Philosophy of the Social Sciences

Nearly thirty years after the first stirrings of the Kuhnian revolution, history and philosophy of science continues to galvanize methodological discussions in all corners of the academy except its own. Evidence for this domestic stagnation appears in Warren Schmaus's thoughtful review of Social Epistemology in which Schmaus takes for granted that history of science is the ultimate court of appeal for disputes between philosophers and sociologists. As against this, this essay argues that such disputes may be better treated by experimental psychology. Humanistic methods typically (though not always) blind the historian to cognitive biases and limitations that make it difficult for philosophers and sociologists to mobilize historical research for settling their differences. It is also observed that the failure of philosophers to incorporate the methods and findings of experiemental psychology is symptomatic of an artificially restrictive understanding of the normative dimension of their enterprise.

This article explores and attempts to resolve some issues that arise when psychoanalytic explanations are construed as a type of historical or narrative explanation. The chief problem is this: If one rejects the claim of narratives to verisimilitude, this appears to divorce the notion of explanation from that of truth. The author examines, in particular, Donald Spence's attempt to deal with the relation of narrative explanations and truth. In his critique of Spence's distinction between narrative truth and historical truth, the author develops some suggestions regarding the role of truth in narrative explanations.