Hum Stud (2009) 32:357–363

DOI 10.1007/s10746-009-9124-2

BOOK REVIEW SYMPOSIUM

Quo Vadis? Quine’s Web, Kuhn’s Revolutions,

and Baert’s ‘‘Way Forward’’
Patrick Baert, Philosophy of the Social Sciences: Towards
Pragmatism. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005

Paul A. Roth

Published online: 11 December 2009

Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

A ‘‘take-home’’ lesson of philosophy of science and epistemology from the last

50 years concerns the cautionary tales told by (among others) W. V. O. Quine and
Thomas Kuhn regarding ‘‘progress’’ with respect to epistemological or scientific
inquiry. The caution in both cases involves fundamentally the same point: absent a
metric of epistemic goodness that provides determinate indices of improvement
upon a prior theory or advancement towards a better one, talk of progress proves
empty. Quine’s web of belief and Kuhn’s incommensurable paradigm shifts pose
alternatives to their predecessors’ optimistic accounts of belief change (either
individual or collective), viz., ones that portray changes of belief as logical/rational
alterations of specific theoretical inferences as a consequence of particular
experiences. Without reasons for epistemic optimism, e.g., a method for vouchsaf-
ing the rational attunement of beliefs to experience, any directional account of
knowledge becomes quite mysterious. This presents a special challenge to those still
wishing to chart a ‘‘way forward.’’
In addition to puzzles about direction of change, Quine and Kuhn bequeath not
unrelated puzzles regarding how to assign a determinate epistemic sense to notions
such as theory and presupposition. The senses to be spurned include at least those
that engender methodological dogmas about testability, implication, verification,
and falsification—in short, those tied to the type of naturalism that Baert rejects.
In sum, positivists held dear very well structured notions of theory and
presupposition. For positivists, presuppositions just were what analytic statements
provided; those statements designated analytic mark the cut between what belongs
to a theoretical framework as opposed to what can be derived from that framework.
But once one repudiates accounts of a logically determinate relation between beliefs

Paper presented as part of an ‘‘Author meets Critics’’ panel on Baert (2005).

P. A. Roth (&)
Department of Philosophy, University of California-Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA
e-mail: paroth@ucsc.edu

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and experience, the epistemic sense of presuppositions and theories becomes quite
clouded. For nothing marks some one belief as presuppositional relative to any other
apart from its place in a derivation and whether, should the derivation be thrown
into question, that belief or some other would need be given up. Hence, absent a
notion of analyticity or some clear surrogate, and lacking a notion of derivation or
some clear surrogate, talk of ‘‘presuppositions’’ and of their ‘‘role’’ in a ‘‘theory’’
becomes quite idle. Quine’s ‘‘countersuggestion’’ that human beliefs qua theory
face the tribunal of experience collectively and not individually and Kuhn’s claim
that a study of successive scientific theories reveals such changes to be logically
discontinuous make hash of the fond hope that appeals to presuppositions and
derivations stand ready to clarify much of anything.
This double burden imposed by the demise of positivism—making sense of
epistemic direction, making sense of how beliefs respond to experience—remains
an unmet challenge to typical philosophical approaches to knowledge, scientific and
not. But Patrick Baert does not share my pessimistic assessment. For he proposes to
‘‘advance a new approach’’ (p. 1) to the philosophy of social science, a ‘‘way
forward’’ (p. 8) to ‘‘the possibility of other forms of knowledge’’ (p. 4), in particular
‘‘a social science that aims at self-referential knowledge acquisition.’’ (p. 8) Indeed,
the notion of self-referential knowledge to which Baert adverts proves sufficiently
robust, he claims, to establish that ‘‘rather than being a mere theoretical construct,
the pursuit of self-referential knowledge acquisition can form highly successful
research strategies in a multitude of fields.’’ (Baert, p. 9) But given the sort of views
that Baert criticizes or endorses, can this possibly be so?
The views of social science inquiry that concern Baert deliberately mix
normative and descriptive elements, though to different degrees and in some
different ways. For example, Durkheim and those discussed under the aegis of
critical theory combine descriptive and normative inquiry. Durkheimian sociology
does readily distinguish between the normal and the pathological. Likewise, critical
theorists operate with a moral binary consisting of what contributes to emancipation
and what inhibits it. In both cases, the descriptive sociology functions in the service
of a prescriptive morality. At the most general level, both fail because their moral
commitments do not connect to an appropriate conception of self-knowledge, and so
to the good as Baert conceives of it. I return to this point below.
The others whom Baert examines—Max Weber, Karl Popper, Critical Realists—
err in having a notion of science as itself ‘‘value free’’ and so, in this mode, capable
of identifying mechanisms at work in the social realm. Each of these views in its
own way, Baert maintains, remains blind to the role that values (qua cognitive
interests) play in guiding inquiry, and so share (to a greater or lesser extent) the false
assumption of knowledge as representational. What Baert says of Weber applies,
mutatis mutandis, to all thinkers he considers in this range: ‘‘His [Weber’s] concept
of value-neutrality was problematic, and he did not fully explore the relationship
between types of cognitive interests and methodology…. [A] pragmatist philosophy
of the social sciences will do away with the notion of value-neutrality and will put
the notion of cognitive interest at the centre.’’ (p. 58) Value neutrality engenders a
false model of inquiry because it assumes a reality to be represented independent of
human interests. So conceived, these approaches gull those who use them into

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thinking that ‘‘states of affairs’’ neutrally represented can then guide policy makers
to rational decisions because the ‘‘facts’’ have been agreed upon. One reason, I take
it, for Baert’s celebration of, e.g., the critiques of cultural anthropology, archeology,
and standard histories involves just their attacks on received forms of representation
and their questioning of supposed facts.1
One might be tempted to infer from this that, however Baert charts the ‘‘move
forward’’ towards pragmatism, it will not be by appeal to a methodological strategy.
For the common failing identified in Weber, Popper, and the sundry critical realists
involves their efforts to secure value neutrality by just such a methodological move.
It comes then as a surprise, at least to this reader, that while Baert emphatically
rejects the ‘‘search for a method’’ insofar as it involves looking for how to cut
science from non-science, Baert retains the view that a ‘‘search for a method’’
remains viable when seeking ‘‘self-knowledge.’’ Put another way, the scientisitic
search for a method fails on Baert’s account because it makes false assumptions
regarding the representational nature of knowledge. But if the object of inquiry
lacks determinate representational features, what point can appeal to a method
possibly serve? The answer cannot be, on pain of contradiction (for Baert, anyway)
‘‘better representation.’’ But if not, what metric serves to judge the adequacy or
appropriateness of the method to which one appeals? Here the Quine/Kuhn
problematic looms once again. Without objects to represent, the notion of a ‘‘better’’
method loses all grip.2
Yet Baert places just such a search for a method at the core of his own enterprise.
This emerges in particularly striking fashion in his summary criticism of Jürgen
Habermas. I quote the passage at length:
Like Hans-Georg Gadamer, Habermas conceived of self-understanding mainly
in ontological terms: in the process of understanding other people, other texts or
culture, we end up reassessing ourselves, our own setting and presuppositions.
Some form of self-understanding necessarily accompanies understanding.
Habermas failed properly to conceive of self-understanding in methodological
terms, namely as a research object in itself, worth pursuing and worth the
thought about how it should be pursued. A critical theory of society ought also
to focus on self-referential knowledge… What we need, therefore, is a
reflection on the various research strategies that employ the confrontation with
difference to obtain this self-referential type of knowledge acquisition. This
intellectual task is central to my pragmatist proposal… (p. 124)

1
This notion of value neutrality divides, Alan Richardson (2003) argues, those who saw science as
serving the cause of progressive politics—Carnap, Dewey—as opposed to those who claimed that all
inquiry already was warped by human interest—Heidegger.
2
The point cuts both ways, i.e., against both positivists and those who wanted to preserve the domain of
the human sciences from the icy clutches of bloodless science. Indeed, what separates, e.g., thinkers such
as Peter Winch or Charles Taylor from those they take themselves to oppose—various positivists—does
not involve that one group affirms and the other denies that there exists a legitimate method of inquiry.
The issue rather concerns claimed differences of method relative to different ontological realms—the
natural as opposed to the social. Winch, Taylor, Barnes, Bloor, Laudan all lay claim to methodological
insights and assurances; they differ (where they do) regarding the methods that apply to the topics of
interest to them—the rules of social behavior, the reasons for theory change, etc.

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The distinction drawn by Baert in this passage between the ontological and the
methodological implies that what he takes ‘‘self-understanding’’ to be transcends, in
some as yet unspecified sense, an account of difference that emerges in the study of
others. Rather, his suggestion goes, there exists a research goal, viz., self-
understanding in itself, that can be treated as the object of systematic methodo-
logical inquiry. (N.B. The methodology here might be multi-faceted; the point is
that whatever the facets, they can be properly fitted to the goal of inquiry—self
understanding). Put another way, if the goal of inquiry lacks a determinate route for
its acquisition, by what argument can one show that any method, however mistaken
its assumptions about the nature of knowledge, can be ruled out as a means of
acquiring what Baert seeks to know?
Without some specifiable notion of self-understanding in what I shall term a non-
contrastive sense, i.e., a notion that does not arise from the sense of distance or
difference between what one now believes and what others do, no point exists
toward which to advance. Now I assume that Baert would prefer not to be saddled
with a notion of ‘‘self understanding in itself’’ as some Kant-like noumenal object.
But I do take it as a genuine puzzle to try to give shape to Baer’s distinction, and to
raise the question of where his project stands without it.
Indeed, in his discussion of Richard Rorty, Baert himself emphasizes Rorty’s
skepticism regarding natural science as a natural (methodological) kind. Addition-
ally, and more generally, he notes that Rorty’s attitude represents an ‘‘ill-conceived’’
controversy because debates ‘‘about method would require a common goal, and this
is absent here.’’ (p. 134) Despite his apparent endorsement of this bit of Rortian
skepticism, Baert later in this very chapter flirts with what I have elsewhere termed
‘‘meaning realism.’’ This finds classic expression in Peter Winch’s idealization of
the social as ‘‘shared rules,’’ and so preserves a special realm of the social at the
price of making it something in the mind of those who belong to a particular society.
In this regard, Baert quotes with favor Charles Taylor’s response to Rorty that
invokes ‘‘‘intersubjective meanings, which are constitutive of the social matrix in
which individuals find themselves and act’’’ (Baert, p. 142). He develops this point,
and this connects with the object to which the method of self-referential
understanding would presumably be attuned, to a goal of making ‘‘discursive what
was previously unquestioned in their culture.’’ (p. 142) Stephen Turner has
criticized this sort of view effectively and at length, and I shall not to pause to
elaborate those criticisms here.3
Now there exist both metaphysically benign (non-meaning realist) and non-begin
readings of these remarks. Read benignly, however, requires what Baert earlier
terms the ontological conception of self-understanding. On this view, one gains self-
understanding by playing off of others. By entering into other lives ethnograph-
ically, imaginatively, therapeutically, etc., one becomes aware of ways of thinking
not currently one’s own, or of options for living not previously imagined. Note that
the ontological need not involve some exotic other. Harold Garfinkel’s ‘‘breaching
experiments’’ or Erving Goffman’s ethnographies of ‘‘closed institutions’’ provide
examples of how clever investigators can lay bare assumptions of the very folk

3
See Turner (1994) and Roth (2003).

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among whom they generally live and work. Even therapeutic (e.g., psychoanalytic)
encounters would be ontological in Baert’s sense, at least insofar as analysis is, as
the saying goes, analysis of transference. Without the other—other person, other
text, other culture—no self emerges to understand.
Again, reading Baert at just this critical juncture proves elusive and difficult. For
his ‘‘advance’’ beyond Rortian conversation ‘‘culminates in the view that it ought to
be intrinsic to the vocation of researchers always to remain sufficiently open minded
that their presuppositions and expectations can be affected by the studies they
embark upon.’’ (p. 143) But how to interpret the exhortation to remain open? One
suggestion would be to see this as an analogue to Popperian falsificationism, but in
the conceptual or ‘‘presuppositional’’ realm. But if read that way, how then to spin
Baert’s criticism of falsification (and not Baert’s alone, of course) that when
experience fails to turn out as anticipated, many paths of revision lie open to
investigators? Once again, Quinean and Kuhnian issues arise. The key point, I
would insist, concerns the fact that faced with the sort of holist concerns involved in
the web of beliefs or in paradigms, the very idea that some beliefs function
‘‘presuppositionally’’ and others do not, and that moreover one knows which are
which, loses its point. We can allege that some beliefs lie closer to the periphery
than do others (as one might say if channeling Quine) or switching some beliefs
effectively induces a gestalt shift (as one might say if channeling Kuhn), but neither
metaphor provides any help in identifying just which beliefs those might be.
My point is not, following Donald Davidson’s well known admonition, to avoid
trafficking in too easy talk of conceptual schemes. The point, rather, is that once the
analytic-synthetic distinction goes, once the notion of theory progress goes, so go
distinctions such as those that Baert makes basic to his account, e.g., between
‘‘presuppositions’’ and the rest. The very notion of a presupposition implies an
articulated structure sufficient to identify what counts as more fundamental than
what. But what structure does Baert have in mind? If by ‘‘presupposition’’ one
means something like just an unarticulated assumption, this bodes no better for
research, unless of course Baert has a method for distinguishing, e.g., who uses
‘quus’ and who ‘plus.’ If one abandons spectator theories of knowledge (as one
should), then one should, and for pretty much parallel reasons, abandon what might
be termed a spectator theory of the mind. A ‘‘spectator theory of mind’’ on the
analogy suggested would have us as passive viewers and interpreters of the mind’s
contents. We would be, on this account, simply able to inventory our own
presuppositions, determinate concepts, fixed rules—call all of these found in many
minds the ‘shared’ or the ‘social’ as you will.
The goal, keep in mind, involves learning what methodological rules investi-
gators might follow in order to achieve the sort of self-knowledge that will lift social
science above the darkness imposed by the clouds of naturalism. Baert does,
certainly, maintain that ‘‘methodological diversity’’ actually characterizes the
sciences, on the one hand, and that the social sciences would gain from
‘‘methodological pluralism,’’ on the other hand. I’m not the one to disagree. But
his examples puzzle. Regarding the actual diversity of the science, he cites the work
of Barry Barnes and David Bloor. Yet both Barnes and Bloor believe that they
provide causal explanations. Their chief complaint has been that philosophy of

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science has turned out to be an explanatory non-starter. Sociology of science

explains, and explains in the requisite causal way. I do not recall a word either has
ever written suggesting that self-knowledge should be the goal of inquiry. At the
other extreme, Bruno Latour would as readily attribute agency to scallops as to the
usual suspects. And perhaps he is right to do so. But this seems the ontological mode
with a vengeance. I entirely fail to grasp how pluralism has anything to do with the
project of enhanced self understanding in the methodological mode.
In this regard, Baert seems not to learn the very moral of the lesson he tries to
teach. When praising the interpretative method, Baert declares that the ‘‘very
reasons… for the necessity of the interpretative method help to explain why faithful
picturing can never be achieved.’’ (p. 152) But, Baert goes onto complain, too often
the very researchers who cite the reasons for the necessity of interpretive methods
make a critical mistake. Specifically, ‘‘they attribute a mysterious capacity to
individual researchers to ‘step outside history’, to assume what Quine called a
‘God’s eye view’, stripped from their own culture, while subjects being investigated
are portrayed as necessarily drawing upon a culturally specific framework to make
sense of the work.’’ (p. 152) Baert rightly decries the positing of what he terms an
‘‘ontological asymmetry,’’ as if the epistemological limits assumed true of those
being researched did not apply to the researchers themselves.
Fair enough, certainly, and to this extent at least Baert and I agree. But then he
makes what I have complained turns out to be the reifying, and completely
unjustified move. For it in no way follows from the epistemological and
methodological doctrines he rejects that there exist shared presuppositions on
which to reflect. Indeed, as I have tried to suggest, when ‘‘givenness’’ goes,
indeterminacy reigns. That the mind acts on the deliverances of the senses to
produce coherence we might term a Kantian truism. But that there then exists a
determinate body of presuppositions that constitute ‘‘self-knowledge’’—Baert’s
analog to the transcendental analytic—for researchers to reflect upon by some
method or other and thus achieve self-understanding in no way follows from
anything Baert here says.
Let me illustrate my concerns using one of Baert’s examples of social science
done right—the cultural studies moment in anthropology exemplified by James
Clifford and George E. Marcus volume (1986). I have argued elsewhere that this
work exemplifies what I term the ‘‘disappearance of the empirical.’’ No longer need
one do fieldwork in the field. A crash course in literary theory (preferably in French)
will serve one much better. Clifford Geertz once remarked to me that the volume on
which Baert lavishes such praise was simply a ‘‘preemptive strike’’ (Geertz’s phrase)
against Geertz in anticipation of the publication of Geertz (1988). The difference is
just this. Geertz looks, in an almost Weberian way, at how the lives of the individual
anthropologists about whom he writes influence their interests and their work. The
contributors to the Clifford and Marcus volume often complain vociferously about
conventional anthropology as handmaiden to colonial power or the anthropologist as
the hidden ventriloquist who (illicitly) speaks for the people studied. Yet, the
pronouncements of contributors to that volume regarding the presuppositions of
those under their lenses seems to exemplify the sort of asymmetric positioning that
Baert rightly condemns rather than an approach to be lauded.

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Indeed, Baert criticizes Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno for this very sort
of enterprise. (pp. 114–116) I simply fail to understand what ‘‘method’’ he takes the
contributors to the Clifford and Marcus volume to be using that might transfer to
social science. Moreover, such strategies for reading texts offer no way to
distinguish between imputation and demonstration. One need not be a represen-
tationalist in the bad old sense to hold that claims about social groups and
institutions must be, in some sense, empirically substantiated. So a dilemma facing
Baert appears to be this. Either he reifies self-knowledge so that researchers have
something to discover or he allows that any plausible reading will do. But he rejects
both representationalism as a form of knowledge and relativism as an acceptable
epistemological position. What then remains?
Baert wants it both ways, i.e., to claim that there exist no essences, no fixed
algorithms, and yet assert that emancipation is a good, and that self-knowledge
provides the royal road to it. (p. 168) The Rortyian spirit conjured up by Baert’s
work has nothing to do, so far as I can tell, with any form of pragmatism, much less
social science. The shade invoked, rather, is that of Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and
Solidarity, of how to learn about ourselves by means other than those suggested by
‘‘pure philosophy.’’ Ironically (and surely Rorty would have it no other way), Baert
remains in the grip of Philosophy, now as always imagined as some idealized object
of inquiry—in this case, self-knowledge—that can be captured by a philosophically
informed method. Baert’s call for researcher responsibility only repeats the hope
shared by Rudolph Carnap, Popper, and some pragmatists that research would
provide objective guidance and so facilitate responsible decision making. To this
extent at least, Baert ‘‘is still, in his heart, a theologian or a metaphysician.’’ (Rorty
1989, p. xv) Ultimately Baert embraces the very tradition he claims to overcome.

References

Baert, P. (2005). Philosophy of the social sciences: Towards pragmatism. Malden, MA: Polity Press.
Clifford, J., & Marcus, G. E. (Eds.). (1986). Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Geertz, C. (1988). Works and lives: The anthropologist as author. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press.
Richardson, A. W. (2003). Logical empiricism, American pragmatism, and the fate of scientific
philosophy in North America. In G. L. Hardcastle & A. W. Richardson (Eds.), Logical empiricism in
North America (pp. 1–24). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Rorty, R. (1989). Contingency, irony, and solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Roth, P. A. (2003). Mistakes. Synthese, 136, 389–408.
Turner, S. (1994). The social theory of practices. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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