This paper defends the right of historians to make use of their knowledge of the remote consequences of past actions. In particular, it is argued that the disciplinary cohesion of the history of science relies crucially upon our ability to target, for further investigation, those past activities ancestral to modern science. The history of science is not limited to the study of those activities but it is structured around them. In this sense, the discipline is inherently ‘present-centred’: its boundaries are (...) determined, in part, by judgements inaccessible to the historical actors. Present-centredness of this sort, it is urged, should not be regarded as a problem; its methodological consequences are minimal.Author Keywords: Anachronism; Diachronic history; Present-centred history; Actors’ categories; Historical causation; Retrospective explanation. (shrink)

Recently, many historians of science have chosen to present their historical narratives from the ‘actors’-eye view’. Scientific knowledge not available within the actors’ culture is not permitted to do explanatory work. Proponents of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge purport to ground this historiography on epistemological relativism. I argue that they are making an unnecessary mistake: unnecessary because the historiographical genre in question can be defended on aesthetic and didactic grounds; and a mistake because the argument from relativism is in any (...) case incoherent.The argument of the present article is self-contained, but steers clear of metaphysical debates in the philosophy of science. To allay fears of hidden assumptions, the sequel, to be published in the following issue, will consider SSK’s prospects of succour from scientific realism, instrumentalism, and a metaphysical system of Bruno Latour’s own devising. (shrink)

This paper investigates the historiographical utility of psychoanalysis, focussing in particular on retrospective explanations of demonic possession and exorcism. It is argued that while 'full-blown' psychoanalytic explanations-those that impose Oedipus complexes, anal eroticism or other sophisticated theoretical structures on the historical actors-may be vulnerable to the charge of anachronism, a weaker form of retrospective psychoanalysis can be defended as a legitimate historical lens. The paper concludes, however, by urging historians to look at psychoanalysis as well as trying to look through (...) it. Full-blown psychoanalysis is a bad historical lens but it may, in some cases, be an excellent explanatory template: a thorough understanding of how psychoanalytic therapy functions in the modern world is, for example, a good theoretical preparation for historians seeking to understand the sixteenth-century's demonological universe. (shrink)

Historians of science have frequently sought to exclude modern scientific knowledge from their narratives. Part I of this paper, published in the previous issue, cautioned against seeing more than a literary preference at work here. In particular, it was argued—contra advocates of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge —that a commitment to epistemological relativism should not be seen as having straightforward historiographical consequences. Part II considers further SSK-inspired attempts to entangle the currently fashionable historiography with particular positions in the philosophy of (...) science. None, I argue, is promising. David Bloor’s proposed alliance with scientific realism relies upon a mistaken view of contrastive explanation; Andrew Pickering’s appeal to instrumentalism is persuasive for particle physics but much less so for science as a whole; and Bruno Latour’s home-grown metaphysics is so bizarre that its compatibility with SSK is, if anything, a further blow to the latter’s plausibility. (shrink)

Abductive reasoning is central to reconstructing the past in the geosciences. This paper outlines the nature of the abductive method and restates it in Bayesian terms. Evidence plays a key role in this working method and, in particular, traces of the past are important in this explanatory framework. Traces, whether singularly or as groups, are interpreted within the context of the event for which they have evidential claims. Traces are not considered as independent entities but rather as inter-related pieces of (...) information concerning the likelihood of specific events. Exemplification of the use of such traces is provided by dissecting an example of their use in the environmental reconstruction of mountain climate. (shrink)

The view that chances are relative frequencies of occurrence within actual, finite reference classes has long been written off. I argue that it ought to be reconsidered. Focusing on non-deterministic chance, I defend a version of finite frequentism in which reference classmates are required to have qualitatively identical pasts. While my analysis can evade or resist several standard objections, it has a counterintuitive consequence: non-trivial chances entail the existence of past light cones that are perfect intrinsic duplicates. In mitigation, I (...) argue that our scientific knowledge is consistent with the hypothesis that there are many such duplicates in the actual world. Moreover, my analysis has some striking advantages: it is simple, it is metaphysically undemanding, and it makes possible a satisfying explanation of the chance–credence connection. 1 Introduction2 Target3 Sketch and Skirmish4 Articulation5 Standard Worries5.1 Frequency tolerance5.2 Leibniz’s dictum5.3 Single case chance5.4 Missing values5.5 Explanation5.6 Counterfactual chances6 Chance and Credence6.1 An indefeasible indifference intuition6.2 Articulating the credence principle6.3 Appraising the credence principle7 Confirmation8 Laws9 Summing Up. (shrink)

Historians must be sensitive to the alienness of the past. Insofar as they are concerned with their actors’ reasoning, they must (through open-minded empirical investigation) find out how their actors thought, and not assume that they thought like us. This is familiar historiographical advice, but pushed too far it can be brought to conflict with rather weak assumptions about what historians must presuppose if they are to interpret their actors at all. The present paper sketches those assumptions, and argues that (...) the influential ‘Strong Program’ in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK) falls foul of them. We do not argue from the correctness of the assumptions to the falsity of SSK. Rather, we note the incompatibility, and then show how SSK theorists’ tendency to take interpretation for granted blinds them—and perhaps their readers—to the existence of the conflict. (shrink)