Pragmatist Contributions to a New Philosophy of History

Abstract

This work is written from the perspective of a New Philosophy of History (NPH), and as such it is interested in promoting what has come to be known as “linguistic self-awareness” for those of us who are interested in the consequences of our linguistic adoptions – whether from the perspective of history, of memory studies or of philosophy of history. NPH as a movement was born in 1973 with the publication of Hayden White's Metahistory, The Historical Imagination in NineteenthCentury Europe,1 and pursued by Frank Ankersmit, Keith Jenkins and others. During the last forty years it has received criticism on diverse fronts on account of its alleged attack on history. This, in turn, is said to be due to its adoption of linguistic idealism and determinism, which would lead to skepticism regarding historical knowledge. Therefore, it is from the perspective of philosophy of history that I encourage a dialogue with the contributions made by a pragmatist approach to language and knowledge, specifically those born from the reflections on social and historical studies, as is the case with George Mead's Social Behaviorism, and the Strong Programme in the Sociology of Knowledge lead by Barry Barnes, David Bloor and, more recently, Martin Kusch, who have not found a conflict between their sociolinguistic approximation to epistemology and their positive appraisal of history as science. Mead's work has been widely recognized in the sociological research field, and Argentina has been a pioneer at it. Mind, self and society2 was edited in Spanish in 1953 under the supervision of Italian-Argentinean sociologist Gino Germani.3 More recently, it is worth noting the crucial place Jürgen Habermas bestows on Mead in his great work The Theory of Communicative Action. Nevertheless, the consequences of his work for philosophy of history remain unexplored to our day, and are worthy not only of a full article, but also of recognizing Mead as a crucial reference in our century's debates on historical knowledge. On the other hand, the Strong Programme, by pursuing and developing Kuhn's Wittgenstenian roots, has been immensely prolific in its sociological and historical studies of science, but has encountered resistance in the field of philosophy of natural sciences. Just like the New Philosophy of History, it has been accused of favoring an attack on science: yet another form of obscurantism. In this paper, I shall try to show that this dialogue between pragmatism and NPH is not an attack on science, but on a certain form of philosophy engaged in a form of dualism between mind-world or language-reality, individual-society, an engagement which, under a pragmatist light, makes no difference in practice. This dialogue is an invitation to reflect on scientific practice with the same resources with which scientific practice carries its task in creative knowledge.