Paul A. Roth

Hearts of darkness: 'perpetrator history' and why there is no why

Three theories contend as explanations of perpetrator behavior in the Holocaust as well as other cases of genocide: structural, intentional, and situational. Structural explanations emphasize the sense in which no single individual or choice accounts for the course of events. In opposition, intentional/cutltural accounts insist upon the genocides as intended outcomes, for how can one explain situations in which people ‘step up’ and repeatedly kill defenseless others in large numbers over sustained periods of time as anything other than a choice? Situational explanations offer a type of behavioral account; this is how people act in certain environments. Critical to the situational account as I discuss it is the ‘Asch paradigm’, i.e. experimentally attested conditions for eliciting conformityof behavior regardlesss of available evidence of prior beliefs. In what follows, I defend what I term above a version of situational explanations of perpetrator behavior. Moreover, I maintain that the factors that explain provide an understanding as well. While not committed to the complete irrelevance or exclusion of cultural or structural factors, nonetheless situational analyses can account both for what happened and why. A cardinal virtue of this version of situational explanations consists in showing how shallow the problem of understanding turns out to be for such cases.

Ways of pastmaking

Riddles of induction – old or new, Hume’s or Goodman’s – pose unanswered challenges to assumptions that experiences logically legitimate expectations or classifications. The challenges apply both to folk beliefs and to scientific ones. In particular, Goodman’s ‘new riddle’ famously confounds efforts to specify how additional experiences confirm the rightness of currently preferred ways of organizing objects, i.e. our favored theories of what kinds there are.1 His riddle serves to emphasize that neither logic nor experience certifies accepted groupings of objects into kinds.2 Hacking strongly endorses Goodman’s riddle and its chief consequences – nature does not dictate any organizing scheme to us, and different schemes need have no connection to one another.

Truth in Interpretation The Case of Psychoanalysis

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 Spences attempt to deal with the relation of narrative explanations and truth. In his critique of Spences distinction between narrative truth and historical truth, the author develops some suggestions regarding the role of truth in narrative explanations.

Siegel on Naturalized Epistemology and Natural Science

Epistemology in its new setting, conversely, is contained in natural science, as a chapter of psychology. . . We are studying how the human subject of our study posits bodies and projects his physics from his data, and we appreciate that our position in the world is just like his. Our very epistemological enterprise, therefore, and the psychology wherein it is a component chapter, and the whole of natural science wherein psychology is a component book-all this is our own construction or projection from stimulations like those we were meting out to our epistemological subject. There is thus reciprocal containment, though containment in different senses: epistemology in natural science and natural science in epistemology (Quine 1969, p. 83).

Varieties and Vagaries of Historical Explanation

For the better part of the 20th century, expositions of issues regarding historical explanation followed a predictable format, one that took as given the nonequivalence of explanations in history and philosophical models of scientific explanation. Ironically, at the present time, the philosophical point of note concerns how the notion of science has itself changed. Debates about explanation in turn need to adapt to this. This prompts the question of whether anything now still makes plausible the thought that history must make some forced choice with regard to the type of science it is and an associated explanatory form. The discussion that follows sketches the alternative forms of explanation between which historians were to pick, and indicates why each proves unsatisfactory. Examination of these issues allows identification of a conception of historical explanation that does not require the metaphysical and epistemological assumptions that engender previous dichotomous characterizations.

The Full Hempel

Book reviewed in this article: The Logic of Historical Explanation by Clayton Roberts

Naturalism without fears

Publisher Summary Because the standards of science themselves fall within the purview of what the sciences examine, philosophical naturalism locates all putatively distinctive philosophical (for example, normative) issues as continuous with and part of what the sciences study. The sciences, in turn, have no further justification for their ways of proceeding other than what account they provide of their sources and methods. Philosophy, as a naturalist conceives of it, shares with more conventional philosophical approaches a concern to conduct a type of meta-level examination of particular sciences. That is, a philosopher qua naturalist examines, systematizes, and generally seeks to make explicit the rules by which the first order endeavor proceeds, including those circumstances under which the rules of inquiry themselves might be modified. However, a key difference between naturalists and others in formulating and articulating such matters arises from naturalisms commitment to the view that in doing this, philosophy has no special methods or resources other than those that belong to the sciences collectively examined.

Kitcher's Two Cultures

A conception of natural science as primarily politics by other means animates the so-called “science wars.” Ideologists dispute over competing conceptions of scientific rationality or objectivity. On the one hand, debunkers maintain that the hard sciences endorse beliefs that only reflect—sometimes consciously, sometimes not— efforts to legitimate nonscientific interests (typically, ones connected to gaining or maintaining political or social advantage). On the other hand, the “scientific faithful” portray science as providing an undistorted window on the natural world, a perspective almost magically disconnected from social influence. One must laud Philip Kitcher’s ambition in Science, Truth, and Democracy to find a via media between these extremes. Kitcher’s analysis evolves through two broad divisions: “Part I: The Search for Truth,” and “Part II: The Claims of Democracy.” The two divisions fit in the following way. Part I defends scientific inquiry as a search for truth, while acknowledging that what truth is is no simple matter. In particular, the questions for which scientists seek (true) answers themselves reflect interests particular to the place and time of those asking the questions. In this regard, reflections in Part I lead to the conclusion that although science connects with a world not of human making, the pieces with which scientists attempt to connect strongly reflect social and cultural interests. This prepares readers for the discussion in Part II, which asks what constraints on research should be imposed. Not all knowledge is worth having. The constraints that emerge involve those which ideal deliberators would

What does the sociology of scientific knowledge explain?: or, when epistemological chickens come home to roost:

Beginning in the 1950s, philosophical critiques (primarily by positivists themselves or apostates) made plain major conceptual difficulties with the positivist account of natural science and its attendant analysis of rationality. However, absent was a means of translating these problems into creative insights regarding the study of scientific practice. This creative translation arrived in 1962, with the publication of Kuhn’s T’he Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Indeed, effecting this change remains one of that work’s enduring accomplishments. What Kuhn’s work suggested to some social scientists was how the story of belief acquisition, maintenance and change in the natural sciences could be told which safely ignores the encomiums to scientific method by the philosophical orthodoxy.’ By the mid-1970s, new schools of the sociology of scientific knowledge laid claim to the conceptual space created by Kuhn with regard to filling out the

Hayden White and the Aesthetics of Historiography

Ironies pervade debates concerning the nature of historical knowledge. Traditional debates between, e.g., historists and positivists, center on whether or not there are differences in kind between the sort of knowledge produced by the human as opposed to the natural sciences. However, what fuels and perpetuates this ostensible disagreement, I maintain, are problematic assumptions about the nature of knowledge which erstwhile opponents share. Without these shared assumptions, the familiar debate would not be possible. The philosophical challenge regarding the nature of historical knowledge has become one of how to reconfigure the alternatives from those currently envisioned.’ To achieve this reconfiguration, assumptions which structure the present debate on historical knowledge must be rejected. These include at least