Towards an Evolutionary Epistemology of History

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Towards an Evolutionary Epistemology of History

Adam TimminsThe University of Manchester

[email protected]

Abstract

What has come to be known as the ‘linguistic turn’ in historical theory over the past forty years or so has finished what the two World Wars began in demolishing the con-fidence that the historical discipline possessed at the turn of the twentieth century. This confidence was most memorably expressed by Lord Acton that one day we would possess ‘ultimate history’. Today most historians are probably more inclined to sub-scribe to Pieter Geyl’s view that history is ‘an argument without end’. Yet the jettisoning of a teleological goal for historical accounts does not mean that we have to also part with the idea of progress; we just need a new definition of it. In this article I argue that we should adopt an evolutionary epistemology of history which sees progress as some-thing pushed from behind, rather than aiming at an undefined point in the future; but this is not the only advantage an evolutionary epistemology can offer us. I go on to outline two further aspects of evolutionary epistemology which may benefit historical theorists.

Keywords

evolutionary epistemology – progress – Thomas Kuhn – philosophy of history – David L Hull

Introduction

The turn of the twentieth century might be described as the golden age of his-torical writing, in the sense that historians were sure that they could access the past unproblematically, and that historiography was making such progress that there would come a point where full and final accounts of every period would exist. Lord Acton famously called this ‘ultimate history’, of which he wrote in

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1906: “we cannot have in this generation; but we can dispose of conventional history, and show the point we have reached on the road from the one to the other.”1 Alas, this was to mark the high point of the historian’s confidence; two world wars swiftly put paid to the era of optimism about mankind’s direction in general, while following the linguistic turn increasing doubt has been cast on the abilities of the historian to recapture the past in anything like its original form.2 The pronouncements of Acton and his other contemporary now sound quaint at best; ludicrously arrogant at worse. Historians have long since jet-tisoned the idea that historical writing has a teleological goal such as ‘truth’ – whatever that may be – or something similar; instead, most are now content to repeat Pieter Geyl’s maxim that “history is an argument without end”.

But does the rejection of the idea that historical writing is progressing towards some ultimate truth or end point mean that we should reject the idea that historiography exhibits any kind of progress? In this essay I will argue that we should replace the idea of a goal orientated historiography – and indeed, historical method for that matter – with an evolutionary model.3 Historical progress should been as something pushed from behind, as opposed to reach-ing towards an indefinable point in the future marked ‘truth’ – which in any case, is not what “common sense would call a goal, for it is neither some-thing we might realise we had reached, nor something to which we might get closer.”4 An evolutionary epistemology is based upon the conjecture that “cog-nitive activities are a product of evolution and selection and that, vice versa, evolution itself is a cognition and knowledge process.”5 An evolutionary epis-temology utilises the concepts of biological evolution to explain the growth of human knowledge; on a very simplistic level, certain theories triumph over others because they are conceptually ‘fitter’ than their competitors.

1 Quoted in Joseph Altholz, “Lord Acton and the Plan of the Cambridge Modern History”, The Historical Journal, Vol. 39, 1996, 726.

2 As Roland Hill puts it, “The century that followed Acton & Creighton has bought such chaos and nightmares to the worked that nothing could seem more remote to the concluding twen-tieth century than Victorian self-confidence and certainties.” Hill, Lord Acton (New Haven; Yale University Press, 2000) 320.

3 A note might be appropriate to track my own entry into evolutionary epistemology: unsur-prisingly, I first came across the idea of an evolutionary epistemology through the later work of Thomas Kuhn; but I have also been heavily influenced by the work of David L. Hull in this field.

4 Richard Rorty, “Is Truth a Goal of Inquiry?” in Truth & Progress: Philosophical Papers Vol. 3 (Cambridge; CUP, 1998) 39.

5 Franz W. Wuketits, “Evolutionary Epistemology: A Challenge to Science & Philosophy” in Wuketits (ed.) Concepts and Approaches in Evolutionary Epistemology (D. Reidel, 1984) 2.

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But utilising an evolutionary epistemology to explain why historiography still has a sense of progress is only a starting point. Over the past few decades, the literary turn in historical their means that epistemology has taken a backside to problems regarding language. Now that we are entering the post- post modernist era however, it may once again be time to turn to how history is actually practised, as opposed to how in would be practised in a counter- factual world. Looking at how historiography has developed since the eighteenth century, I believe an evolutionary epistemology would go a long way towards explaining how and why it has evolved in the way it has. Historiographical evolution and change is process; and it will make sense more if we examine it as such.

Before we go any further, it would probably be best to state exactly what we mean by evolution. Most people have a rough idea of the concept; but it might help to give a brief sketch before we start getting into the technicalities of biol-ogy and an evolutionary epistemology: in particular, the idea of evolution as progress. The eighteenth century saw the birth of the idea of progress, which replaced that of providence – now it came to be believed that humans through their own efforts could improve the lot of mankind.6 Evolution “came in on the back of progress. It was the story of social progress written into the rocks.”7

The progenitor of evolution was of course, Charles Darwin.8 As Michael Ruse points out, if evolution amounted to thinking that all organisms came from a process of natural development from primitive beginnings, then Darwin wasn’t the first evolutionist. What Darwin did do however, “by amass-ing an amazing array of biological facts – behaviour, palaeontology, biogeog-raphy, systematics, morphology, embryology – was make the idea of evolution not simply plausible, but (in the opinion of his contemporaries and thinking people ever since) commonsensical.”9 Additionally, he proposed the mecha-nism of natural selection to account for biological change. More organisms are born than are able to survive and reproduce; hence a struggle for existence takes place in which those that survive do so due to their superior adaptation to their environment.

6 Michael Ruse, “The Philosophy of Evolutionary Theory”, in Aviezer Tucker (ed.) A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography (Wiley Blackwell, 2009), 307.

7 Ibid., 308.8 Of course, it is an anachronism to speak of Darwinism as a single theory: Mayr partitions

‘Darwinism’ into five different theories. See Ernst Mayr, One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought (London: Penguin, 1993), 36–37.

9 Ibid.



The idea of evolution rests on two fundamental principles; everything that is here is something that has become; and the reason that things “become” is through mutation and selection.10 The beginning of the evolutionary pro-cess saw molecules form from the primordial soup, and at some point a self- replicative hypercycle formed; even “for these first life forms, it became necessary for survival to “recognise” substances necessary for self-replication, and later to “recognise” part of oneself in order not to devour oneself.”11 An evolutionary epistemology is inescapably realist.12 As Löw puts it, there is a tendency to talk of “hypothetical realism” in order to avoid “the accusation of being naïve. . . of simply taking the external world naively as our ratiomorphic world-view apparatus presents it.”13 But as R. Kasper succinctly notes, anyone who doubts that the external world is real would be a candidate for section-ing. Ultimately, evolutionary epistemology is about the idea of knowledge as a changing, dynamic process; among other things it is “a theory of the natural conditions under which actual novelty can arise.”14

In a ground-breaking article in the late 1980’s, Michael Bradie identified two distinct strands of evolutionary epistemology: the EEM program and the EET program.15 EEM, is shorthand for Evolutionary Epistemology of Mechanisms; this is the attempt to explain the development of cognitive mechanisms via evolutionary theory. The second acronym, EET, is the attempt to use an evo-lutionary model to analyse the growth of knowledge. It is the second branch of evolutionary epistemology this paper concerns itself with. My argument is that the growth of history as a discipline should be best understood on an evolutionary analogy. That is to say, the practise of history, and the sub-areas/disciplines of historical writing within it, is something that has grown from primitive beginnings into the complexly organised discipline that it is today. Furthermore, the direction that historical methodology and writing has taken is not random, but rather, has done so because the discipline of history has become ‘fitter’. I hope to fully outline and explore the implications of an evolutionary epistemology in a book length work in the future; for now I will

10 Reinhard Löw – “The Metaphysical Limits of Evolutionary Epistemology”, Wuketits (ed.) Concepts and Approaches in Evolutionary Epistemology, 210.

11 Ibid. 12 After a fashion anyway – see A.J. Clark – “Evolutionary Epistemology and Ontological

Realism”, The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 34, 1984, 482–490. 13 Ibid., 212.14 Ibid., 226.15 Michael Bradie, “Assessing Evolutionary Epistemology”, Biology and Philosophy, Vol. 1,

1986, 401.

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concentrate on a few aspects of the subject. First, I will look at the idea of historical writings as a process as driven from behind as opposed to aiming towards something. Then I will turn to the idea of speciation in historical writ-ing, before turning to the idea of competition and credit. The idea of the latter in evolutionary epistemology is closely aligned to the idea of demes, which is what we will finish upon before our concluding remarks.

Pulling not Pushing

Traditionally, scientists and scientific enquiry has aimed at ‘the truth’. not only is this somewhat vague, but makes little sense: how can we aim towards an end goal if we do not know what it is? As Richard Rorty put it, truth “is not what common sense would call a goal, for it is neither something we might realise we had reached, nor something to which we might get closer.” The idea of a lack of goal would seem to tie in with an evolutionary epistemology; evolu-tion does not aim towards anything; rather, it is the result of blind variation. The “very essence of modern-day Neo-Darwinist theory is that it is not pro-gressive – “it is not going anywhere – it has no goal, whether it is realisable or not.”16 There are some however, that have made a case that biology does indeed progress – “that the evolution of the higher plants and animals constitutes an advance, on the grounds that the plants and animals in question are more complex than their ancestors and are capable of surviving under a greater vari-ety of conditions.”17 Also, scientists have not been keen to give up on the idea of realism, and certainly not in favour of random selection. This mirrors some of the opposition Darwin himself faced – his arguments for evolution were accepted fairly quickly, but his arguments for natural selection encountered an enormous amount of resistance.18 People were prepared to accept that species evolved; but were not so willing to give on the idea of teleology.

In some of his later writings, Thomas Kuhn addressed the idea of evolutionary epistemology, in particular the idea of an evolutionary conception of scientific progress. Kuhn argued that we should view science as a process driven from

16 Michael Ruse, “Does Evolutionary Epistemology Imply Realism?” in Nicholas Rescher (ed.), Evolution, Cognition and Realism: Studies in Evolutionary Epistemology (Lanham: University of America Press, 1990), 103.

17 Alan Holland and Anthony O’Hear, “On What Makes an Evolutionary Epistemology”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, Vol. 58, 180–181.

18 Michael Ruse also makes this point. See Ruse, “The Philosophy of Evolutionary Theory”, 311–312.



behind rather than aiming towards something – “a process of evolution from primitive beginnings – a process whose successive stages are characterized by an increasingly detailed and refined understanding of nature”19 Rejecting the idea that science is moving towards a goal set by nature in advance does not mean that the scientific process is meaningless or directionless: on the con-trary as science progresses we are learning about the world in more and more depth. The difference is that in an evolutionary view of science, scientists are reacting to what has gone before. The problems “that scientists are expected to address are defined by the work of their predecessors and peers.”20 The data they are expected to account for are developed by their predecessors, as are the concepts and instruments that they use. Even when a new theory arises, this too is grounded in the past, as it will usually be generated in response to an anomaly that arose in its predecessor. In this respective, science is backward-looking: ‘backward looking’ is normally a pejorative term, but need not be in this case.21

What Kuhn is trying to emphasise is the tradition-bound nature of science. When Newton developed his physical theories, he was not trying to antici-pate quantum theory; rather, he was concerned with the goals of his prede-cessors – “understanding the behaviour of falling bodies, pendulums, motion propagated through fluids, projectiles, and orbiting planets and satellites.”22 Scientific change is best understood a response to science’s current state, as opposed to reaching for the undefined goal of the ‘truth’, or the world as it ‘really is’. This also ties into Kuhn’s views on scientific discovery – the “opera-tions and measurements that a scientist undertakes in the laboratory are not “the given” of experience but rather “the collected with difficulty.”23 It is not a case that everything we have learned about nature was just waiting ‘out there’ to be found. Discovery in science is constrained by the existing theories of the time, and “conceptual, mathematical, and instrumental resources often need to be developed and refined in order to complete the discovery process.”24

19 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago Press, 1962), 170. I should also cite here K Brad Wray’s Kuhn’s Evolutionary Social Epistemology (CUP, 2011) – Wray is one of the first writers to try and tie Kuhn’s scattered writings on evolu-tionary epistemology together, and this was one of the first points of contacts I had with evolutionary epistemology.

20 Wray, Kuhn’s Evolutionary Social Epistemology, 113.21 Ibid.22 Ibid. 114.23 Kuhn, Structure, 136.24 Wray, Kuhn’s Evolutionary Social Epistemology, 114–15.

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It is not so different with history. Does it really make sense to say that we are aiming for ‘the truth’ when we put together our historical accounts? As noted earlier, historians nowadays tend to subscribe to Geyl’s maxim that history is “an argument without end.” Perhaps so; but this does not mean histo-riography is simply a meaningless succession of accounts – or, as Elton bluntly put it, “one damn thing after another.”25 If one looks at any stretch of histo-riography, the historical writing in it has clearly made progress. Later works supersede earlier ones in any field – the primary example that springs to mind is the Russian Revolution. As Hobsbawm noted in one of his lectures, the col-lapse of the USSR and the gradual opening of the Russian archives meant that a lot of the existing Cold War history became irrelevant. For instance, the work of Robert Conquest will be read as “a remarkable pioneer effort to assess the Stalin terror, but one which has inevitably become obsolete.”26

So then, scientists compare their theories with those of their predecessors: Einstein did not compare his theories with the ‘world-in-itself ’ (although that is not to say the world-in-itself did not play a role in them – but this is an issue we need not get bogged down with here); he compared them with Newton’s. Similarly, historians’ measure their accounts against those of their predeces-sors. Any historian writing on Hitler must take into account works by the likes of Ian Kershaw; and if his/her contribution is to make any headway, it must address something that these previous accounts did not. Like science then, we should see historiography as a process that has moved away from primitive beginnings, rather than towards an indefinite goal. As time has progressed, we have gained a greater understanding and more detailed accounts in most areas of historical research. This is largely due to the process of speciation.

Speciation

One of the key elements in Kuhn’s later work on an evolutionary model of sci-ence was the idea of speciation. In one of his final papers, Kuhn stated that in his (alas never completed) forthcoming book, the break between normal and revolutionary science would emerge as “a distinction between develop-ments that do and developments that don’t require local taxonomic change.”27 After a scientific revolution, there are always more cognitive specialties than

25 Geoffrey Elton, The Practise of History (CUP, 1967), 36.26 Eric Hobsbawm, “Can We Write History of the Russian Revolution?”, in On History

(London, Abacus, 1998).27 Kuhn, “The Road Since Structure”, reprinted in The Road Since Structure (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1977), 97.



there were before. Either “a new branch has split off from the parent trunk, as scientific specialties have repeatedly split off in the past from philosophy and from medicine. Or else a new specialty has been born at an area of appar-ent overlap between two prexisiting specialties, as occurred, for example, in the cases of physical chemistry and molecular biology.”28 Any cursory study of the history of science bears out the idea of increasingly speciation. One study noted that in 1911, there were 19 specialties in physics; the number had increased to 100 in 1954, and by 1970 there were 205.29

When speciation occurs, the branch that breaks off gradually acquires its own journals, its own professional society, and even new university chairs and departments. With “much reluctance” Kuhn increasingly came to feel that this process of specialization, “with its consequent limitation on communica-tion and community, is inescapable, a consequence of first principles.”30 For revolutions are like much like speciation in biology: as opposed to mutation, which is a parallel Kuhn toyed with using, but ultimately dropped. It is difficult to identify an episode of speciation until sometime after it has occurred, and even then scientists are hard pressed to date the time of its occurrence; simi-larly, we usually only identify a scientific revolution long after the event, with the benefit of historical perspective.

Like science, the evolution of the historical discipline can be characterised as being a process of increasing specialization. At the time of the professional-ization of history, there were three forms of historical writing: political, diplo-matic and ecclesiastical – and the demarcation lines between them were not always obvious. The late nineteenth century saw the emergence of economic, social history and cultural history; while the post-war period in the twentieth century has seen an explosion of speciality offshoots. How did these speciali-ties come about? Let us examine the birth of one of them. The emergence of economic history can be traced to more than one factor. The first involved a schism in economic theory between economists who favoured an ahistori-cal approach to the subject, and those who felt that history still had a role to play, perhaps best exemplified by the dispute in Germany between the his-torical school of economics and the neo-classicists. But as Breisach puts it, their dispute did not so much bring about the divorce between economic theory and economic history as making visible to all a schism which had been apparent for a while.31 In America too, the union between the American

28 Ibid. 29 Wray, Kuhn’s Evolutionary Social Epistemology, 117.30 Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, Modern (Chicago; University of Chicago

Press, 1983), 299.31 Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, Modern, 299.

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Historical Association and the American Economic Association came to an end when the latter decided they decided that economic theory was not sub-ject to the contingent whims of Clio.

Meanwhile, John Tosh feels that the rise of economic – and social history for that matter – can be traced to the major social and economic transformations that were taking place in Western Society, transformations “which historical study as then practised was manifestly incapable of explaining.”32 Certainly this appeared to be the motivation behind the turn towards economic history in the American Historical Profession; the ‘New American Historians’ were searching for what they considered to be the “real” forces that were shaping American society.33 But they did not write what we might call ‘pure’ economic history; rather, economic history was mixed with social history in works such as Carl Beard’s Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. Another key factor was the public interest in reading economic explanation; “the public was interested in reading books about the origins of capitalism, the history of the Industrial Revolution and its many faces, the history of great merchants and commercial adventurers.”34

Finally, one must take note of the publication of works by Karl Marx; but ini-tially “history professors paid little attention to Marx’s interpretation of history, and only a few scholars in other fields took up Marxist theory to expound upon it or criticise it.”35 The American historian E.R.A. Seligman was an admirer of Marx, but he probably spoke for many when he stated that as a philosophical doctrine historical materialism could no longer be defended, but “in the nar-rower sense of the economic interpretation of history . . . the theory has been, and still is, of considerable significance.”36

Even in sub-fields of historical writing, we see the effect of speciation. Take for instance, the area I use as a kind of historiographical laboratory, the ori-gins of the Second World War.37 When history first started to be written on the subject, it generally centred around two topics: Hitler’s alleged plan for world domination, and the failings – personal and political – of the appeasers. The appearance of Taylor’s Origins of the Second World War and other revisionist accounts saw a broadening of the topics that had to be taken into consider-

32 Tosh, The Pursuit of History, 125–126.33 Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, Modern, 300.34 Lutz Raphael, “ ‘Experiments in Modernization’: Social and Economic History in Europe

and the United States 1840–1940” in The Oxford History of Historical Writing Vol. 4, 98.35 Ibid., 297. 36 Quoted in Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, Modern 300. 37 See also my “Kuhnian Consensus and Historiography”, Journal for the Philosophy of

History, Vol. 7, 2013, 82–105.



ation: long term trends in both German and British foreign policy; the role of French diplomacy in the run-up to the war; and a reassessment of appease-ment as a strategy. In turn, the emergence of the counter-revisionist school saw the sprouting of further areas of investigation: the impact of British domestic concerns on foreign policy; the role of the press and public opinion; an exami-nation of rearmament process; and a look at the role the dominions played. And so on.

Is this fragmentation a bad thing? It would appear many historians think so. Perez Zagorin bemoaned the “fragmentation of the historical discipline into an ever-increasing number of highly specialized areas whose detailed results remain unintegrated into a more comprehensive vision and understanding of the past is a . . . very serious problem.”38 In a sense he is correct, in that there must be room for what J.H. Hexter called ‘parachutists’ as well as ‘truffle hunt-ers’ in historical writing. But, regrettable though it ultimately might be, frag-mentation is the price we pay in historical writing for being able to investigate the past in a detail which we might not otherwise have been able to achieve. To use the words of John Ziman, it is a matter of “knowing more and more about less and less.”39 Indeed, one of the strong points of evolutionary theory is that it explains how “organised complexity can come out of primeval simplicity.”40 Since its development as a discipline, history has proceeded from being meth-odologically a fairly simple affair – a scrupulous study of the facts will reveal one underlying interpretation – to being an extremely complex undertaking, with historians having to grapple with all sorts of philosophical and episte-mological questions that Acton or Ranke could never have dreamed of. Yet far from the increasing problematisation of historical study signalling its impend-ing doom as postmodernists would have you believe, it is actually a fairly commonplace evolutionary occurrence.

So speciation occurs on a fairly frequently basis in the historical profession, as in science. But what happens within these niches that develop?

Demes and Competition

Competition is an inevitable part of academic life. There are only a certain number of berths available, and in order to get the top jobs – or indeed any academic job for that matter – one must outstrip ones competitors. As

38 Perez Zagorin, “History, The Referent, and Narrative”, History & Theory, Vol. 38, 1999, 11.39 John Ziman, Knowing Everything About Nothing (Cambridge; CUP, 1987). 40 Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (London; Penguin, 1991), 316.

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well as practical rewards for the individual’s efforts, there is also the spur of recognition – academics, like most people, get a boost from seeing their achievements acknowledge for their own sake. Indeed, Thomas Kuhn argued that this satisfaction in successfully completing their work – which he referred to as ‘puzzle-solving’ – what was drove most scientists regardless of pecuniary considerations. Paradoxically however, in order to function successfully a disci-pline requires co-operation, its practitioners build upon each other’s work. For instance, this paper could not have been written without reference to a large number of articles and books – and when we use another academic’s work we rely on said information to be accurate. But how is the tension between co-operation and competition managed?

In Science as a Process, David Hull argued that that science possesses a demic structure. In evolutionary biology, a deme is a small, isolated, interbreeding population which shares a gene pool. Evolution occurs more slowly in large panmictic populations, but progresses more quickly in small populations iso-lated from the species (hence Hull agrees with Kuhn about the merits of spe-ciation). Ideally, a deme will consist of organisms “in sufficient proximity to each other that they all have equal probably of mating with each other and producing offspring, provided they are sexually mature, of the opposite sex, and equivalent with respect to sex selection.”41 If these conditions are met, then the organisms in a deme will share the same gene pool. Sometimes, in natural populations, some mating occurs between adjacent demes, and not all organ-isms within a deme can mate – but by and large, the isolation between demes is often obtained sufficiently in order for demes to play an important role in biological evolution.

The analogy with science is that scientists are organisms – they attempt to pass on their genes. The replicators in science are not genes however, but rather, “elements of the substantive content of science – beliefs about the goals of science, proper ways to go about realising these goals, problems and their possible solutions, modes of representation, accumulating data, and so on.”42 All of these entities get passed on via conversations, lectures and publications; the ‘vehicles’ of transmission for this conceptual replication are books, journals computers, and of course, the human brain. In biological evolution, chunks of genetic material are the primary replicators; they pass on information con-tained in their structures as well as functioning as interactors in the production of more inclusive interactors. Conceptual replicators “cannot interact directly with that portion of the natural world to which they ostensible refer. Instead,

41 David L. Hull, Science as a Process (University of Chicago Press, 1988), 434.42 Ibid., 434.



they interact only indirectly through scientists.”43 Genes produce organisms; but ideas do not produce scientists. That said, ideas do influence the way sci-entists behave – scientists notice problems and attempt to solve them; thus becoming the primary interactors in the conceptual development of science.

Scientists do not confront the world as isolated individuals; they use each other’s ideas, pass them on, and attempt to improve them. Most progress in science occurs through recombination. Occasionally, a novel idea will crop up; but by and large, scientists attempt to find combinations of idea to produce explanations of natural phenomena; these replications sequences also pass through other scientists, who repeat the process. As well as intellectual inter-ests, scientists have other interests. Previously these interests – social, politi-cal etc. – would have been classed as ‘extra-scientific’; but now they are taken to be an inextricable part of the scientific process. Hull argues that science is a social process; but in the sense that the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK) movement does. The social processes most relevant are usually con-nected with science itself.

In biological reproduction there is a tension between competition and co-operation. On one hand, scientists would get nowhere if they did not co-oper-ate with each other, as their work necessarily involves building on the work of others. Similarly, in a deme, there is an incentive to be co-operative instead of competitive in a reproductive sense – if ones sister or cousin produces off-spring, then one shares “the genetic glory since a significant number of my genes are successfully reproduced.”44 But also key to science is the aspect of competitiveness. In science, recognition is the mark of success – of inclusive conceptual fitness. To have one’s ideas pass the tribunal of one’s peers and rec-ognised as one’s own is the goal that scientists aim for; the reason they aim for this is the chance of fame; unknown precursors do not count in science. Hull writes of Mendel that his “main problem was that he was too humble: a couple of papers, a couple of letters to a famous colleague and that was that.”45 Recognition alone contributes to conceptual survival; and recognition nearly always rests on contributing something new, regardless of how much it builds on the work of others. The “overall success of science is built upon this tension between the greed of the individual scientist for total credit and the scientists fear that if he or she does not connect his or her work with that of others by

43 Ibid., 434.44 Eugenie Gatens Robinson, “Why Falsification Is the Wrong Paradigm for Evolutionary

Epistemology: An Analysis of Hull’s Selection Theory”, Philosophy of Science, Vol. 60, No. 4, 1993, 545.

45 Hull, Science as a Process, 363.

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rapid publication and citing the work of colleagues, his or her own work will not find support.”46 Paradoxically, the reason scientists do not falsify data in order to get ahead is because scientists largely build upon each other’s work. Fraudulent work would lead to a decline in conceptual fitness, and possibly extinction; so co-operation is forced by the mutual dependence scientists have on each other.

The sum total of interdemic competition and co-operation leads to a kind of objectivity for science as a whole. Moreover, what we might describe as bad or unedifying behaviour by scientists is actually a functional part of ensuring sci-entific progress. Although “objective knowledge through bias and commitment sounds as paradoxical as bombs for peace”, Hull believes that “the existence and ultimate rationality of science can be explained in terms of jealousy, bias and irrationality.”47 From his own field Hull provides the example of the heated controversy between the cladists and the pheneticists in taxonomy.

As with scientists, historians are organisms in the sense that we are trying to pass things down to the next generation through various means and methods – journal and conference papers, through teaching, and correspondence with other historians to name but three vehicles. If we want to understand why the bulk of Rankeanism has survived well into the twenty-first century, the idea of conceptual fitness might not be a bad place to start. Successive generations of historians have clearly though that these precepts were worth passing down, ‘replicating’, to use evolutionary epistemological parlance. The vehicles for this replication are largely the same as in science – books, journals, lectures, con-ferences, and soforth.

Even more so than scientists, historians cannot interact directly with that portion of the natural world to which they refer in their works. That said, this does not mean that ‘the-past-in-itself ’ plays no part in the work that the his-torian produces. Rather, the past-in-itself is constructed indirectly through historians. And just as science involves the recombination of ideas, so much historical innovation comes from the recombination what is already known. Of course, we discover new facts in many areas, and these will incorporated into subsequent accounts. But take something like the origins of the First World War. We probably know as much about the five weeks that preceded the outbreak of war as we ever will. Yet debate among historians about the causes of the war will continue, with each of them putting together various combinations of facts in the hope of reaching a coherent and comprehensive

46 Gatens-Robinson, “Why Falsification is the Wrong Paradigm for Evolutionary Epistemol-ogy”, 546.




explanation; and even if the sum total of facts (to put it crudely) remains the same, undoubtedly new combinations will continue to be tried.

Historians must also navigate a tension between competition and co- operation. On one hand historians within the same historiographical niche need to co-operate. Not only on an intellectual level – for instance, this essay would not have been possible without building upon the works of others – but also on a personal level. By personal, I mean interacting with other histori-ans on a professional/social level – for instance, others looking at each other’s articles and making suggestions, and so on. It is this interdependence on each that to an extent compels co-operation – we resist the temptation to cut cor-ners and fabricate our work on the basis that if others did the same it would invalidate our own work – therefore we too must play our part. But we are also competitors. Only a certain number can rise to the top of the tree; and for reasons of personal/professional pride as well as social/financial incentives, we want this to be us. We want to get ahead of our competitors; but we do so within the prescribed rules and norms of the game, and these do not preclude being personable to one’s competition – the analogy of Richard I and Saladin, who would exchanges fruit and medicines while at war with each other, is per-haps appropriate.

Survival and Fair Play

One of the key things in the set-up of science is how the credit practises of scientists are built into the discipline of science itself; or to put it another way, “makes intelligently selfish, venal, and fame-greedy scientists report their own findings honestly (albeit selectively) and to be generous in citing the works of others.”48 Being ‘on the make’ is usually regarded as a bad thing; but in science it can be (although not always) compatible with success: if ever there was an example of a scientist on the make, it was James D. Watson – who subsequently co-discovered DNA.49

The traditional image of the scientist of course, that of someone on a disin-terested quest for knowledge. As Noretta Koertege admits, before reading Hull’s account this is a view she had subscribed to: citations were there “to direct the interested reader to a place where they can get additional information on the subject. Who did the experiment or formulated the theory is “really” not very important, although it does provide a way of assigning responsibility for

48 Donald T. Campbell, “Epistemological Roles for Selection Theory”, in Nicholas Rescher (ed.), Evolution, Cognition and Realism: Studies in Evolutionary Epistemology, 12.


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bad work.”50 Striving for recognition is supposed to be a process peripheral to the process of science. But in an evolutionary reading of science, being a suc-cessful scientist is likely to enhance survival and reproduction: and “increasing one’s conceptual inclusive fitness in science means increasing the number of replicates of one’s contributions in the work of successive generations of other citations.”51

This was not always the case though. In its early history, science was extremely secretive, on the basis that it grew out of things like wizardry – alchemists “kept their knowledge as secret as possible because only in this way could they benefit from it.”52 Some way had to found of getting scientists to share their findings with fellow scientists – without such sharing, science would not be cumulative. And as Koertge points out, this thirsting after new knowledge and taking credit for it is something that is peculiar to academia. After all, “there are educated adults, many of them excellent college teachers, whose active curiosity makes them life-long readers of ‘Great Books’ but who have few aspirations to make novel contributions. Satisfying one’s personal curiosity does not insure communal progress.”53 Therefore we must reject the idea that it is somehow ‘natural’ to want to solve problems and get credit for it.

The point is however, that though scientists have the same mundane ambi-tions and dreams as the rest of us, this does not mean that their activities should have no special cognitive status as a result. It is a case of making sure that the proximate rewards available to scientists reward the ultimate aim of science.54 In other professions there is something of a disconnect between the success structure and the internal aims of the profession – politics is the obvious example.55 One of the more heartening things about science though, is that although it is possible to do good by doing well, many scientists – although naturally they want credit what they do achieve – do what they do for the most part because they enjoy it. As anyone who has read Plastic Fantastic will know, it can be spectacularly easy to fabricate things and get away with it in science.56 But the majority of scientists would feel somewhat uneasy about doing so.

50 Noretta Koertge, “The Function of Credit in Hull’s Evolutionary Model of Science”, PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, Vol. 1990, Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers (1990), 238.

51 Hull, Science as a Process, 283.52 Ibid., 322–23. 53 Koertge, “The Function of Credit in Hull’s Evolutionary Model of Science”, 239–240.54 Ibid., 240.55 Ibid. 56 See Eugenie Samuel Reich, Plastic Fantastic: How The Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook The

Scientific World (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).



Just like science, history is a cumulative enterprise. One of the key steps history took in its professionalization was the establishment of the footnote.57 Footnotes had existed prior to the professionalization of history of course; but, as Gibbon showed, they tended more often than not to be used for entertain-ment. Since the professionalization of history though, each “serious work of history must now travel, like a tank, on indestructible documentary treads. Failure to live up to this ideal of discovery and presentation brought disaster to such adherents of traditional method (or the absence of method) as Froude-who gave his name, like Holland, to a recognizable disease.”58 Historians generally use footnotes for two reasons: to show support for their own work, and to also show they have mastered the literature in the field. Like scientists, historians behave in ways designed to encourage other historians to use their work, and conversely, the best thing one historian can do for another is to use their work – with explicit acknowledgement of course.59

As with science, the historian’s motives are largely selfish – but this selfish-ness ends up working in most cases for the good of history. The reason I have spent the best part of this morning working on this article, as well as countless other hours, is that I want to get it published. In theory, publication will bring my work to the attention of a wider audience, which will certainly do my pros-pects in academia no harm. In order to get published, I must produce a piece of work that is classed as an original contribution to historical knowledge. Any process that spurs historians to try and write good history can only be good for the profession as a whole, even if the motives aren’t quite as pure as we would perhaps like.

So we co-operate with other historians, but we are also competitors. We teach our undergraduates that the historical enterprise is all about co-operation and getting on with ones colleagues; a myth that a month work-ing in any university history department will quickly dispel. Perhaps the term that best describes the relationship historians have with each other is “friendly hostile co-operation” – a term originally coined by Popper. When we do co-operate with others, we tend to do so because it usually in our interests to do so. If a post-graduate student is asked to collaborate on an article with his/her supervisor, they will usually do so on the basis that it does not do to say no to their supervisor on such matters, even if it means putting in most of the work. Similarly, interaction and debate with other historians can be extremely fruitful in developing one’s ideas.

57 The key work here is Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (London; Faber, 1997).58 Anthony Grafton, “The Footnote from De Thou to Ranke”, History & Theory, Vol. 33, No. 4,

1994, 60.59 For the parallel in science, see Hull, Science as a Process, 310.

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Like in science, early historians worked largely on their theories in isolation. Ranke never discussed his theories or writing with other historians, although he was happy to co-operate with them in organising conferences and so forth. This was in the days when historical writing was still a largely individual enter-prise; many of the historical journals did not start to make their appearance until the latter part of the nineteenth century, and so did not have a wealth of monographs to keep up with.

The idea of the role of co-operation and credit brings into play the role of social elements in both science and history. The recognition that there is undoubtedly a social element to science (mainly inspired inadvertently by Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions), which gave rise to a movement that came to be known as the aforementioned SSK movement. Proceeding in classic fashion to decide that the baby was superfluous as well as the bathwater, they argued that all developments in science could be explained by social – or ‘external’ reasons – at the expense of internal one’s. This of course, is nonsense. As Hull puts it, science “quite obviously proceeds in a “social context”; it could not possible exist in total isolation from the rest of society. It is also true that science itself exhibits social organisation . . . Studying the world we live in is a social process, but from this platitude it does not follow that our knowledge of the world is socially determined.”60

And so it is the case with history. But that said, not enough study has been made into the sociology of history and the historical profession: and it is a gaping lacuna in the work of most postmodernist historical theorists. It is a gap that stems from the tendency to take as the starting point of their analyses the finished product of a work of history, thus ignoring it’s actual production.61 Elsewhere I have argued that we need something like a sociology of history in order to investigate aspects like those set out in the above – what might be termed the murkier aspects of historical epistemology, but aspects that nonetheless play a key role in how we constructs our accounts and arrive at conclusions about the evidence.

Conclusion

In this article I have sought to make the case for adopting an evolutionary epis-temological approach to the study of history. Such an effort must be seen as part of a wider project to bring epistemology back into history in general. Much

60 Hull, Science as a Process, 14–15. 61 See Herman Paul, “Performing History”, History & Theory, Vol. 50, 2011, 1–19.



recent philosophy of history has been what we might call negative-prescriptive – telling us what history cannot achieve on the basis of theory, with little refer-ence to actual historical practise.62 An evolutionary epistemology seeks to be descriptive: as Frank Ankersmit put it recently, “philosophers of history need to take what historians actually do as their starting point, and move on from there.”63 Evolutionary epistemology does not seek to “establish necessary and sufficient conditions for something to count as knowledge” – rather, it “seeks to characterise how what we take to be knowledge has arisen.”64

Of course, the irony is that one of the criticisms of evolutionary epistemol-ogy in science has been that it fails to sufficient address the tension between descriptive and normative functions. David Hull argued with regards to that any normative claims that he makes in Science as a Process, “if urging the use of successful methods amounts to epistemology, then my concerns are “epistemological”, but only in the most anaemic sense of the term.”65 However, Gatens-Robinson argues that “he cannot have this hedge”, for if he is aiming at approximating the laws of nature, then “he has built normativity into his account from the outset.”66 This is also a tension in my account that will need to be addressed at some point. However, at this point we can say that it fulfils a descriptive element, which is something that has been lacking from philoso-phy of history in the past few decades. It also puts epistemology back at the forefront of the philosophy of history, after a period where all such questions have been neglected in favour of literary readings of historical texts.

In summary then, I believe that an evolutionary epistemology of history will give us a greater understanding of how the historical profession has devel-oped the norms it has; will help us to better understand how we construct our accounts; and how the discipline can move forward in the coming years. This paper is but a start though; much more work needs to be done on the subject, but hopefully it will give others food for thought.

62 The work of Keith Jenkins is a prime example of this.63 Frank Ankersmit, Meaning, Truth and Reference in Historical Representation (Stanford:

University of Stanford Press, 2012), 114. 64 William Bechtel, “Towards Making Evolutionary Epistemology into a Truly Naturalised

Epistemology”, in Rescher (ed.), Evolution, Cognition and Realism: Studies in Evolutionary Epistemology, 63.

65 Hull, Science as a Process, 13. 66 Gatens-Robinson, “Why Falsification is the Wrong Paradigm for Evolutionary

Epistemology”, 548.

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Towards an Evolutionary Epistemology of History

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