
Jouni-Matti KuukkanenUniversity of Oulu · Philosophy
Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen
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Publications (54)
Kuhn famously rejects that science progresses towards a uniquely true account of the mind-independent world. Yet he states that science progresses. Progress comes down to improved problem-solving. It is important to realize that Kuhn talks about the progress of scientific knowledge. This raises the question of in what sense exactly problem-solving...
Wilfrid Sellars’s suggestion that there are valid material inferences entails that validity is not limited to formal inferences. Because material inferences are expressed in ordinary language and deal with both conceptual and empirical matters, an interesting prospect unfolds: valid reasoning is irreducibly plural. However, it is not clear what the...
This article tackles the problem of normativity in naturalism and considers it in the context of the philosophy of historiography. I argue that strong naturalism is inconsistent with genuine normativity. The strong naturalist faces a difficult dilemma. If he rejects any reliance on conceptual intuitions, his epistemic inquiries will not get off the...
This paper examines Frank Ankersmit as a rationalist. I argue that there is a theory of rationality in Ankersmit, and that rationalism is an essential feature of his philosophy of history. It is salient that, according to Ankersmit, this theory of rationality can be discovered by a priori reasoning through analysing what the concept of representati...
This essay is a response to four reviewers of my book Postnarrativist Philosophy of Historiography and to one detailed assessment of holism as studied in the book. I will focus on the following themes discussed by the reviewers: the debt to narrativism, representation and aboutness, truth, holism, internalism and externalism, argument, narrativity...
I argue in this article that an aspect of Imre Lakatos’s philosophy has been largely ignored in previous literature. The key feature of Lakatos’s philosophy of the historiography of science is its non-representationalism, which enables comparisons of alternative ‘historiographic research programmes’ without implying that the interpretations of hist...
This paper suggests that the failure to integrate history and philosophy of science properly may be explained by incompatible metaphysics implied by these fields. Historians and sociologists tend to be historicists, who assume that all objects of research are variable in principle, while philosophers look for permanent and essential qualities. I an...
In this introductory essay we briefly discuss three issues. First, we take stock of and pay tribute to the main achievements of narrativism, on the one hand. On the other hand, we also note its weariness as a scholarly project and argue that the philosophy of history is gradually moving toward a broadly understood postnarrativist stage and a period...
The central challenge of the philosophy of history and historiography is to find a principled way to rank different interpretations of the past without assuming their truth in terms of correspondence. The narrativist insight of the narrative philosophy of historiography was to correctly question historical realism. It analyzed texts and showed that...
Postnarrativist Philosophy of Historiography argues that narrativism has made important contributions to the theory and philosophy of historiography but that it is now time to move beyond it to postnarrativism. Much of the theorizing of historiography has focused on defending either absolutist historical realism or relativist postmodernism. Kuukkan...
Imagine that you go to a bookshop near you and seek out the history shelf. What you have in front of you are the main scholarly products of the discipline of history. What are they? Naturally, they are books, often with illustrated covers and, typically, hundreds of pages of writing. But is this the main scholarly product? Ink on paper? Of course n...
What kind of a subject is historiography? Is it a science, an art form, a craft or a unique practice of its own kind? And what is the point of doing historiography? These questions are important because the answers in part determine what historians should aim at producing and achieving. Philosophers and theoreticians of history and historiography h...
The paradigmatic change that narrativism brought about in the theory and philosophy of history and historiography, as already emphasized a number of times, is that it turned our attention to what the books of history as more or less autonomous entities are. After all, they are the main knowledge contributions of historiography. Since books are comp...
This chapter provides an in-depth analysis of narrativist philosophy of historiography. The two philosophers whose thinking was already introduced in the previous chapter are discussed in detail here: Hayden White and Frank Ankersmit. I hope to be able to show that despite some differences, they share a certain core philosophy between them.
‘There is no higher knowledge, or hot-line to the gods, which tells us that the Renaissance, or for that matter the Enlightenment, actually took place’ (Marwick 2001, 67). These words of Marwick might be said to capture the message of the previous chapter. It was concluded that colligatory concepts are constructions without counterparts in historic...
The perception that it is necessary to choose between a nihilistic ‘anything goes’ postmodernism and an absolutist objectivism has bewitched much of the contemporary philosophical discussion on historiography and beyond. This book has tried to show the way in which historiography, and specifically its main cognitive products, can be evaluated and r...
This chapter focuses on one of the central themes of the narrativist philosophy of historiography, constructivism, as outlined in the previous chapter. More specifically, the analysis centers on ontological constructivism, that is, the question of whether historiography creates and adds something that is not given in historical reality. With regard...
I have built this book on the contributions of the narrativist philosophy of historiography although I have also departed substantially from its model. It is now possible to reformulate the central contribution of the narrativist school as the insight that historical knowledge in synthesized form — regardless of whether this is taken to mean histor...
The philosophy of historiography looked very different half a century ago. Narrativism is currently the dominant school, but then it was the analytic philosophy of history, whose interests and problems were rather different. In order to appreciate the transition to narrativism and understand the change of perspective that accompanied it, it is inst...
The challenge in the remaining chapters is to outline a comprehensive theory of evaluation of books in historiography. However, before a positive theory can be laid out there is still more groundwork to be done and many problems need to be solved. I ended the last chapter by saying that a text is the main cognitive unit in historiography. It is the...
The essence of my view on narrativism and on justification in historiography has now been outlined. There are still a number of topics with wider philosophical significance that must be discussed. The first concerns the question of the objectivity and subjectivity of historiography. I will approach this issue by considering the senses in which hist...
Roger Cooter is concerned about the survival of historiography under the pressures of neoliberal economics and the entertainment industry. His and Claudia Stein's book is a welcome call for “critical history,” which is aware of own fundamental intellectual categories. Cooter emphasizes the importance of self-reflection and political contextualizati...
This paper examines how Hayden White and specifically Frank Ankersmit have attempted to develop the representationalist account of historiography. It is notable that both reject the copy theory of representation, but nevertheless commit to the idea that historiography produces representations. I argue that it would have been more advantageous to go...
The narrativist turn of the 1970s and 1980s transformed the discussion of general history. With the rejection of Rankean historical realism, the focus shifted to the historian as a narrator and on narratives as literary products. Oddly, the historiography of science took a turn in the opposite direction at the same time. The social turn in the hist...
This article deals with the problematic concepts of the rational and the social, which have been typically seen as dichotomous in the history and philosophy of science literature. I argue that this view is mistaken and that the social can be seen as something that enables rationality in science, and further, that a scientific community as well as a...
This paper considers the legacy of Kuhn and his Structure with regard to the current history and philosophy of science. Kuhn can be seen as a myth breaker, whose contribution is the way he connected historical and philosophical studies of science, questioning the cumulativist image and demanding historical responsibility of the views of science. I...
It has become increasingly common in historiography of science to understand science and its products as inherently local. However, this orientation is faced with three problems. First, how can one explain the seeming universality of contemporary science? Second, if science is so reflective of its local conditions of production, how can it travel s...
The causal theory of reference is often taken to provide a solution to the problems, such as incomparability and referential discontinuity, that the meaning-change thesis raised. I show that Kuhn successfully questioned the causal theory and Putnam's idea that reference is determined via the sameness relation of essences that holds between a sample...
Šešelja and Straßer’s critique fails to hit its target for two main reasons. First, the argument is not that Kuhn is a rationalist because he is a coherentist. Although Kuhn can be taken as a rationalist because of his commitment to epistemic values, coherence analysis provides a more comprehensive characterisation of cognitive process in scientifi...
There are a large number of disciplines that are interested in the theoretical aspects of the history of thought. Their perspectives and subjects may vary, but fundamentally they have a common research interest: the history of human thinking and its products. Despite this, they are studied in relative isolation. I argue that having different subjec...
Arthur Lovejoy's history of unit-ideas and the history of concepts are often criticized for being historically insensitive forms of history-writing. Critics claim that one cannot find invariable ideas or concepts in several contexts or times in history without resorting to some distortion. One popular reaction is to reject the history of ideas and...
Kuhn argued against both the correspondence theory of truth and convergent realism. Although he likely misunderstood the nature of the correspondence theory, which it seems he wrongly believed to be an epistemic theory, Kuhn had an important epistemic point to make. He maintained that any assessment of correspondence between beliefs and reality is...
Lorraine Daston ja Peter Galison: Objectivity. Zone Books 2007. Objectivity on kirja, jota ei voi ke-vyesti sivuuttaa, sillä sen ovat tuot-taneet kaksi tieteen tutkimuksen raskassarjalaista. Lorraine Daston on Berliinin Max Planck -tutki-musinstituutin toiminnanjohtaja, ja hän on ollut vierailevana profes-sorina useissa yliopistoissa Euroo-passa ja...
There are two conclusions that one can safely draw from the debates on the relationship between sociology of science and philosophy during recent decades: The sociologists of science have been typically perceived as advo-cating social constructivism, and philosophers have generally attacked this position as indefensible or even bizarre. My intentio...