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Toward a more natural historical attitude

  • Paper in the Philosophy of the Life Sciences
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Abstract

Modeling his position on Arthur Fine’s Natural Ontological Attitude, Derek Turner proposed the Natural Historical Attitude. Although these positions share a family resemblance, Turner’s position differs from Fine’s in two important ways. First, Fine’s contextualism is more fine-grained. Second, Turner’s argument for metaphysical agnosticism seems to lead to the implausible conclusion that we should be agnostic about the mind-independence of ordinary objects – a position in tension with Fine’s “core position.” While this paper presents a textual analysis of Fine’s and Turner’s arguments, the conclusions reached here cohere well with some of the best empirically-informed assessments of the historical sciences. Given the diversity of the historical sciences, the fact that many claims in the historical sciences have enough support to be regarded as true, and the implausibility of Turner’s agnosticism, philosophers studying historical science would be better served by embracing a stance closer to Fine’s Natural Ontological Attitude.

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Notes

  1. As one referee noted, this statement of the core position is vague. Exactly what does it mean to “accept that quarks are real”? This aspect of Fine’s position is – by design -- difficult to pin down. Fine (1991) argues that trying to provide a more detailed explication of the proper form of acceptance or belief is not a productive task. Further, he wants the core position to be compatible with varying degrees of confidence and skepticism about the reality of postulated entities. These aspects of the core position are discussed more fully in Sects.  4.1 and 5.3.

  2. See Sect. 5 for a more detailed discussion of this point. Although Fine is an epistemic realist in one sense (i.e., he accepts the truth of many well-justified scientific claims), he rejects any version of scientific realism that is committed to the correspondence theory of truth.

  3. There are many different versions of constructivism (Mallon, 2019). For the sake of simplicity in this paper, I will address only those forms of constructivism that Turner highlights.

  4. Turner labels these statements H and H* but uses the same labels (with different assigned meanings) on p. 147. In order to avoid confusion, I consistently use HR and HC as defined here. Within direct quotations, I place my labels in square brackets.

  5. Jeffares (2010) and Currie (2018) criticize Turner’s assessment of the role of background theories in the historical sciences. In response, Turner (pers. comm.) has softened his position on the “role asymmetry.”

  6. In commenting on a draft of this paper, Turner noted that the issue of mind-independence is rarely if ever raised in scientific debates. I agree. Since the issue is not central to scientific discourse or practice, philosophers of science should not press the issue – unless there are good (local) reasons to do so.

  7. In this passage, Turner focuses on the “distant past” even though his general focus is on “pre-history” (i.e.,more than 5,000 years ago).

  8. This argument against the correspondence theory has been challenged by realists such as Musgrave (1989) and Kitcher (2001). The dispute over the adequacy of the correspondence theory is too large to address in this essay. This is one respect in which I do not offer a full defense of NOA. Rather, my claim is this: given that Fine and Turner both prefer the deflationary approach, if my critique of metaphysical agnosticism is correct, then Turner should move to embrace a position closer to NOA.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Arthur Fine for his support of this project. Thanks also to Derek Turner and the anonymous referees; their comments and suggestions led to significant improvements in the essay.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC, 29424, United States

    Todd Grantham

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Grantham, T. Toward a more natural historical attitude. Euro Jnl Phil Sci 14, 2 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-023-00564-3

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