Collingwood, Scientism and Historicism

Historicism Blues

“Always historicize!” Fredric Jameson calls this opening salvo from 1981’s The Political Unconscious the book’s “transhistorical imperative” and its “moral” (9). Is this, indeed, the most sacred of all critical commandments? The “thou shalt not kill” of literary studies (above all, perhaps, of American literary studies)? (Nietzsche might have called it, rather, the “thou shalt kill”: in his wor...

Linguistics, Historicism and the Humanities

Historicism, Entrenchment, and Conventionalism

W. V. Quine famously argues that though all knowledge is empirical, mathematics is entrenched relative to physics and the special sciences. Further, entrenchment accounts for the necessity of mathematics relative to these other disciplines. Michael Friedman challenges Quine’s view by appealing to historicism, the thesis that the nature of science is illuminated by taking into account its histor...

Naturalism without Scientism

Let us begin with naturalism itself. These days, most philosophers seem eager to regard themselves as naturalists, but this is possible only because there is so little agreement about what naturalism actually involves or requires. There is, of course, a straightforwardly (and self‐consciously) scientistic form of philosophical naturalism, which simply assumes that the claims of our best scienti...

Charlatanism, Scientism, and Psychology's Social Contract

Three problems are identified that the author believes must be addressed in order for psychology to achieve its full potential as a science and profession: the pretension of some practitioners to more knowledge and skill than they possess (charlatanism), the use of scientism (i.e., the misapplication of restrictive definitions of science) to make unwarranted attacks on the profession, and a gen...