Cogito Ergo Blog

The title of Nancy’s Globalization or the Creation of the World, as the author’s Preface makes clear, is intentionally ambiguous; the terms can represent an alternative, or be treated as synonymous. In the first sense, ‘Globalization’ stands for the continued dominance of the existing network of market relationships which are understood as an endless and self-destructive pursuit of profit (the ‘bad infinite’ of p. 40). But ‘globalization’ can also mean, or might be made to mean, the creation of the world, understood as ‘re-opening each possible struggle for…what must form the contrary of global injustice’ (p. 54). In this latter sense, we are to understand globalization in a positive light.

Nancy recognizes explicitly that this notion of the creation of the world is in origin a theological one (p. 67). This is an important point, for much of the argument of the book turns on the notions of what is involved in ‘creation’, and what is meant by a ‘world’. Creation in the Christian tradition was an activity strictly reserved to God of which all human works could be only a pale imitation, and there was an absolute divorce between the Creator and His creation. Indeed, Nancy points out that in Western thought at large, in classical as well as Christian times, the world has always been contrasted with something else. In the case of Platonism, it was the timeless, changeless, perfect order of form; in Christianity with a heaven usually conceived of as sharing these characteristics.

What has changed in our own time is that the force of this contrast has collapsed. There is no longer anything for us to contrast the world with, and consequently (if one accepts this view) our very idea of what a world is – what this world is – has fallen into confusion. This, however, is not an inevitable state of affairs, if we appreciate the nature of ‘the world’ as a concept. Perhaps most importantly, we must understand that it is an ideal whole; that is to say, the world as such is not something we can encounter directly in experience. To be a world is just to be the ‘form of forms’, understood as the framework which makes meaningful experience possible (p. 52). A world is a ‘totality of meaning’ (p. 41), and meaning requires form.

Nancy deliberately makes use of Platonic language here, perhaps to indicate the extent to which he is both remaining within and modifying the older tradition of thinking about the idea of a world. He is continuous with the earlier tradition insofar as he retains the irrational element of Platonism, as evinced in his quotation of Wittgenstein’s remark that ‘It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists’ (p. 52). But the key difference between Nancy’s idea of a world and the earlier ideas that he identifies is that for him, this ‘form of forms’, however mysterious, is something artefactual. The ‘world’, in his sense, is a human creation through and through (‘the world’ is entirely distinct in this sense from the material reality of ‘the globe’), and taking responsibility for the framework of meaning it provides is what is involved in ‘creating’ it.

As Nancy himself recognizes, this is a descendant of Nietzsche’s view that God is dead (p. 69), and the second section ends on a decidedly existential note: ‘It is for us to decide for ourselves’ (p. 74). In the remarks on history and philosophy at the beginning of the third section it becomes obvious, if it was not clear enough already, why he is placing this emphasis on decision; he wants to get away from conceptions of the historical process, whether theological or teleological or both, that dictate a pre-ordained path (‘the absence of auto-completion’, p. 81) for historical events. The future is open, rather than closed. Traditional philosophy (‘metaphysics’, p. 81) was a sometimes covert and sometimes overt attempt to close off the future in one particular direction; philosophy today (‘deconstruction’, p. 83) has achieved a self-consciousness regarding its own historic character that renders any such enterprise illegitimate.

Nancy associates this shift with a similar transformation in the notion of ‘nature’. Already in Hegel we find the idea that human intelligence generates a ‘second nature’ for us. In our own time, thanks to technology (in its broadest sense, which includes things like writing and accounting) we have moved beyond ‘nature’ altogether, in the sense that for human beings, absolutely nothing is fixed. We live in a condition of ‘extreme instability and mutability’ (p. 87), a condition that is underlined by the list of ‘the succession of technologies’ on p. 89.

This account of the world has implications, in Nancy’s mind, for the place of politics within it. He borrows Badiou’s notion of politics as one of the four ‘conditions of philosophy’ (p. 85), but also makes it a ‘structure of the impossible’ and itself a ‘technology’ (p. 88). Each of these claims requires some explication. The most plausible way of construing the idea that politics is a condition of philosophy is perhaps to say that philosophy can only occur in a civil order; it is certainly true that in Athens, for example, this is how it began. By calling it a ‘structure of the impossible’ he may possibly mean that it sets forth human goals that are constantly in the process of transformation and hence are never finally achieved. And politics as a technology is presumably akin to all other technologies in that it contributes to the process of ‘denaturation, or…the infinitization of ends’ (p. 90).

This understanding of politics, however, seems to be somewhat at odds with the idea of justice outlined in the ‘Complements’, a section in which Rousseau is invoked and Nancy himself strikes a very Rousseauian note when he declares that ‘an unbearable injustice is unleashed everywhere: the earth trembles, the viruses infect, men are criminals, liars, and executioners’ (p. 111). The notion that ‘the world is to itself the supreme law of its justice’ seems to suggest an appeal to a suitably dynamicized notion of natural law that will conveniently result in a condemnation of all those things of which Nancy disapproves; in particular the way in which ‘sovereignty…as pure violence’ and the ‘violence of capital’ have allegedly captured the modern state (p. 105).

As a confessed Marxist sympathizer, it is disappointing rather than surprising that Nancy should end up apparently contradicting his initial Nietzschean commitment to an idea of the world as a playful Heraclitean flux and retreating into trite gnomic utterances (‘And what if sovereignty was the revolt of the people?’, p. 109). Typically for a French intellectual, a virtual contempt for the mundane complexities of politics runs throughout the work, and a large part of the reason for this is the excessive voluntarism it displays. It is simply not true to say that ‘A people are always their own invention’, for the same reason it is not true that
It is for us to decide for ourselves’.

A great deal of individual and collective identity, and a great deal of historical change for that matter, is entirely outside the sphere of invention and decision. At the personal level, one’s gender, ethnicity, health, height, strength, appearance, and so on are all (at least initially and for the most part) given, as are indeed social status and religious confession – and yet they are absolutely constitutive of identity. So far as historical movements affecting the fate of peoples go, a great deal of our current political problems result from the fact that the world’s population has doubled in the last fifty years or so (here, on the increasing importance of so-called ‘biopolitics’ in the modern world, no doubt Nancy and Foucault have a point). And human history as a whole has been profoundly determined by considerations of climate, demography, disease, distribution of natural resources, and so on, that were within no-one’s control; indeed, for much of history these were factors of which we were all profoundly ignorant.

Thus, to represent our existential and by extension our political situation as one of continuous Protean self-creation by fiat seems profoundly misleading. While Nancy’s reflections on the nature of worldhood are frequently insightful, (despite the portentous tone), in the last resort his treatment of politics appears naïve. Real politics means wrestling with complex problems under conditions of severe constraint where the most one can usually hope to achieve is a compromise that will inevitably fail to fully satisfy most of those concerned.

Dealing with globalization is not a choice between existential self-enactment and the final victory of finance capital but an attempt to address such mundane but unavoidable dilemmas as, how are we to divide the world’s water resources given that the developing world is moving towards a meat-eating diet that consumes on average fifteen times the amount of water as a vegetarian one? How are we to adjust institutions of international society (the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, and so on) that still reflect the world as it was in 1945 and other countries (like China, India, and Brazil) are now far more prominent? How are we going to address climate change? Mitigate the inequalities of world trade? And so on.

Certainly, democratic politics must now be carried on the absence of the various illusions to which totalitarian ideologies, feudal monarchies, and dynastic empires were all subject in their different ways, but when one has said this, one has not really said very much. While it is in Nancy’s favour that he does recognize that power is necessarily part of politics (p. 106), he never really grasps what this means in concrete terms. The real problems of globalization require a mastery of detail, an acceptance of limitations, and a tolerance of imperfection for which (in common with Badiou and Latour) he seems to have little taste.

Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern is an analysis of the concept of ‘modernity’ that rightly identifies it as a historic phenomenon characterized by an insistence on the absolute nature of several related dichotomies. This insistence, as he observers, has inevitably resulted in contradictions that have been consequential for both theory and practice. For example, an absolute divorce between ‘nature’ and ‘society’ means that we want to view nature as both absolutely real and socially constructed, and society as both a force that is independent of ourselves and as something that is subject to volition.

The oppositions Latour detects are certainly visible, and the broad contentions that ‘modernity’ is the peculiar product of certain features of European history and that it is manifestly paradoxical are sound. Moreover, the position he wants to take up – which is critical of post-modernism (including deconstruction) as remaining within the modernist intellectual horizon, of Marxism as self-defeating, and of Heideggerianism as a form of anti-modernism than thus remains deeply implicated with it rather than simply side-stepping it like his own ‘non-modern’ position – is refreshing in a French intellectual.

However, there are some strange omissions, and some problematic notions. For someone so concerned with the relationship between science and politics (he regards the Hobbes-Boyle controversy as exemplary), it is odd that Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions receives no attention. Nor does he really give the work done on history of science in the Anglophone tradition enough credit for appreciating the socio-political context of scientific thought; what about Butterfield’s The Origins of Modern Science, for example, written as long ago as 1947?

Again, the Anglophone revival of rhetoric studies (well underway in the 1990s when the book was written) is simply passed over. A work like McCloskey’s The Rhetoric of Economics makes the point that ‘science’ (whether natural, social, or historical) is inevitably rhetorical and persuasive but is nonetheless ‘true’ and ‘objective’ for all that. One would have thought that economics was a kind of paradigm case of the interaction of the human and non-human (people on the one hand and money, commodities, and raw materials on the other), but it is simply missing.

So too is the entire movement of historical thought from Vico in the eighteenth century onwards. The rise of historical thought in Germany in the nineteenth century is simply absent, and hermeneutics is treated far too briefly, as one in a series of perpetual failures to overcome the dichotomies set up in the early modern period. Dilthey in particular was capable of a degree of historical sensitivity that entirely transcends the crude divisions present in Latour’s ‘constitution’ of modernity. Nor does Latour seem to appreciate very clearly, in his championing of anthropology, that it, like sociology, is just one branch of the modern historical science (along with archaeology and history ‘proper’).

Worse, Latour’s reading of the history of philosophy at large is very contentious – Kant may have set up a division between the ideal world of things in themselves and the empirical world of appearances, but he also pioneered a new approach to categoriality which allowed him to specify the conditions of various forms of experience – practical, religious, aesthetic, and scientific – in a way which potentially supplies solutions to most if not all of the problems Latour addresses. Yet this side of the Critique of Pure Reason goes undiscussed. The treatment of Hegel is similarly superficial. Latour simply dismisses dialectics rather than appreciating the way in which Hegel’s rendering of Kant’s categories into dynamic forms in the Encyclopedia provides them with a historicity which both detects and evades the very problems Latour thinks he is being novel in identifying.

Then there are the concepts of ‘quasi-objects’ and ‘networks’ that carry most of the load. ‘Quasi-objects’ are supposed to bring together the non-human and the human in a way that modernity cannot explicitly account for. But in many respects we are quite right to keep them separate. Who has ever mistaken a tree, or for that matter a computer, for a human being? The notion of a quasi-object only appears problematic for Latour because he is loose in his use of words like science, technology, and nature.

While it is commendable that Latour avoids any Heideggerian hostility to technology, the very notion of technology – some portion of the material world transformed into an instrument for human use according to a rational design – suggests that it already combines the human and the non-human in its meaning. There was, of course, ‘technology’ long before there was ‘science’. But technology assisted by science (the machine gun) is really no more conceptually problematic than technology that is the product of exclusively practical experience (the flint arrow-head). Admittedly, one wants, in understanding both technological innovation and scientific thought, to look at all the circumstances of their production, and their filiations with ideas in other fields; but this is hardly revelatory.

Science-based technology has indeed become such a large part of our lives that our interactions with machines and with each other in ways that are both enabled and constrained by machines are interesting to study; but they are arguably far less problematic than Latour believes. No doubt one interesting fact about these interactions is that they appear transparent to the user who remains ignorant of the manifold conditions of their operation and indeed of all their potential consequences.

Nevertheless, what Latour calls ‘quasi-objects’ are only difficult to grasp conceptually (as distinct from the undeniably painstaking labour of investigating them empirically) if one persists in mixing up, as he does, (i) ‘science’ as an ideal form of inquiry distinguished by certain categorial presuppositions with ‘science’ as an activity requiring specific people and particular materials for its pursuit, and (ii) ‘nature’ as an exclusively physical concept, where homogeneity is indeed the rule, with ‘nature’ as it is experienced in diverse ways between cultures. (Cp. the remark on universal gravitation at p. 120)

As for the idea of a ‘network’, what is a ‘network’ but another term for a context? Latour only finds the nature of groups (with their local and global manifestations) as problematic as he does because he again ignores the work of any number of writers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Ferdinand Tonnies in C19 Germany and Antony Black in our own day in particular spring to mind) who have engaged with the history and theory of associational life. Nor, perhaps, does he give Foucauldian ‘archeology’ the attention that it should receive in this context as one of his notable precursors.

So, there is plenty to criticize. But the desire to overcome the ‘modern’ sense of disconnectedness from the past, and of absolute difference from all other cultures, including earlier phases of its own, can only be applauded. Admirable too is the opposition to the idea that we are in the grip of impersonal forces, whether of nature or society, that we are forced to be simply victims of. Latour is also sophisticated enough to pay tribute to the contributions of both modern and post-modern thought, and not to simply repeat their mistake of trying to do the impossible in rejecting all that had gone before.

What one wonders is where it all ends up. The degraded environment, on the side of nature, and the impoverished masses who constitute the majority of the world’s human population, on the other, are consequences of modernism. One can only agree with Latour about this, though of course he is by no means unique in making the point. But his talk, in general terms, of ‘relocating the human’ and ‘amending the constitution’ of modernity does not amount to truly practical thought on how we are to deal with our present discontents.

Remarks like ‘A democracy extended to things themselves’ are neither perspicuous (will my mobile phone want to vote? Should I buy one for someone who doesn’t have one?) nor helpful. There is something awfully ‘modern’ and even complacent about Latour’s concluding declaration that ‘I have done my job as philosopher and constituent by gathering together the scattered themes of a comparative anthropology. Others will be able to convene the Parliament of Things’. Others, indeed, are trying – look at Monbiot’s Age of Consent, for example, which tries to envisage, in institutional and constitutional terms, what a world government might look like. But one wouldn’t learn this from Latour.

Cyril Aydon, author of a biography on Darwin, has now produced An Introduction to 150,000 years of human history. It is a work of synthesis, inevitably; it is questionable how one could even do 'research' on the the subject of 'world history' - where would one start? It is also not an academic work, in the sense that it eschews the usual critical apparatus of footnotes, although it does have a useful index and suggestions for further reading. But it must be said at once the 'non-academic' character of The Story of Man should not be taken as a criticism. Aydon writes in a direct and flowing fashion that ensures the reader wants to keep turning the page, and his aim of introducing the general reading public to an overview of human history is an extremely important one.

In comparison with some other recent works, like those by Peter Watson or Richard Tarnas, he emphasizes ideas less, and things rather more. For all that he has little sympathy with Marxist ideology, it is material culture and socio-economic change - in areas such as agriculture, pathology, trade, and demography - that Aydon sees as the motors of history. And if one takes the long-term, bird's eye view, this must presumably be right. One cannot expect individuals to figure very heavily in such a survey, and politics and even war must appear as epiphenomenal a great deal of the time. Sometimes one feels this is perhaps a little overdone, but on the whole it is salutary for those who have been educated chiefly in modern European history in which the nation-state has played a central role.

Aydon also deserves credit for having written a history which is indeed genuinely global; he may be English, but one would never know it. Insofar as it is both possible and required by the story of human development as it has actually occurred, all continents and nations get equal weight. One feels sympathy, for example, when Australia is periodically revisited and the reader learns for the third or fourth time that nothing had happened in the interim, but in areas of the world like Australia that either lacked a literate culture or whose records were destroyed (as in parts of South America when Europeans arrived), there is simply nothing the historical writer can do. The occasional stylistic repetition, for example the increasingly irritating description of economic opportunities as 'mouth-watering' that a better editor would have removed, can easily be forgiven when one is presented with such a rich digest of material.

Aydon is also as comprehensive as he could reasonably have been; from early human origins (where he is particularly strong - some of the passages read like a modern reworking of Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins of Inequality), to ancient civilizations, through the medieval era (in which the backwardness of Europe relative to other parts of the world is rightly repeatedly emphasized), into the age of European discovery, which lead first to colonial conquest and then later to imperialism and slavery, the great movements of world history are all here.

Even those who have read similar works will benefit from being reminded by the large scale view on offer here that the political, economic, and technological dominance of Western culture over the Chinese and Muslim worlds arrived relatively late and is almost certainly itself just another historical moment. And in matters of detail, some of the facts will almost certainly be new to any reader; I naively imagined railways succeeded the invention of the steam-engine, whereas the first railways were in fact devised to carry horse-drawn loads.

Aydon does not attempt to gloss over the violence and brutality of much of human history, but he also misses no opportunity to draw attention to the lasting achievements of humanity, whether in civilization, science, art, or philosophy. He is commendably free from dogmatism of any kind, ideological or religious, and his concluding chapter on the likely future faced by humanity is somewhat grim but hardly alarmist; the potential for natural disaster, disease, man-made global warming, war, or some combination of all of these to destroy the human race is real, and must be added into any weighing up of the scales. And in the last analysis, the enormity of the potential threats is not allowed to mask the scale of the adventure so far, and to come. The Story of Man deserves to find a wide public, and is particularly suitable for the young; I definitely wish I had read something similar in my teens.

Tucker, Our Knowledge of the Past (Cambridge: CUP, 2004)

Tucker provides a welcome and robust rejection of scepticism about historical knowledge, and is moreover correct in thinking that a well-founded concept of the nature of historical knowledge is part of a civilized politics. There are obvious empirical examples that can be cited in defence of the possibility of historical knowledge, such as the successes of historians in correctly predicting the existence of evidence [Giesebrecht], and Tucker assembles a good range of examples in this respect. But he wants to go further by putting forward a genuinely philosophical argument in defence of the scientific nature of historiography, which he calls the '[representation] of past events...that generates probable knowledge of the past' .(2)

This argument is based on the similarity between history and other sciences including linguistics and evolutionary biology, all of which study information flows. In effect, Tucker wants to show that history is a science by demonstrating that it shares the characteristics of these other disciplines which are already admitted to be sciences. Naturally, this involves some consideration of the nature of science itself. Tucker opposes the old positivist conception of science which was essentially Newtonian; modern philosophy recognizes science 'as stochastic, probabilistic, with limited powers of prediction, and irreducible to another science' (211).

If Tucker is read as claiming that there is more ground in common between the human and natural sciences than has often been thought, this is unobjectionable. Both branches of science are rational, critical, sceptical, evidential, and inferential in their approach to knowledge. Perhaps, as Tucker claims, too much has been made of the difference between explanatory natural science, in which an effect is supposed to be related to its cause or causes in terms of a general law or laws, and understanding in the human sciences which focusses on the reasons why this event in particular was the outcome of previous states of affairs.

Nevertheless, it is also possible to feel at certain points that Tucker has in fact shown what makes history scientific, rather than what makes it history; that is, he has focussed on the common factors (which undeniably exist, and no doubt do need to be highlighted) between history and various other sciences, natural and human, to the neglect of the factors that enable us to pick out history as a distinctive discipline in its own right. In doing so, he also sometimes seems to unconsciously avail himself of the positivist approach that in other respects he is rightly keen to leave behind.

A key problem lies in the use made of the notion of 'information'. Despite repeatedly insisting that there are no 'ready to eat facts' (2, 12, 14, 43, 93, 138, 178), 'information' is treating as a kind of scientific constant. 'Historiographic information-bearing signals are considerably slower and composed often of words, rather than of light as in science, but these properties do not distinguish epistemically between historiography and science. Scientists understand the transmission of light; historians analyze the fidelity of textual information' (94).

The problem is that this entirely neglects the nature of the information involved; its qualitative aspect, if you like. It would be foolish to object to talking of historical evidence as containing information for historians; but it would be equally foolish to imagine that we mean the same thing by it as scientific information. When a biologist extracts DNA, or a linguist studies a sound recording, they are entitled to presuppose that their 'information' is present before them in a quantifiable form that exists entirely independently of their own subjectivity, because they are dealing with the results of non-intelligent processes; but this is never the case with evidence that must literally be read before it can be used, as is the case in history.

Notice how Tucker falls back on the language of realism; the 'fidelity' of textual information. To what is such information faithful? It cannot, by Tucker's own admission, be 'the facts'; there are none, in advance of historical inquiry (even if we admit, as he rightly does, the received knowledge of the tradition of historical investigation as part of what we mean by historical knowledge, this too comes under the heading of material that must be read or heard to be useful to the historian; it does not supply the role of a DNA sample). It cannot, also, be faithful to 'the past'; we have, again by his own admission, no way of knowing whether or not this is the case, nor even of knowing whether there is an independently existing past. Information can only be faithful to the events; but these are precisely what we piece together on the basis of the evidence, in hermeneutic fashion.

Tucker, however, does not like the hermeneutic tradition of Verstehen which would have rescued him from his frequent but unacknowledged retreats into a realist position. He makes the point, which must be conceded, that in many cases its proponents (like Dilthey and Collingwood) emphasized rational, conscious, and voluntary action, which leads to an untenably truncated concept of historical understanding (201). Much action is not rational, and much of history is not limited to the study of action; historical movements take place over centuries, even millennia, and historical actors may be blithely unaware of them. Demographic and economic trends, for instance, may operate without anyone alive at the time being aware of them.

Tucker is also right to say that the classic hermeneutic situation of a 'reader, a text, [and] the relationship between them' does not apply to historiography. In history we are dealing with 'a community of interpreters, their theories, and sets of documents'. (259-60) This is entirely true. But in the very next sentence there seems to be a tacit accommodation with at least a moderate type of hermeneutic tradition, when he concedes that 'The world is not a text, but it can be interpreted as texts'. (260) This is all that any plausible hermeneutic theory would require to defend a theory of history as providing an understanding of the meaning of past events, where their meaning involves some grasp of the reasons for their occurring as they did.

However, Tucker neglects to bring out the connection between hermeneutic theory and the study of meaning, preferring to concentrate exclusively on the admitted defects of the hermeneutic approach. This means that he cannot accommodate the qualitative difference in the nature of the information dealt with by history. It is true that history must be able to study long term trends in population, economy, and so forth as well as individual actions and decisions; but the ultimate focus is always on the difference that such trends made to the people who were alive at the time. An individual or a society does not have to be aware of an economic or demographic trend to experience, however unwittingly, its effects, and to respond to them. The focus in history, in other words, is on the changed life-experience that such trends produce, and here there is ineliminable reference to subjectivity and reflexivity of a sort absent from biology and linguistics.

There is however a commendably powerful sense of the seamless nature of events in historical thinking. For Tucker, historical explanations can be either determined or underdetermined. A determined historical proposition is one that is fully warranted by the evidence; an underdetermined one is one for which evidence is partially lacking, so that there may be several (though not indefinitely many) equally plausible explanations for the evidence as it stands. This is one major source, Tucker claims, of historical disagreement and of the division of historians into identifiable schools. But it is clear from this distinction that there is no period in history about which statements would be inherently underdetermined simply because of the kind of events they were dealing with; all historical knowledge may be determined if we possess adequate evidence, on Tucker's view. 'Justification comes form the evidence and the theories that connect the explanatory structure with the evidence, a distinct deductive, inductive, or other justification is redundant' (187).

In history, there are no mysteries from necessity, only from lack of sources. And the sources are all that is required. Always allowing for genuine cases of ambiguity and incoherence within the evidence itself, and allowing too that no historical explanation is ever completely certain, the evidence is, ultimately, all that historians need; they do not need additional covering laws to work out the relationship between the events they describe, because the events they describe are related to one another in terms of other events of which ultimately only a handful of interpretations are possible, one of which will usually turn out to be the right one. Or at least, not obviously wrong like the others.

To claim otherwise, in the face of the achievements of modern historiography, is to resort to outright scepticism. Tucker does not make as much as he might of the fact that in the twentieth century humanity achieved for the first time a completely secular, critical, inferential perspective on its own history as a universal whole, definitively superseding the kind of overview of world history offered by, for example, Hegel in the early nineteenth century. This knowledge of human history was achieved without the use of covering laws, nor have any been derived from it.

Of course, in some contexts, this may not be relevant. If one wants to show what history has in common with all other sciences, it can perhaps be disregarded. But in understanding what makes history distinctive, it is crucial, and Tucker's neglect of the point shows in the tension between his tacitly positivistic conception of neutral information on the one hand, and on the other, his insistence that there are no ready made facts of the sort on which positivists traditionally insisted. His recognition that history cannot be made to fit the model of the natural sciences seems tinged with regret; 'For now, fully scientific historiography is science fiction' (253).

This is perhaps because of the belief that Tucker has in the 'undistorted' communication that he believes takes place in a scientific community (179). There is a related belief that the interpretation of meanings of historical events can be entirely divorced from the acquisition of historical knowledge which is surely false given Tucker's own belief there are no prefabricated facts (215). These two claims are rather analogous to the belief in neutral information mentioned above. Of course, insofar as scientists can communicate in entirely formal or mathematical terms, there is some sense to the notion of undistorted communication; pure mathematicians, mathematical physicists, and logicians really are freed from the inherent ambiguities of natural language.

But these activities form only a part of what we call science. In fact, Tucker quickly retreats from this position to the view that 'within a sociohistorical community of discourse a fairly undistorted and meaningful communication frequently takes place' (179). This is unexceptional, but it is as true of the community of historians as it is of any (other) group of scientists, and really states little more than the trivial truth that we normally succeed in understanding one another most of the time.

The area in which Tucker is most genuinely innovative is in showing how Bayesian probability can provide a model of historical reasoning. A particular strength of his argument is its ability to distinguish Bayesian probabilism from the kind of probabilism advanced by Hempel, which still relied on the covering law approach. There is some real philosophical value in being able to state in formal (not of course quantitative) terms the grounds on which historians distinguish between the relative likelihood of various explanations for given evidence; it is not to be confused with the attempt, shown to be futile by Goldstein, of formalising historical statements themselves. For clearly stating the logic of historical judgments of probability, he deserves recognition as a truly pioneering thinker in the philosophy of history.

Ultimately, this Bayesian approach involves Tucker in a major claim about the organization of the sciences; he asserts that 'The sciences are divided neither into human sciences and natural sciences according to their subject matters, nor into ideographic and nomothetic sciences according to the purpose of their inquiries, but between sciences that examine the similar effects of common tokens of causes that preserve information about their common causes, and sciences that examine the similar effects of shared types of causes' (260). This claim is deliberately intended to overturn what Tucker regards as two major traditions of thinking about the organization of the sciences, the positivist one noted above in which the human sciences were always the poor relations of their natural scientific cousins, and the neo-Kantian tradition of Rickert, Simmel, and Dilthey that tried to establish the autonomy of the human sciences, including history, and grant them equal status with the natural sciences in doing so.

However, what Tucker does not rule out is that the sciences are divided into human sciences and natural sciences, and that within each of these broader groups there are sciences that examine the similar effects of common tokens of causes that preserve information about their common causes, and sciences that examine the similar effects of shared types of causes. What he has highlighted, arguably, is an important additional means of classifying forms of thought rather than a classification which entirely overturns those used hitherto. Within the human sciences, for example, it would seem that history comes into the former class, of ' sciences that examine the similar effects of common tokens of causes that preserve information about their common causes', and sociology falls into the latter group of 'sciences that examine the similar effects of shared types of causes'.

His revisionist position allows Tucker to claim that he does not adhere straightforwardly to any version of either realist (positivist) or neo-Kantian (constructionist) philosophy of history (256), although he admits that 'It is impossible to refute determined constructionism. It fits determined historiography as evidence just as well as a realist interpretation. Yet, though construction is simpler than realism, it makes fewer assumptions, realism is a better explanation of the historiographic Rankean paradigm, why a uniquely heterogenous and uncoerced large group of historians has come to agree on the theories and methods that define the historiographic community' (257)

But this objection can be dealt with by raising a point similar to Tucker's own caution that one should not confuse 'historiographic phenomenology and ideology; what historians may think of their enterprise and how they like to present their enterprise, with actual historiographic practice' (193). Just because the realist assumption is highly efficacious does not mean it is right (or wrong, for that matter); it is actually a naïve importation into historical theory from the ordinary lanaguage of practical experience, which requires realist assumptions. Ordinary language, however, is not the language in which history is written, as Tucker himself admits (178).

Tucker's account of constructionism is also flawed in other ways. He claims (without providing a specific example other than Goldstein) that constructionism 'denies that historiography refers to history, to the past'. In fact, Goldstein, if read carefully, does not deny this, exactly. And nor does Oakeshott, who makes pastness a category of historical understanding while maintaining a radical constructionist position. What both argue is that any historical talk about the past cannot be treated in the same way as commonsensical talk about the past, and in fact Tucker entirely agrees with this; constructionism is a strategy for preventing confusion of what Tucker calls 'therapeutic, nonscientific' (262) accounts of the past being allowed to hold sway unchallenged and thus potentially abused by demagogues.

In another attempt to undermine the constructionist case, Tucker mentions that 'Dummet argued that sentences about the past are not assertoric, they do not assert anything, because there are no clear truth conditions that would allow or disallow us to assert them' (255). Dummet, however, was not discussing the nature of historical knowledge when he made this remark. By Tucker's own admission, historiographic knowledge is theoretic knowledge. But even if Dummet had been discussing historical truth, how damaging would this charge be, if we have already established that history is capable of providing 'the best explanation of historiographic evidence' (254), as Tucker puts it? Why fixate on the notion of truth?

What is important in the kind of context that Dummet is discussing - the context in which what Tucker calls 'ordinary folks' (191) assert things about the past - is that their claims are efficacious. If I say to myself 'I left my wallet in the bedroom', what matters to me at that moment is not that this is true, but whether my wallet is in the bedroom when I walk in there to look for it. Similarly, if the historian can explain evidence in a way that rules out other possible explanations of it, what is to be gained by claiming that this explanation is either true or false when it has done what was required of it?

In fact, constructionism neither wants nor needs to abandon truth claims in the way that Tucker suggests, though there are, as we have just seen, reasons for thinking that it would not be as problematic as he believes even if it did. Nevertheless, all constructionism needs to assert is that there is a qualitative difference between historical explanations and narratives of the past, and other statements about the past. And this is tacitly admitted by Tucker in the distinctions he makes between historiographic and therapeutic accounts of the past, and between historians and 'ordinary folks'.

It is strange, then, that Tucker should still write that 'We understand history backward' (p. 229). Of course, there is a sense in which historians do understand history backward, because they have some idea of the outcome of the series of events they investigate. But there is a serious ambiguity in the notion of understanding history backward that needs addressing. Where the past is seen as significant or relevant, it is really the therapeutic past which is under consideration; this, by definition, has to be a kind of past, or view of the past (we need not worry too much about the distinction) in which its importance is as the preamble to our present.

By contrast, the theoretic or historical view of the past is of the past in terms of its past; the explanation of an event in terms of its antecedent causes. We do not understand why the French revolution occurred in terms of what came after it; we grasp the reasons why it happened in terms of what lead up to it. And it we ask 'what were the consequences of the French revolution', we must distinguish between asking that question in relation to those who experienced them in the nineteenth century, for instance, and asking it in relation to ourselves.

It is a hallmark of all theoretical thinking that our practical concerns must be temporarily shelved. This is as true for readers of historical works as it is for writers of them, and it is a precondition of the engagement of the historical imagination, which is the real source of the civilizing value that Tucker correctly detects in history. This critical species of imagination is an integral element of the educated mind, and it is one of the things that allows individuals to resist being moved to potentially self-destructive action by specious rhetoric.

Ultimately, Tucker is not really entitled, given his own tacit concessions to the hermeneutic and constructionist positions coupled with his illegimate tacit resort to a positivist and realist concept of 'information', to talk about “our knowledge of the past”, when we cannot know that there is any such thing. An indication of where he has gone wrong comes in the claim that 'evaluating how contingent history is can only be done empirically' (226). Contingency is here being contrasted with necessity. But history, as Oakeshott observed, is totally contingent. Oakeshott did not mean to say that history is accidental, for none of it is, in the sense of being composed chance or random occurrences.

Nor did Oakeshott mean to say that no necessary natural processes (sunrise, death, etc.) are at work in history, or even that, as Tucker alleges, 'universal or general statements are inapplicable to historiography because historical events are unique' (242). Historians are perfectly able to generalize; but the kind of generalizations they put forward never have the status of universal laws of the type associated with positivism.

What Oakeshott wished to draw attention to was that all of the historical past could have been otherwise, even if what might have been different would in many cases have been very similar to what did in fact occur, as Tucker rightly stresses in his reflections on the plot of It's A Wonderful Life (238). And it could have been otherwise because we are always dealing with the responses of people to events, and these, while they may have certain structural limitations (not all things are possible for all people at all times and in all places), are never foreordained. All history is equally contingent; which is quite consistent with holding that some events in history were more likely than others. Their likelihood, however, at least by itself, tells us nothing about

The contrast between contingency and necessity only arises in the context of the very debates over the scientific nature of history that Tucker is rightly trying to leave behind. It presupposes a certain metaphysical viewpoint; namely, that we inhabit a natural (perhaps 'external') world in which certain (necessary) processes with an identity entirely independent of consciousness are going on, but into which subjectivity introduces an element of randomness (contingency). The scientific, historical, and practical attitudes are all caught up in this continuum. This metaphysical viewpoint however is something that we simply cannot know the truth of. The most that the scientist can do is to presuppose that this is the case. Such a presupposition is perfectly legitimate, but not to be turned into an unqualified truth about the nature of reality.

But Tucker in fact sees that 'The epistemic question whether or not scientific historiography is possible is independent of the ontology of history' (213). And indeed, he does not need to avail himself of the notion of the past to make good his account of history as a form of probabilistic inference to the best explanation. The irony is that a more careful consideration of the neo-Kantian constructionist position that he claims to repudiate might have revealed to him how much closer he stands to it than he thinks. His claim that 'All historiography is hypothetical, unobserved, and should be the best explanation of observable evidence' (149) is, at the very least, entirely consistent with the constructionism of Goldstein and Oakeshott. And constructionism also contains the key to resolve some of the outstanding difficulties with what, by any standards, is one of the most important contributions to philosophy of history of recent years.

i) Reflection. The experience of seeing oneself in a mirror; it's fascination. The first-person and third-person view. Reflexivity of self consciousness and its infinite character.

ii) Mapping. Reading and making maps.

iii) Classifying. Grouping objects together, involves exclusion.

iv) Perspectives. Having a point of view. Not being able to see everything at once, things looking different from different angles.