Modeling the History of Ideas

Modeling the History of Ideas. Betti, A. & van den Berg, H. Ghent, July, 2013.

The history of ideas has long been a discipline in disrepute. It has been criticized as involving an improper historical method that does not provide understanding of historical texts. The aim of this paper is to propose a worked out method for the history of ideas that has none of the shortcomings traditionally ascribed to this approach. We call this method the model approach to history of ideas. We argue that a satisfactorily worked out and implementable method to trace (dis)continuities in the history of human thought (or concept drift) requires historians to use explicit interpretive conceptual frameworks. We call these frameworks models. We show in what sense the use of models solves two major shortcomings of existing defenses of history of ideas. First, at present we have only a vocabulary, and not yet a proper implementable method for history of ideas. Second, holistic objections remain unanswered and so does Skinner’s criticism that history of ideas is a biased account resulting in arbitrary narratives. We counter holism by assuming a metaphysically neutral stance on ideas or concepts. We counter Skinner in two ways: (i) We reinterpret Kuukkanen's recent conventionalistic core/margin approach in a realistic fashion; (ii) We maintain that the ideas we can do history of properly are (highly complex) ideas we can capture in models, i.e. explicit and schematic representations of the manifold relations among the elements of the complex idea or concept constituting the object of investigation. Such schematic representations increase the comprehension of historical texts, allow us to reconstruct the intentions of authors, and provide historians of ideas with a method that is not susceptible to common holist criticisms. To illustrate our proposal, we discuss the so-called Classical Model of Science and discuss work in computer science and cognitive psychology.

@book{betti_modeling_2013,
	address = {Ghent},
	title = {Modeling the {History} of {Ideas}},
	url = {http://www.inth.ugent.be/?page_id=2927},
	abstract = {The history of ideas has long been a discipline in disrepute. It has
been criticized as involving an improper historical method that does
not provide understanding of historical texts. The aim of this paper
is to propose a worked out method for the history of ideas that has
none of the shortcomings traditionally ascribed to this approach. We
call this method the model approach to history of ideas. We argue that
a satisfactorily worked out and implementable method to trace
(dis)continuities in the history of human thought (or concept drift)
requires historians to use explicit interpretive conceptual
frameworks. We call these frameworks models. We show in what sense the
use of models solves two major shortcomings of existing defenses of
history of ideas. First, at present we have only a vocabulary, and not
yet a proper implementable method for history of ideas. Second,
holistic objections remain unanswered and so does Skinner’s criticism
that history of ideas is a biased account resulting in arbitrary
narratives. We counter holism by assuming a metaphysically neutral
stance on ideas or concepts. We counter Skinner in two ways: (i) We
reinterpret Kuukkanen's recent conventionalistic core/margin approach
in a realistic fashion; (ii) We maintain that the ideas we can do
history of properly are (highly complex) ideas we can capture in
models, i.e. explicit and schematic representations of the manifold
relations among the elements of the complex idea or concept
constituting the object of investigation. Such schematic
representations increase the comprehension of historical texts, allow
us to reconstruct the intentions of authors, and provide historians of
ideas with a method that is not susceptible to common holist
criticisms. To illustrate our proposal, we discuss the so-called
Classical Model of Science and discuss work in computer science and
cognitive psychology.},
	author = {Betti, Arianna and van den Berg, Hein},
	month = jul,
	year = {2013},
}

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