Philosophy of Science and the History of the Humanities
abstract for the 34th Dutch-Flemish Day of Philosophy
Floris Solleveld
Radboud University Nijmegen
“Progress” is a contested notion in the philosophy of science. Both the idea of a linear increase of
knowledge and of a scientific revolution have been criticized as “whiggish”; that is, doing injustice to
the past by measuring it against the present. Still, the implication that there would be no significant
increase in knowledge functions in the debate as a conclusion or reductio ad absurdum from certain
theoretical positions rather than as an empirical observation. There is, obviously, a discrepancy
between a methodological historicism and the local historical description of observations and
discoveries.
My aim in this presentation is to put this dilemma in the history and philosophy of science in a new
light by transporting it into the domain of the humanities. A few authors (Bickendorf, Leerssen,
Carhart) have spoken of a “scientific revolution” or “paradigm shift” in art history, philology and “the
science of culture”, but there has been no systematic discussion to date of what such notions would
mean in the humanities.
Ever since Descartes, scholars in the humanities have been accused of replicating bookish knowledge
and building paper castles rather than contributing to the increase of knowledge. This rhetoric comes
not only from outside, but has been reproduced by consecutive generations of scholars rejecting the
work of their predecessors, as a way of tearing down paper castles in order to build anew. These
ruptures are not merely rhetorical, but come with new domain definitions, new styles of reasoning
and new forms of presentation. In short, this type of criticism is part of the reorganization of
knowledge.
But how radical are these ruptures , really? For lack of strictly defined units and measures, there
cannot be radical “incommensurability” in the humanities; hence there can be no “paradigm shifts”
in the strict Kuhnian sense. Rather, I will argue, one should look at changing ways in which
information is transformed into knowledge. New insights and new forms of analysis only lead to a
substantial increase of knowledge if a sustained argument can be built from them, if they combine
with new ways of organizing and presenting information to make accumulation possible. It is not
enough to know something; knowledge only qualifies as knowledge if it is presented as such.
In this presentation, I will outline an integrated approach to how information is transformed into
knowledge. This approach covers 1) the arrangement of information through styles of reasoning [cf.
Hacking, Historical Ontology (2002)] 2) forms of presentation and how they reflect different
epistemic virtues [cf. Daston and Galison, Objectivity (2007)] ; 3) the scrutiny of information through
different ways of criticism; and 4) the re-use and reformulation of information through various types
of intertextuality. My presentation focuses on the first two and discusses to what extent Hacking’s
“styles of reasoning” and Daston’s “epistemic virtues” are overlapping, complementary, or conflicting
categories. Against Hacking’s strict taxonomy, I argue for an essentially open conception of “styles of
reasoning”. The virtue of such an approach is that that it allows for both progress and ruptures, so
that one can be whiggish without being anachronistic.
Biography
Floris Solleveld (1982) is a PhD student at Radboud University Nijmegen and guest researcher at the
University of Amsterdam working on the project How the Humanities turned Scientific: Ideals and
Practices of Scholarship between Enlightenment and Romanticism. His other research interests
include theory choice in linguistics and current developments in higher arts education. Additionally,
he makes illustrations and writes on avant-garde music and interdisciplinary art for several online
media.