In a recent paper “Selection, presentism, and pluralist history” (2022), Hakob Barseghyan discusses presentism from the perspective of selection criteria in historiography, i.e. how to choose what events, phenomena, processes, and so on are studied in historiography. Barseghyan argues that there are three basic criteria neither of which is essentially presentist. Barseghyan argues that the usefulness and problems in the criteria are also separate from the question of presentism.
In this post, I discuss the criteria and argue that presentism still has benefits that make it a preferable position, even if it is not the sole position one can adopt. I argue that the presentist reading of the criteria is the preferable way to identify a historiographical field, a coordinated study of some aspect of history. This is what presentism is about. It is an answer to the question of what unifies (or should unify) a historiographical field. It is not (directly) an answer to the question of what particular historical occurrences should be studied. One may study whatever occurrences one wishes. However, the contribution that any study of a particular occurrence makes to our total understanding of history depends on its connections to other historical studies and further uses outside historiography. Therefore, it is important to understand what selection criteria define a historiographical field because the historiographical field connects together and unifies the isolated studies of historical occurrences and shows them in the frame of a more general historical whole. For example, I have argued that historiography of science (a historiographical field) should be understood as the study of the causal history of the present science because science matters to us and because causal understanding provides historical understanding of science (Virmajoki 2022). The claim is not that every individual historian should study the events that causally contributed to the present science. The claim is that if historiography of science is to matter as a field for us, then we study the causal history of the present science. The causal backbone coordinates the field and guarantees historical understanding.
Now, let¨s turn to the criteria.
The first criterion is selection by actor intentionality. This criterion is formulated most strongly by Cunningham (1988). According to this criterion
“A historical fact (activity, event, idea, etc.) falls within the domain of the history of X if its actors practiced the intentional activity X” (Barseghyan, 63).
This criterion has its benefits: It allows us to steer clear from categorizing the actions of past actors incorrectly and to avoid mistakenly judging them for not achieving something they did not intend to do. Aristotle, for example, did not have the intention to produce mathematical physics and so we should not judge him on those terms. The criterion is supposedly not essentially presentist. While we can classify intentional activities in terms of intentions similar to one that the present-day actors have, this does not have to be the case. We can equally well study activities that are centered around intentions that no one has anymore.
The problem is that the criterion of intention is a non-sequitur. It collapses into similarity-based criterion, (i.e. a criterion according to which some historical activity was A only if it resembled the current A). For example, consider science. Suppose that the claim is that historical person P considered activity A as science. How could we know this? We could know this only if P attaches to A a description D such that D tells us that A is scientific activity. When would we accept that, because P uses D to describe A, A is a scientific activity? The only answer is that we would accept this only if D was such a description that we could use to describe science in our society.
Furthermore, even if we grant that it is possible to know when a historical actor thinks that she is doing science or has an intention to do science, these thoughts or intentions are not necessary or sufficient for doing science. First, the experiments in CERN are scientific activities, but whose intentions or thoughts make this to be the case? Is there some kind of a collective intention and if there is, how could a historian have an access to it? If, on the other hand, one claims that the experiments are scientific because each person working in CERN has the intention to do science, the history of science would study these persons. This is not an implausible idea. But what if the persons in the IT unit of CERN do not have the intention to do science but only to keep the computers working? Would they be excluded from the history of science? And if they were, how could it then be possible to understand CERN – IT seems like a very important part of the functioning of CERN? Second, one may take random notes about the behavior of her cat with the intention of doing science, but this does not make the activity a scientific one. Now, it could be argued that the activity is not scientific because one cannot have an intention of doing science and at the same time do something completely different. This argument is based on the idea that certain behavior is necessary for the attribution of intentions. If this idea is correct, then one needs to study the behavior of the historical actors first and only after that attribute the intention of doing science to them. And if this is the case, intentions cannot be used to pick up the scientific activities from past eras. Rather, a certain kind of behavior would be what defines whether or not an activity is a scientific one. Then the original problem returns: We need to define what kind of behavior is necessary and sufficient for scientific activity in such a way that the conditions (C) are satisfied.
Another problem with the approach based on intentions is that it seems that scientists have different intentions from each other. Some scientists think that there is not any scientific method. On the other hand, some scientists believe that there is a scientific method. For example, Hugh G. Gaught has written an entire book about a scientific method. Which one of these groups should be considered as scientific? Should a project which involves researchers from both groups be judged as scientific or not?
The problems with the intentionality-based criterion point towards a great benefit of presentism: The present-day activities are conceptually most transparent to us, and any criterion that uses some conceptual machinery to select the historical activities to be studied should take this into account. If it were possible to center historical studies around intentional activities, they should be centered around present activities as this presentist selection avoid the conceptual traps.
The second criterion is selection by later effect. According to this criterion
“A historical fact (activity, event, idea, etc.) falls within the domain of the history of X if it (causally) contributed to bringing about some aspects of X.” (Barseghyan, 65).
I have defended this criterion many times in the historiography of science. It is a good criterion. However, Barseghyan argues that it is not an essentially presentist criterion, as one can take any activity, event, idea, etc. from history and study its causal roots. I completely agree and I would even argue that historiography should do this to achieve understanding of any event of the past. Causal history provides historical understanding.
However, I am still not sure whether this criterion can support the identification of a historiographical field, if read in a non-presentist way. The study of a causal history does not, in itself, constitute a historiographical field. The study of events leading to the observation of gravitational deflection in 1919 is not a historiographical field. Ideally, we would like to center a historiographical field around types of activities, science vs. some instance of science. There are two reasons why the presentist selection of the activities (i.e. selection that says we need to study the causal histories of present activities) is to preferred.
First, the present world is more transparent to us than the past. Identifying a family of activities is easier in our own context than in the context of the past, not least because it is extremely difficult to define human activities. We do not have to define anything explicitly in the present context. We can simply take as activity A any activity that is currently considered as A. But doesn’t this also work with respect to the past; can’t we just take any activities that were considered as A* in the past to be A*? The problem, again, is that we need to tell how to identify that historical actors consider an activity as activity A*. We need to posit a definition of A* that the historical actors associated with A* in order to identify A*s from the past by following the actors. This might be done but the conceptual risks are big. For example, not many activities can be defined and, because of this, it is a mistake to expect that a definition of A* can be found. For example, we cannot find a definition of science that captures everything we currently consider as science and nothing else. In the future, a historian would fail in her attempt to find a conceptual core that helps her to pick scientific activities from the past. Moreover, even if there was some kind of definition of A*, it is unclear we would be able to pick it because our conceptual system differs from the past. The risk is that we construct A* on the basis of our understanding of what kinds of activities there are in the world. This would be the worst type of presentism, hidden presentism.
Secondly, our activities matter to us, and therefore it is important to study the causal history of those activities. As Hall (1983, 54) puts it, “The most obvious of all historical questions is: ‘How did we arrive at the condition we are now in?’” The question is not “How did the past actors arrive at the condition they were in”? Again, these types of causal histories are important in their own right, but their value in determining a relevant historiographical field is rather suspicious.
The third criterion is selection by problem: “A historical fact (activity, event, idea, etc.) falls within the domain of the history of problem X if it can be taken as an attempted solution to X.” (Barseghyan, 66).
Obviously, this criterion is not essentially presentist. We can take some past problem X and study the history of attempted solutions to X. However, it is unclear how such histories would provide historical understanding rather than a collection of historical incidents that introduce different solutions to a problem. A presentist selection is much more understandable, as it would describe historical attempted solutions to our own problems. However, it is unclear, again, how this would provide historical understanding rather than temporally scattered incidents that happen to be helpful for us. I do not think highly of this criterion when it comes to determining a historiographical field.
Where does this lead us?
As said, historiography can choose its subject matter as it wishes. However, the nature of historiographical fields should be thought in a more rigorous manner as they coordinate pieces of historical knowledge in a wider frame and serve further epistemic purposes (consider, for example, the use of history of science in the philosophy of science). Given this, presentist selection in terms of later effect seems like the best way to go. We should define historiographical fields in terms of causal histories, i.e. in ontological terms. History of A is the study of the causal history of current A.
Barseghyan argues that we can allow pluralism when it comes to the selection criteria, and I wholeheartedly agree when it comes to the choices of individual historical studies. Historiography should be studied from many perspectives and historiography should have diverse subject matter. However, I disagree when it comes to determining a historiographical field. In that case, the use of pluralist criteria only leads to pluralism on paper. Let me explain.
In order to satisfy the role of a coordinator, a historiographical field must have unambiguous criteria of selection that guarantees that different pieces of historical knowledge can be connected. For example, if we allow that historiography of science studies both causal histories of science and the solution to problems, the pieces do not fit together automatically. A solution might have been forgotten and thus had no causal effect on the development of science; a causally relevant idea might not have been a solution to any general problem. If we connect the two criteria, we make the wider point of the historiography of science obscure. Are we attempting to understand the development of science or solutions to problems? Pluralism comes with the prize of ambiguity. What would be the point of pluralism in that case? Fruitful pluralism is pluralism that provides different answers and perspectives to the same subject matter, and the ambiguous pluralism does not achieve this.
When it comes to historiography of science, Barseghyan writes that “I see no reason why we should be reluctant to take a pluralist stance: while some histories may benefit from a narrow present-day notion of ‘science’, others may use ‘science’ in a broader, more inclusive sense as denoting all different ways of knowing the world across cultures and time periods” (64). The problem is that, while we can allow that both of these might be called “historiography of science”, the two tasks are rather different from each other. The problem from which my defense of presentism stems is that the historiography of science has become a field whose unity and conceptual justification have become unclear because there are many different tasks that go under the label “historiography of science”. This has led many people to think that the field has become redundant. (Virmajoki 2020). I disagree about the redundant nature because science is important to us and deserves to be understood historically. A pluralism that fuels confusion about a historiographical field does not solve the issue of intellectual coordination but only makes it sound nicer.
To sum up, historical studies can select their subject matter in many different ways. However, when it comes to the coordination of historical knowledge in terms of historiographical fields, presentism is the preferable way to go.
References
Barseghyan, Hakob (2022). Selection, presentism, and pluralist history”. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0039368122000036
Virmajoki, Veli (2022). In Defense of Causal Presentism. HOPOS. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/718993