject Kuhn’s approach as irredeemably flawed,
although not as hopeless as Feyerabend’s’. Philosophical arch enemies, say, a
realist and an instrumentalist, manage to peacefully co-exist and communicate in

*Email: jouni-matti.kuukkancn@helsinki.fi

© 2014 Taylor & Francis

614 J.-M. Kuukkanen

the same room. I am not sure why this is so, but perhaps the decades of
institutionalization and common practice cultivate mutual civility.
Scholars in the theory and philosophy of history constitute a heterogeneous
group. They come from different intellectual schools, which may have been
established in different geographical regions and thus represent different
language areas. At least as important is the fact that they come from different
fields: typically from some sub-discipline of history (‘general’, cultural,
conceptual, memory studies), from various schools of philosophy, literary
studies, history of science, politics etc. It is no wonder that the ideas clash, and
occasionally also persons.
Heterogeneity is a strength and dynamism provides an opportunity to create
something qualitatively new and (who knows) also something institutionally
enduring. However, the requirement is that the energy is channelled creatively
and not destructively; that these gatherings and other exchanges lead to more co­
operation and discussion, not to further fragmentation and non-speaking. It is
necessary to talk about the future of the field. It is from this angle that I comment
briefly on the Roth-Ankersmit controversy.
On the face of it, the debate deals with the recent philosophy of Frank
Ankersmit and specifically with his book Meaning, Truth, and Reference in
Historical Representation (2012). The main accusation that Paul Roth makes is
that Ankersmit’s thinking in the book is confused or inconsistent with a
philosophy it more or less implicitly commits to. Save a few comments, my
intention is not to debate specific interpretations of Ankersmit. I express some of
my agreements and disagreements with Ankersmit elsewhere (e.g. Kuukkanen
2013). The purpose of my comment is to highlight the question, what philosophy
o f history should be, which naturally requires addressing Roth’s claim that there
is no need for a ‘philosophy of history’.
I think it is fair to say that Roth reads Ankersmit with a specific philosophical
framework in mind. Whether it is Quinean, I do not know, but certainly Carnap,
Quine, Sellars and Davidson are the main characters. And why not? These are
some of the most celebrated authors and through them one can draft a connected
story of philosophical thinking in the decades before and after the Second World
War. They all have their followers in current analytic philosophy (although one
comes across very few Camapians these days). But the backbone that these
authors provide is also problematic. For example, I don’t think it is correct to say
that analytic philosophers in general commit to holism with regard to meaning,
truth and reference. Some do, for example all Davidsonians and Quineans
probably do, but some certainly do not. Jerry Fodor and Ernest Lepore do not,1
and they subsequently found philosophers ‘in droves retreating’ to weaker
positions than holism (Fodor and Lepore 1993,1). The problem is that the history
of analytic philosophy did not end with Davidson, but has moved on. Consider,
for example, the so-called direct theory of reference (or the causal theory of
reference, if you wish), which were brought to the centre of philosophical
discussion by Putnam and Kripke in the 1970s, according to which proper names
 Rethinking History 615
refer directly to their bearers. Some have attempted to apply this theory also to the
so-called theoretical terms in science by postulating that the meaning of a term is
determined by an essential property of the entity or substance to which it refers,
like H20 as the meaning of ‘water’. The direct and causal theorists of reference
certainly are not holists, provided that the semantic properties of symbols can be
determined solely by their relations in the non-linguistic world. Their accounts
would qualify as forms of ‘semantic atomism’ (see Fodor and Lepore 1992, 7).
If we nevertheless wish to talk about holism, it would be very useful to
differentiate the sense in which ‘holism’ is addressed: mental, semantic,
confirmational or something else? What is Quine most well-known for? It is
arguably confirmational holism, although the questions of meaning, truth and
reference are entangled with it due to his specific naturalistic and behaviourist
assumptions. Confirmation holism could be said to be an account, according to
which only theories or sets of sentences together can be confirmed, one
consequence of which is that no belief or hypothesis has to be abandoned on the
face of negative evidence because adjustments can be made elsewhere in the ‘web
of belief. With regard to confirmation holism, we can take Ankersmit’s word that
he is no holist. He says that no new insights on the French revolution have
consequences for historians’ beliefs about the Middle Ages (although the word
‘perceptible’ risks watering down this account) (Ankersmit 2013, 575, note 12).
But then again, I would be surprised if Ankersmit were to deny holisim in all its
forms. The central insight of the narrativist philosophy of historiography is that
texts are wholes, and we should not cherry-pick historical claims from a historical
text because only the whole texts provide us the ‘meaning’ or the ‘message’.2
And then again, if we focus on debating the history of philosophy (and not the
philosophy of history), we could perhaps find a way to be a holist on theoretical
language, and be a non-holist on non-theoretical language. It would be Carnap in
the years 1936-1956,3 when he struggled to accept that theoretical language
cannot be reduced to observational language, and came to accept full-bloodied
‘meaning postulates’, and yet wished to retain immediately definable observation
language. From here it is, of course, a short step to remark that observation and
observational language are ‘theory-laden’, as historical philosophers of science
claimed, which left philosophers at the ‘mercy of holism’.
But there is a more important issue to address here than debate on the
specifics of recent philosophy. The debate on the theories of reference has moved
on from the 1970s and 1980s formulations, and I do not pretend to be fully up-to-
date with the most recent twists in the philosophy of language. And this is the
point. Do we need a philosophy of history? And if we do, what kind of discussion
should it consist in? On what tradition(s) should it tap into? If we accept Roth’s
suggestion that there is no need for ‘philosophy of history’, but that there is
nevertheless a need for philosophy and, further, that the contemporary analytic
philosophy of language is the most appropriate form, then I should hurriedly
catch up with what’s going in the philosophy of language, say in the 2000s, i.e.
616 J.-M. Kuukkcinen

the most recent articles on ‘rigid reference’, compositionality and other topics.
But so should Roth and Ankersmit.
At this point, I have to express my uneasiness with Roth’s idea that there is no
room for ‘philosophy of history’. There are thousands of books and articles on
Carnap, Quine, Sellars, Davidson, Dummett, Kripke, Putnam, Devitt, etc., and
much of them are of very high quality. But why should ‘philosophers of history’
reheat these debates in their journals? It is very much ‘reheating’ because the
full-time analytic philosophers of language have usually been there before, and,
dare I say, have often managed to analyse them even better. And this is my
personal opinion: there is already now too much discussion on the various great
figures of philosophy (and not necessarily ‘analytic’) with, perhaps, a half page of
text that links to the ‘philosophy of history’. Too often one is left wondering
about the relevance for the field specific questions.
In order to spell out my view of why there is the need for ‘philosophy of
history’ and perhaps now more than ever, I need to say a few words on the
enigmatic question of ‘what is history’. To take the shortest route to this issue,
Tucker (2008) suggested that we reserve the term ‘historiography’ for what
‘historians write, about past events’ and ‘history’ for the actual events and
processes themselves.4 Philosophy of historiography is in this case the
philosophical examination of historiography, which includes studying the
relation of evidence to ‘historiographies’, the epistemology of historiography,
and the ontology of historiographic concepts. Historians come of course in
various colours and only some of them work in academia, but they all should be
subjects in principle to philosophical examination. But again, what is there to
examine, if all foundational concepts and principles have already been developed
in the philosophy of language?
Without taking any stand on the status of historiography (whether it should be
regarded as a science, as literature, art or something else), as a social practice
scholarly historiography certainly fulfils all the criteria of a ‘science’, as it is
studied in the philosophy of science and science studies nowadays. It is well
institutionalized, it has its own professional norms and practices, and history
produces knowledge in the weak sense of the term at least, etc. It may be very
different from physics or psychology, but scholarly historiography certainly has
developed a craft with its own characteristics. This is to say that scholarly
historiography can well be regarded as a science (but again, this implies nothing
of the kind of practice it is, nor is this a normative statement) and the philosophy
of (scholarly) historiography can consequently be understood as a sub-field of the
philosophy of science.
What has happened in the philosophy of science in the past 50 years or so? It
has fragmented. In some form, there may still be something like ‘general
philosophy of science’, but there is nothing comparable to the times, when logical
positivists and empiricists and, subsequently, Popper and historical philosophers
of science were writing. There will hardly be another form of the ‘rationality
debates’ of the 1970s any time soon. Practically no one imagines that the same
 Rethinking History 617

kind of method, practical rationality, explanation or law-schema would apply to

all ‘sciences’. Maybe even ‘natural kinds’ need a different charaterization in
different disciplines. What seems apt in physics may not be so in economics.
Biology may require yet another set of concepts and theories. It is no surprise that
we talk increasingly about philosophy of physics, philosophy of chemistry,
philosophy of biology, philosophy of economics, etc. In passing, it may even be
noted that Paul Feyerabend’s suggestion that ‘anything goes’ appears less radical
now than a few decades ago, if it is understood as criticism of the idea that the
same method is used in all sciences. Clearly we must be more circumspect and
localized.
‘Philosophy of history’ as the philosophy of historiography fits well with the
general trend in the history and philosophy of science and science studies. There
is a discipline of historiography with its own practical rationality, problems and
concepts, and therefore there is a need for a philosophy of this particular practice.
Only a discipline specific analysis can tell us what we are dealing with. If that
philosophy can be connected to some other, broadly encompassing philosophies,
such as Quine’s, so be it, but the connection should be argued from the point of
view of ‘philosophy of history’, and not the other way round.
One more thing needs to be added here. There is also another type of second-
order discipline studying historiography: theory of history. It is perhaps related to
‘philosophy of history’, but separate from it nevertheless. I take it that the central
distinguishing feature of ‘theory of history’ is its propensity to take the notions of
historiography more or less as they are used by historians and engage in theory
building from this starting point. It is my conviction that explicit philosophical
reflection and analysis has a lot to contribute to our understanding, but if
philosophers do not sufficiently pay attention to the questions that are characteristic
of/specific to historiography, then the theoreticians of history surely go their own
way and everyone is worse off.
I should caution against misunderstandings. The philosophy of historio­
graphy needs people who know and understand the history of philosophy, i.e.
who can write about all those great figures and much more beyond them. The
vocabulary used in ‘mainstream’ philosophy provides us with a benchmark for
philosophical talk in general, and the concepts of philosophy may prove to be
very useful tools for expressing views on history. Furthermore, critical
philosophy is needed: if and when mistakes are made, they must be corrected.
Both philosophers and theoreticians of historiography should be aware, or be
made aware, of the standardized philosophical discourse, for example that the
correspondence theory of truth is a semantic theory, which puts forward a specific
theory of what we mean when we say that something ‘is true’ (and not normally
an epistemic theory dealing with the circumstances in which to establish that
something is true), or that ‘representation’ in the analytic tradition typically
means reflection of the state of affairs in the external world and allows the
determination of referential relations, the truth-values, of composite expressions.
But then again, once awareness is signalled, nothing prevents philosophers of
618 J.-M. Kuukkanen

historiography from applying the concepts in the way that seems most
appropriate in the context of (the reflection on) historiography.
It is good to finish this piece with a note on agreement between Roth and
Ankersmit. The latter writes that ‘my method is to take historical writing as it is
and I then try to make sense of it as well as I can* (Ankersmit 2013, 580). Roth
(2013) agrees in principle with this: ‘No one, I take it, denies that practices of
research and writing differ from discipline to discipline’ (557). At least they both
agree that, on some practical level, historiography has unique features. This is
promising. They disagree as to what this ‘uniqueness’ amounts to philosophically
or how ‘unique’ it actually is. To settle this question is no small matter. On the
other hand, it is no new matter either, as discussion on the nature and status of
historiography as a disciplinary practice has raged for more than 100 years at
least. The Roth-Ankersmit controversy shows that discussion in ‘philosophy of
history’ still goes on.

Notes
1. For an excellent discussion on the problems of semantic holism and on potential
alternatives to it, see Fodor and Lepore (1992).
2. It seems that Ankersmit (1983) is very explicit on holism in Narrative Logic. Consider
also the following of his later writings: ‘History and historical debate is holistic in that
the universally shared assumption in historical writing is that only the whole text
conveys the historian’s cognitivist message, and to which the parts only contribute’
(Ankersmit 2008, 92; similarly 2012, 159).
3. That is, between the publications of ‘Testability and Meaning’ (Carnap 1953), initially
published in 1936 and 1937, and ‘The Methodological Character of Theoretical
Concepts’, which appealed in 1956 (Carnap 1953).
4. Tucker limits ‘history’ to past events and processes, but it would be better to include
all events and processes on the axis past-present-future.

References
Ankersmit, Frank R. 1983. Narrative Logic. A Seinantic Analysis o f the Historian’s
Language. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.
Ankersmit, Frank R. 2008. “Rorty and History.” New Literary History 39: 79-100.
Ankersmit, Frank R. 2012. Meaning, Truth, and Reference in Historical Representation.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Ankersmit, Frank R. 2013. “Reply to Professor Roth: On How Antidogmatism Bred
Dogmatism.” Rethinking History: The Journal o f Theory and Practice 17 (4):
570-585.
Carnap, Rudolf. 1953. “Testability and Meaning.” In Readings in the Philosophy o f
Science, edited by Herbert Feigl, and Michael Scriven, 47-93. New York: Appleton-
Centruy-Crofts.
Carnap, Rudolf. 1956. “The Methodological Character of Theoretical Concepts.” In The
Foundations o f Science and the Concept o f Psychology and Pyschoanalysis, Vol. 2.
Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy o f Science, edited by Herbert Feigl, and Michael
Scriven, 33-76. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Fodor, Jerry, and Ernest Lepore. 1992. Holism. A Shopper’s Guide. Oxford: Blackwell.
 Rethinking History 619
Fodor, Jerry, and Ernest Lepore, eds, 1993. Holism: A Consumer Update. Amsterdam:
Rodopi.
Kuukkanen, Jouni-Matti. 2013. “Representationaiism and Non-representationalism in
Historiography.” Journal o f the Philosophy o f History 7: 453-479.
Roth, Paul A. 2013. “Whistling History: Ankersmit’s neo-Tractarian Theory of Historical
Representation.” Rethinking History: The Journal o f Theory and Practice 17 (4):
548-569.
Suppes, Frederick, ed. 1977. “Afterword.” In The Structure of Scientific Theories,
617-731. 2nd ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Tucker, Aviezer, ed. 2008. “Introduction.” In A Companion to the Philosophy o f History
and Historiography, 1-7. Chichester: Blackwell.
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