RATIONALISM IN HISTORY
Mark Bevir. The Logic of the History of Ideas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, reprinted 2000 [L]
When Hegel spoke of history as the "slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals have been sacrificed" [27], he wished his hearers to find satisfaction in the contemplation of a "reason" in history that would redeem those sacrifices by explaining their necessity. A "logic" of history in this sense - of history as res gestae - seeks not only to relate events to one another by means of a narrative in which they can be seen to make sense, but to show how a certain narrative can render events meaningful by relating them to the (absolute) Idea. That this "Idea or Reason is the True," that "nothing but it . . . manifests itself in the world," is not, Hegel reminds us, something established historically but "has been proved in philosophy" [11]. Seen thus, historicism begins the moment that the Idea of history becomes the "history of ideas" - that is, the moment when reason becomes the object, rather than the subject, of history. In its many forms - Begriffsgeschichte, intellectual history, history of worldviews, Ideologiekritik, history of mentalités, and so on - history of ideas bears the traces of its birth in the retreat of speculative philosophy of history's robust rationalism, whether of the idealistic Hegelian, or the materialist Marxian, variety. Under such conditions, to announce a "logic" of the history of ideas is to link historiography with philosophy in a way that might surprise those many who have grown accustomed to thinking that the latter is dead and the former is anything but logical.
For "history" has been the shibboleth under which twentieth-century critical discourse has sought to free itself from the "philosophical" model of knowing that dominated earlier times. If at the outset of the century the new currents in European philosophy - Husserlian phenomenology and Russellian analysis - were militantly anti-historical, by century's end only the latter remained so. The former very quickly spawned or influenced a host of offshoots (existentialism, hermeneutics, deconstruction, genealogy) with little in common but the belief that philosophy is thoroughly historical. When, in the guise of "theory," critical discourse in fields such as literature, cultural studies, feminism, or post-colonial studies draws close to philosophy, then, it is generally a philosophy that sees itself entangled in history, no longer capable of "master narratives" or logics because suspicious of its own past. Significantly, this scepticism has made itself felt in the discipline of history itself, where the theory of historiography is increasingly integrated into a general postmodern, post-philosophical, model of cultural production that emphasizes politics or poetics over reason, rhetoric over cognition. (1) In Mark Bevir's proposal for a logic of the history of ideas, the historian protests against such integration: historical inquiry - whose principles provide the basis for a "general logic of history" and indeed for a "theory of culture" [L316] - is a rational enterprise that yields objective knowledge guided by the regulative idea of truth as correspondence to a fixed historical reality.
With this tightly argued, brilliant book, Bevir breathes new life into a view of philosophy of history that dominated the field in the 1950s and 1960s, the age of "analytic philosophy of history." As Richard Vann has pointed out in an article tracing the changing content of the journal History and Theory between 1960 and 1975, analytic philosophy of history was primarily concerned to elucidate the "scientific" character of history, concentrating on "the topics of law, causality, explanation and prediction" and theories of "rational explanation" [41]. This brought with it a tendency to focus on individual sentences (one thinks here of Arthur Danto's account of "narrative sentences") and the logical connections between them, at the expense of the larger discursive units of historical writing. Reflecting the general tendency in philosophy at the time to take epistemological issues as the authentically philosophical ones, analytic philosophy of history held the cognitive aspects of the historian's project to be central and relegated other aspects - textual, rhetorical, political - to the status of emotive window-dressing. But a counter-trend - open to the critical discourses mentioned above and best exemplified, perhaps, by Hayden White's Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe - soon emerged, in which the "story" aspect of history, its narrative structure, took center stage.
As historians began to consider the relation between narrative structure and their disciplinary epistemological "realism," arguments from the field of literary theory - one thinks here of Frank Kermode and Roland Barthes - began to displace those of analytic philosophy. "Once history is seen as literature," writes Vann, "questions of genre, plotting, and the fundamental principles of historiography come to the fore" [61]. "For the next twenty years," he concludes, "historians' language, not explanation or causality, would be the topic around which most reflections on history would center" [69]. Among the consequences of this displacement was what John Zammito calls the "dissolution of referentiality" [803], the suspicion that the constructive character of narrative places realism out of reach. Stories are not wie es eigentlich gewesen ist; "life," writes Vann, "does not have the form of [a story] except insofar as we give it that form, then supposing ourselves to have found it there" [67]. Though later theorists would defend a kind of "narrative realism" in historiography, (2) this way of restoring referentiality suffered from an obscurity not besetting the earlier analytical approach - namely, the fact that the unit of epistemological evaluation is the narrative as a whole. Unlike single assertoric sentences or chains of logical deduction, narratives are heterogeneous, consisting of assertoric, evaluative, normative, and interrogative sentences from diverse genres of discourse. To evaluate a narrative as a whole in terms of truth, then, cannot simply be a matter of isolating the true sentences in it. As Louis O. Mink noted, "a historical narrative claims truth not only for each of its individual statements distributively, but for the complex form of the narrative itself" [198]. But given its heterogeneity, not only is it not clear how one is to assess this "complex form" for truth; it is unclear even that truth is the appropriate criterion for assessing it. (3) As Hayden White argued, the narrative form derives not from the exigencies of cognition but from the "demand . . . for moral meaning, a demand that sequences of real events be assessed as to their significance as elements of a moral drama." (4)
The proponents of a poetics of history most often took for granted a picture of science, reason, and cognition drawn from the earlier analytic philosophy, heavily indebted to logical positivism. During the same twenty years in which narrative theory flourished, however, analytic philosophy underwent a sea-change. Thanks to W. V. O. Quine's criticism of the analytic-synthetic distinction, and Thomas Kuhn's theory of scientific revolutions, the terms of the debate over rationality, objectivity, and explanation shifted. In particular, the older search for ultimate foundations of knowledge in the incorrigible givens of either sense-experience or pure reason gave way to anti-foundationalist, "holistic" approaches in semantics and epistemology. At first, this eventuality seemed only to advance the agenda of those narrative theorists whom Bevir describes as "sceptics" - White, Gadamer, Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty; but also "contextualists" (J. G. A. Pocock) and "conventionalists" (Quentin Skinner) among theorizing historians who took the "linguistic turn." Bevir, however, finds in "post-analytical" philosophy the tools for an "attempt to modify the tradition of modern idealism in response to the dilemma posed by anti-foundationalism understood as the rejection of the very idea of pure reason or final truth" [L314]. Rather than signaling the collapse of robust rationalism, Quine and Kuhn provide resources for its revival, for a logic of the history of ideas that articulates the norms in accord with which historical narratives ought to be constructed if they are to embody objectively justifiable historical understandings and explanations.
Among the norms for which Bevir argues are the following: historians of ideas should be concerned only with meanings that can be ascribed to specific individuals (procedural individualism); such meaning should be seen to derive from individual intentions and, more narrowly, from beliefs cognitively available to the individual at the time (intentionalism); beliefs should be ascribed to individuals according to the presumption that they are sincere, conscious, and rational; synchronic explanation of beliefs should proceed by identifying the intellectual traditions in which the individual stands; diachronic explanation should model belief change rationally, as an attempt to restore consistency in one's web of beliefs in the face of a dilemma within one's intellectual tradition; and distortions of these normative presumptions should be explained as the illegitimate influence of "pro-attitudes" - perhaps unconscious - upon the rational process of belief formation. Such norms do not provide a method or "logic of discovery" but reflect the "forms of reasoning" employed in the discipline to justify and explain its assertions, however they may be discovered. They thus constitute a canon for evaluating the historical narrative as a whole. Narratives can be judged, relative to other narratives, as more or less "objective" according to the standards of accuracy, comprehensiveness, consistency with respect to the use of evidence, progressiveness, fruitfulness, and openness to criticism [L126].
Why, then, did a noted historian of ideas, Alan Megill, claim that "a great many of [Bevir's] suggestions, and his perspective on the history of ideas as a whole, would greatly impair the field if generally adopted. Indeed they would destroy it" [336]? Megill purports to find a "major disconnection" between what Bevir describes and the practice of actual historians, surmising that Bevir's is essentially a philosophical "thought experiment" along the lines of John Rawls's "original position" or Hilary Putnam's "brain in a vat" [336-7]. Megill does not say where such thought experiments fail to connect with practice; it seems clear, however, that his worry is not with this or that detail but with the overall rationalism of Bevir's approach. Are Megill's fears merely the prejudices of one who is more sympathetic to "the post-structuralist or post-modern sections of the anti-foundationalist tradition" [L310]? Or does Bevir's rationalism omit something without which our philosophical understanding of what is at stake in historical narratives would be crucially impoverished? How successful is Bevir's argument in its own terms? And if it has limits, do they adumbrate an aspect of historical narrative that eludes the norms of logic and complicates the issue of evaluation? In what follows I hope to shed light on these questions. It seems to me that Bevir's appeal to a minimal notion of rationality as "consistency" is a salutary reminder not to fetishize "otherness": even if "the past is a foreign country," it is not the case, as Ankersmit imagines, that the world of our own daily life is "wholly alien to our encounter with the foreign country of the past" ["Comments" 230]. Some of the strongest pages in Bevir's book are devoted to criticizing the hyperbolic skeptical, relativist, and irrationalist conclusions that have been drawn from anti-foundationalist premises. Yet a rationalism comes to dominate Bevir's theory that, in my view, obscures the complexity of the kind of meaning with which historians have to do. That meaning, I argue, is best understood phenomenologically, not logically. Operating with a rationalistically distorted conception of what he calls our "being in the world," Bevir does violence to the phenomenology of historical understanding. But because he believes that logic is entitled to ignore phenomenology, we must begin with his argument for that view.
1. The Return of Rationalism: The Logic of Philosophy
What sort of philosophical approach to the history of ideas is likely to turn up the norms that govern the writing of such histories? Though there may be many such norms, those that govern the cognitive claims of a discipline can reasonably be said to belong to its "logic." On Bevir's view, logic is a "second-order" inquiry that does not study a particular domain of entities but rather the "forms of reasoning" appropriate to the cognitive elaboration of some domain. Thus a logic of the history of ideas will not be an historical inquiry, nor will it study the language of historiography in all its rhetorical richness. Rather, it will focus on modes of explanation and justification, and it will do so not merely descriptively but with a normative intent: "a logic provides us with a normative account of reasoning, not a historical, sociological, or psychological one" [L9]. The philosopher does not collect data on how historians actually work but analyzes the "conceptual form and content of an ideal type of reasoning" that constitutes "good practice" in the field [L9]. How is the philosopher able to identify such norms? This meta-question belongs to the "logic of philosophy," and it is to Bevir's credit that he does not ignore it. Philosophers "determine what forms of reasoning are appropriate to a discipline by studying the concepts operating within it" [L7].
Bevir specifically contrasts this view of philosophy with "phenomenology." On his account, phenomenology is not a second-order discipline concerned with reasoning, but a first-order discipline concerned with "the inspection of one's own consciousness" or (in its hermeneutic variant) on "the nature of our being and how it circumscribes the ways we can reach an understanding of our world" [L3]. For this very reason, however, "phenomenological . . . accounts of actual historical reasoning can[not] sustain a logic. The most they can do is suggest limits to the possible" [L9]. Here Bevir inserts himself into a long-standing dispute. Neo-Kantians such as Paul Natorp and Heinrich Rickert argued, against Husserl, that since phenomenology is merely reflective and descriptive rather than argumentative and constructive it cannot reach normative conclusions, cannot say how things should cognitively go, but only how they do. (5) In response, Husserl and others argued that no such logic can be developed without a phenomenological description that identifies the terrain governed by the logic, a description that already includes the sources of normativity. (6) Bevir's response is a division of labor: phenomenology and analytic philosophy (logic) "do not give conflicting answers to a shared set of questions," but each "approach is designed to deal with a distinct set of questions" [L3]. At the conclusion of his book, then, Bevir invites us to consider the deeper questions raised by it: "What precisely is the status of the knowledge given us by the grammar of our concepts? How does post-analytic philosophy relate to other traditions such as phenomenology" [L317]? In taking up this invitation, I argue that Bevir's division of labor won't hold: while his view of conceptual analysis as normative inquiry lies squarely within the neo-Kantian camp, his logical norms gain their cognitive grip thanks only to a phenomenological thesis about the "nature of our being in the world." And when problems arise in the analytic account of historical meaning, it is to phenomenology that we should turn to dissolve them. The logical norms Bevir recommends for historical narratives have undeniable merit, but they provide a one-sided picture of "good practice" in the field.
Just how is an analysis of the concepts used in a given field supposed to supply norms for how to proceed in that field? A logic of a discipline is a theory of what holds "true for us by virtue of semantic meaning alone" [L8-9]. Such a theory employs deductive arguments to establish the "limits" of a given field and inductive arguments to tease out the "range of circumstances" that its concepts "can cover" [L22]. This is, of course, a familiar picture: the analytic truths of a discipline constitute its rational core (its "categories" in the older neo-Kantian idiom) and determine what counts as "valid" within the field. But in the post-positivist context of post-analytic philosophy - that is, in the face of Quine's critique of the very notion of something "true by virtue of semantic meaning alone" - the challenge is to explain why conceptual analysis is normative.
Bevir embraces the anti-foundationalism entailed by Quine's arguments for "semantic holism." (7) On the foundationalist picture, (8) knowledge is secured either by conceptually untainted sense experience or by conceptual truths established purely logically, without admixture of empirical contingency. Quine showed that this division does not hold up. As Bevir writes, "how we define something must depend on our other beliefs, where these other beliefs might alter as a result of further empirical investigation"; and what counts as empirical verification "must depend on the way our other beliefs stabilize our definitions of the terms of that proposition" [L5]. The resulting semantic holism entails that our beliefs face the tribunal of experience as a whole. But if that is so, what sense can be made of "true by virtue of semantic meaning"? Bevir follows Wittgenstein in claiming that analysis gives us the "grammar of our concepts." But why isn't such grammar simply a description of how sets of our beliefs hang together at a certain time?
The answer comes by way of an "anthropological turn" in epistemology. Though here the distinction between the normativity of logical analysis and the merely descriptive character of a phenomenological account of "the nature of our being in the world" already begins to blur, the anthropological turn does allow for a certain hedge against the conventionalism and scepticism often taken to be entailed by semantic holism. First, since "semantic meaning" is defined by truth-conditions - "what would have to be the case in reality for it to be true in reality" [L36] - then even though analysis of our concepts does not yield pure logical tautologies, our web of beliefs as a whole "goes a long way toward fixing the semantic meaning of its individual components" [L7]. The fact that our web of beliefs is a web of beliefs means that we are committed to its concepts, by means of which we "make sense of the world" [L13]. Thus, analysis can draw out "the logical implications of beliefs that we currently hold true" [L7]. This yields a "lax concept of the analytic" [L95]: though "all our theories might prove false" [L94], and though philosophical knowledge is not self-evident since "someone who did not share our concepts would not accept it as true," nevertheless "we cannot question the knowledge philosophy gives us since our acceptance of our concepts makes it true for us by virtue of semantic meaning alone" [L8]. Bevir accepts the "anthropological relativism" that this implies [L169], but he denies that to reject foundationalism is "necessarily to reject the very idea of our having justified knowledge" [L6]. For to make the anthropological turn is to shift "the focus of our epistemology from a search for given truths [the error of foundationalism] to a defence of a human practice" [L80] - for instance, our practice of engaging in historical inquiry. The grammar of the concepts we employ should yield norms of justification for that practice; it should tell us what it means for an historical narrative as a whole (and not just individual sentences in it) to be justified. What sorts of norms govern our thinking about what makes an historical narrative successful? And why are just these norms employed?
In answer to the first question Bevir develops a theory of the "objectivity" of historical narratives that steers a course between objectivism and skepticism. "Objective" is not a predicate that attaches to a theory by itself, but only in relation to other competing theories; one theory can be said to be more objective when compared with others. Theories can be compared in terms of "agreed facts" - that is, facts that "everyone in a given community, especially any of them present as witnesses, would accept as true" [L98]. Though facts of this sort are theory laden (there is no "pure" perception) they are not theoretical deductions (which would make them wholly immanent to the theory). Rather, "observations enter into our theories" by being entailed by facts, and "observations stick to the world." Thus even if holism precludes us from equating facts directly with truth, we can "fend off idealism simply by insisting on the presence of an independent reality, correspondence with which constitutes truth" [L99]. We shall return to this issue of truth, but one norm for designating a theory more objective than another has emerged: though we cannot say that a theory "fits the facts" simplicter, we can say that a theory does better than others "in terms of their relative ability to relate innumerable facts to one another" [L100].
Against the argument that appeal to facts will always be circular - since theories determine facts we cannot judge theories by reference to their success in explaining facts - Bevir argues that determining relative objectivity depends also on "criticism." The critic can point to unconsidered facts, require explanation of uncomfortable facts, and highlight counter-instances in order to facilitate comparison of one theory with another [L100]. Since in the holistic and comparative context appeal to facts is never decisive, however, the practice of criticism entails "intellectual virtues" or "rules of thumb of intellectual honesty" [L100]: willingness to take criticism seriously; preference for established standards of evidence and reason; preference for challenges to these standards which themselves rest on impersonal, consistent criteria of evidence and reason; and preference for positive speculative theories which suggest exciting new predictions over negative, face-saving ones that merely block criticism [L101]. Together these practices, and the intellectual virtues they involve, generate criteria for determining which theory is more objective - that is, which narrative is better justified - than its rivals: a theory is more objective if it is more "accurate, comprehensive, consistent, progressive, fruitful, and open than its rivals" [L104].
Most historians would agree that Bevir's account captures something important, but does this notion of objectivity represent the exclusive norm governing "good practice" in the field? What is achieved by pursuit of such objectivity - or, to phrase it as our second question above - why are just these norms employed? The answer, though obvious, is not without its problems: these norms are supposed to track cognitive authority; a narrative that is more objective ought thereby to be more true than its rivals, closer to that "fixed historical reality" [L123] which is, on this account, the object of historical inquiry. Two questions arise here: if historical narratives serve aims in addition to cognitive ones - for instance, the "demand for moral meaning" (White) - has Bevir's cognitive standard really given us a norm by which the success of the narrative as a whole can be evaluated? Is there any way of choosing between rival narratives, one of which emphasizes moral or political, while the other emphasizes cognitive, norms? A second question concerns the relation between truth and objectivity itself: what reason is there for thinking that procedures that yield objectivity actually do track truth? It is noteworthy that, in answering this question, Bevir must rest his case ultimately on a "deduction from the nature of our being in the world" [L126], that is, on what is finally an ontological (phenomenological) premise.
To connect objectivity with truth Bevir must overcome the objections of "irrationalism" and "incommensurability." According to the first, objectivity is merely conventional: the consistency of our theories and their ability to accommodate a greater number of facts does not signal a better connection to the world, but only a more satisfying arrangement of our assumptions and conventions. Against this Bevir can marshal no definitive argument based on the logic of our concepts. He needs something stronger, since the very connection between such concepts and the world is at issue. If it is to have any authority against irrationalism, this connection cannot be merely entailed by our theory. Hence, invoking the "principle of inference to the best explanation," he argues that we can "fend off irrationalism" by appeal to "the nature of our being in the world" [L110-11]. Specifically, Bevir argues that within our web of beliefs our "perceptual beliefs" have a "special status" and that our "perceptions must be fairly reliable" because "we are moderately successful in our pre-given natural and social environments" [L108]. Though success in our environment can't secure any given instance of perception, "the broad content" of our perceptions must be "accurate" if we are to account for that success. Many questions arise here. Is it really appropriate to speak of perceptual beliefs? What is "broad content"? What is "success" in an environment, and are we certain that accuracy of perceptual beliefs is really part of the best explanation of it? I shall not stop to explore these questions, however, since my interest lies only in the form of the argument. To establish the cognitive authority of his conception of objectivity (its connection with truth) Bevir must, first, appeal to a specific picture of our being in the world, and, second, employ a causal-reliablist argument for the accuracy of our perceptions. Neither of these are matters of the "logic" of the history of ideas, though without them that logic does not yield even genuinely cognitive norms.
A similar argument is used to dispatch the objection of "incommensurability" - the charge that rival theories cannot be compared since there is no neutral "platform" from which the comparison could be carried out. Bevir argues that there is such a platform, though we cannot say apriori what belongs to it since we will always be working from "our" criteria of objectivity in the comparison. That there must be one is shown by the "ability of the tribe and the anthropologists to interact with their respective environments" [L112-13]. As in the case of perception so in the case of the worldviews of anthropologist and native: "the structures of their worldviews must be broadly similar" [L113] if we are to account for their continued existence. This means that "all groups can come to understand the worldview of all other groups" [L114]. Although the "loser" in a comparison of the objectivity of worldviews may not initially accept the comparison, over time the "initial dogmatism of the losers wears down" in the face of criticism. Thus "truth can still play the role of a regulative ideal around which all cultures coalesce" [L116].
Even if Bevir's conclusions are on the whole salutary, it should not be overlooked that they are not, even on his own terms, a matter of logic. His appeal to the nature of our being in the world shows that logic cannot exempt itself from phenomenology even in establishing its own cognitive bona fides. And there is little reason to think that the logic of the history of ideas is not subject to phenomenological infiltration at other points in its account of the norms of historical practice. In particular, by ignoring phenomenology Bevir introduces two rationalistic distortions into his theory of historical meaning - a rationalization of the everyday and a rationalization of folk psychology. To preserve the gains of logic, both distortions need to be overcome through phenomenological criticism.
2. The Rationalization of the Everyday
Conceptual analysis can yield the logic of a discipline because it treats the discipline as a "semantic whole." By focusing on "the conceptual structure the practitioners of a discipline take to be true," analysis uncovers those norms and commitments that "follow from the categories that underpin the very possibility of scholars engaging in the discipline." To reject such norms is "to overturn the whole of the discipline" [L21]. Such normative claims are only as good as the material they start from; they are compelling only to the extent that the "conceptual structure the practitioners take to be true," or the "set of concepts" to which "we" are committed, has been accurately identified prior to analysis. How are the conceptual structures necessary to the history of ideas identified?
Classical transcendental philosophy could answer this question in a fairly straightforward way: one begins by taking a particular scientific theory as given (the "fact of science") and then exhibits its categorial structure, the norms by which it constitutes objective experience or knowledge. The more perspicuous the theoretical structure of the science (the more clearly it exhibits an internal deductive articulation), the more convincing this strategy appears. (9) For in such cases the philosopher need not introduce terms of art to identify the field's governing categories; the terms of the theory themselves serve that function. Because basic concepts like mass, force, and velocity are defined through explicit laws, their relations are governed by rational norms in an obvious way. "Semantic holism" in the classical context, then, was self-evidently a "theoretical" holism. By starting with explicit theories, transcendental analysis did not need to argue for how its object of study - the discipline - ought to be characterized.
Things are not so simple in Bevir's updated version of this program, however, for the logic of the history of ideas has no pre-given theory upon which to work; there is no articulated "conceptual structure" that practitioners of the history of ideas "take to be true." The problem of how to identify the relevant semantic whole that will yield the norms of the field thus becomes significant. In response, Bevir convincingly rejects scientistic reductionism but also commits what appears, from a phenomenological perspective, to be a distorting rationalization of our everyday experience and the meaning embedded in it.
First, Bevir argues that the conceptual structure to which historians of ideas are committed is not some "specialized vocabulary," as in the natural sciences, but the "concepts of ordinary language" by which we "describe beliefs, actions, and the like" [L16]. Canvassing various versions of scientism from reductive physicalism to social positivism, Bevir astutely shows how these attempts to reject ordinary language and introduce "the scientific concept of causation" into the history of ideas are "self-defeating," since doing so eliminates the "meaningful objects" of interest to historians [L177-86]. Because of the nature of its object of study - "historical meaning" - history of ideas is, as natural science is not, continuous with our everyday way of talking. It depends essentially on "folk psychology," a "cluster of concepts that refer to human attitudes," including "fear, belief, desire, pleasure" [L179]. Our everyday life is thus the loam from which historical understanding grows, and the norms of that understanding will refer back to the sort of "semantic whole" that sustains ordinary language. But what sort of whole is that?
Bevir has no doubt that our everyday concepts constitute "theories about the world - for example, that human beings are agents who typically have reasons for holding the beliefs they do" [L16]. The semantic holism of everyday life, no less than science itself, is theoretical holism; the conceptually informed character of everyday experience - the meaning that things have for us - is a function of theoretical construction. As Bevir has written elsewhere, "phenomenologists cannot base objective knowledge on experiences that are simply given to consciousness since even experiences as they are given to consciousness must be experiences of theoretically constructed objects" ["Meaning, Truth" 70]. If this accurately represents the holism of everyday life, and if the conceptual structure of an historical discipline is identical with that of everyday experience, then historical claims will be theory laden in just the way that claims in the natural sciences are, and logical norms will govern historical meaning. But there are grounds for doubting that everyday holism is properly represented as theoretical holism. On the contrary, to speak of "theories" here indicates a rationalistic distortion of the everyday.
First, it would appear to be a minimal condition on any theory that it conform to formal-logical rules, but it is not clear that ordinary language does. For instance, if everyday experience
had an implicit theoretical structure modus ponens should govern it, but the following case suggests that it may not: (10) Before the 1980 election the three candidates were Reagan, Anderson, and Carter. Although Anderson was running as an Independent, he was a Republican. Polls indicated that Reagan was almost sure to win, that Carter had a small chance and Anderson had none. Thus it was reasonable to believe:
1. If a Republican wins, then if Reagan doesn't win, Anderson will.
2. A Republican will win.
But it would not have been reasonable to believe the modus ponens conclusion:
3. If Reagan doesn't win, Anderson will.
This and similar examples suggest that the "grammar" of our everyday conceptual structure - if there is such a thing - may not be a logical one.
More importantly, there are phenomenological grounds for doubting that the holism that gets reflectively expressed as the "theory" that (for instance) "human beings are agents who typically have reasons for holding the beliefs they do" in fact has the structure of a theory. Hubert Dreyfus usefully distinguishes between "theoretical" and "practical" holism: the former construes the "background" or context of everyday life, "common sense," as a "theory," while the latter construes it as a "background of practices" made up of "habits and customs, embodied in the sort of subtle skills which we exhibit in our everyday interaction with things and people" ["Holism" 6, 8]. Crucial here is the phenomenological claim that "the background of practices does not consist in a belief system, a system of rules, or in formalized procedures; indeed, it seems the background does not consist in representations at all" [9]. If the holism that provides the "foundation of everyday intelligibility and scientific theory" is of this sort, then the assumption that everyday intelligibility (and so the conceptual commitments of the history of ideas) can be modeled as a theory and refined into a logic would be a rationalistic distortion.
The point is not that a "grammar of our concepts" is not possible; rather, it is that in the absence of phenomenological criticism and reflection it is impossible to grasp the limits of such a grammar for understanding the constitution of everyday (and so also, by hypothesis, historical) meaning. (11) The rationalistic distortion of everyday practical holism makes it appear that ordinary language commits us to some conceptual scheme in the way that a physicist is committed to electrons and quarks, but ordinary language is not normative in this way. Phenomenologically, I may be committed to treating someone as an agent (in the sense that I expect him to respond when I ask him to shut the window), even if I am not committed to treating someone as an "agent" (in the sense of being committed to a folk "theory" in which terms like "agent," "belief," "desire" become inescapable). There are many ways of understanding my practical expectation of a response, of cashing in my commitment to "agency." There is, for instance, a practice of making polite requests, at which I am quite adept. Phenomenology suggests that such practices are sufficient to generate the intelligibility things have for us in everyday contexts, and while one may dispute this, one must dispute it on phenomenological grounds. The claim that ordinary language and everyday intelligibility must have the structure of a theoretical whole is not a purely "grammatical" thesis but a substantive thesis about our being in the world. Indeed, as Dreyfus points out, it is a rationalistic distortion of Wittgenstein himself, for whom "agreement in judgments means agreement in what people do and say, not what they believe" ["Holism"12]. The agreement, as Wittgenstein puts it, "is not agreement in opinions but in form of life" [88].
Bevir might object that Dreyfus's phenomenological demonstration that such "background practices" constitute a whole that is "not a set of assumptions or beliefs about which one could even in principle be clear" [13] is irrelevant. Logic is concerned solely with "semantic meaning" - with what we are committed to taking the world to be like in employing the concepts we employ when we make truth claims - and nothing that has been said so far demonstrates that this does not have a theoretical structure. And Bevir in fact provides a subtle account of meaning in which no appeal to background practices seems necessary. But here a second rationalistic distortion emerges, the rationalization of folk psychology. Bevir believes that he need not enter into disputes in the philosophy of mind - between internalists, externalists, behaviorists, phenomenologists - precisely because "the concept of rationality provides us with an account of how the mind works" [L238], one to which folk psychology is supposedly committed [L160]. To show that this introduces a distortion with philosophical implications for the history of ideas we must examine two of Bevir's central concepts: "historical meaning" and the "web of beliefs." Arguably, appeal to beliefs fails to capture the kind of meaning at work in everyday life and so also in the history of ideas.
3. The Rationalization of Folk Psychology
"All historians study the same things," writes Bevir. "Historians of ideas concern themselves with these things" - for instance, texts, artefacts, actions - "as expressions of meaning" [L140]. But the historian is not concerned, as the philosopher is, with semantic meaning (defined in terms of truth conditions), nor with linguistic meaning (the conventional meanings of words found in dictionaries). Rather, historians seek to reconstruct "hermeneutic meaning." Bevir's account of hermeneutic meaning is intentionalistic: he follows the "common-sense view that the meaning of a given utterance derives from the intentions of its author" [L32]. This "procedural individualism" reaffirms human creativity and agency in the face of trendy historical explanations appealing to subjectless conventions, contexts, or epistemes. Contextualists like Pockock, for instance, argue that meanings are fixed not by intentions but by paradigms at work in the context in which the utterance is made. But this, Bevir objects, is to substitute semantic for hermeneutic meaning: paradigms may fix what would count as true, but they don't tell us what is expressed by words used on a particular occasion [L34-40]. Conventionalists like Skinner, on the other hand, argue that meanings are determined by existing linguistic conventions. But this is to substitute linguistic meaning for hermeneutic meaning: existing conventions are necessary for language to function at all, but they are not sufficient to fix the meaning of concrete utterances [L41-6]. Both semantic and linguistic meaning are mere abstractions, according to Bevir, and are therefore of no interest to the historian. Only hermeneutic meaning is a concrete, datable occurrence, only it has "historical existence" [L52].
What is it to have hermeneutic meaning? Limiting ourselves for the moment to linguistic formations, Bevir distinguishes between "works" and "texts," arguing that only works have hermeneutic meaning. A work is a linguistic formation (a text) to which a meaning has been "attributed" at a given time by an author or reader. By themselves, texts do not have meaning. "Objects come to mean something only because someone understands" - that is, intends - "them to do so" [L61]. (12) If the concept of hermeneutic meaning is to be useful to historians, then, Bevir must supply a convincing account of "intending" and "attributing." He believes that in order to do this he need not decide between arcane theories in philosophy of mind, since "the concept of rationality provides us with an account of how the mind works" - that is, provides the norm ("consistency") which organizes our folk-psychological "theory" of the relations between beliefs, desires, and so on. But then, it had better be both consistent and able to account for the kind of meaning of interest to historians. If not, then historians may be excused from treating this rationalized folk psychology as normative and may draw upon wider phenomenological insights for approaching hermeneutic meaning.
How do intentions constitute works out of texts? "Intending" can be understood as speakers and authors using language to express their points of view - not what the world is, but what they take it to be - and folk psychology holds such points of view to consist in "thoughts or beliefs" [L129-30]. If the meaning embedded in my point of view can be adequately captured by the concept of "belief," a whole rationalistic ontology seems to follow. First, all the properties of semantic holism are now attributed to the structure of the mind: beliefs themselves cannot be understood individually but belong to a "web of beliefs" that, as we saw, is taken to have the form of a theory [L155]. Second, since beliefs are distinct from "pro-attitudes" and "illocutionary force" [L140], hermeneutic meaning is understood to involve no necessary reference to these (potentially alogical) factors. Third, the ascription of beliefs is governed by the normative presumptions of sincerity, consciousness, and rationality [L142-43]. There are, however, two sorts of difficulty with this rationalistic view of folk psychology as an account of meaning. One has to do with the notion of intention, the other with the notion of attribution.
The first arises because the folk-psychological account of hermeneutic meaning is silent on a crucial question. According to that theory, sentences, utterances, and texts are simply things that exist in the world; they do not possess meaning until someone intends them as having meaning. This intention is supposed to take place by "thoughts or beliefs" being "associated" with them. But how does appeal to belief explain anything here? According to Bevir's "grammatical" account, "a belief is a psychological state we attribute to someone in an attempt to explain and predict behavior" [L129]. But as he had previously argued, "behavioral or mental states do not have meanings in the sense that utterances have meanings"; they are "things that exist in a world outside human discourse and so do not have hermeneutic meanings" [L118-19]. How, then, can the attribution of a mental state - belief - explain how something else (a sentence or utterance) comes to have hermeneutic meaning? It will not do to argue, as Bevir does, that belief is "the psychological state in which one holds a proposition true" [L129], since this introduces a notion of "proposition" that presupposes hermeneutic meaning. Like semantic and linguistic meaning, the proposition must be an abstraction from hermeneutic meaning, but the whole point of appealing to belief was to explain what hermeneutic meaning is. No doubt we do attribute "beliefs" to people to explain what they "mean," but this cannot conceal the gap in our folk-psychological practice if it is construed rationalistically as a "theory of meaning." It is no more comprehensible how a psychological state can have a meaning than it is how a sentence, as an entity in the world, can have a meaning. One might argue that beliefs just have "intrinsic intentionality" or intrinsic meaning, but this is a substantive philosophical theory and not a simple entailment of our folk-psychological concepts, let alone a normative theory of "how the mind works."
This leads to a second difficulty. If the concept of belief fails to provide an adequate account of how intentions could determine meaning, the metaphor of a "web" of beliefs fails to provide a coherent model of belief attribution. This metaphor treats the mind as a repository of representations, and the historian who tries to understand intentions will primarily be concerned to reconstruct such representations. But how are beliefs individuated? And what norms govern their attribution?
Consider Bevir's approach to the meaning of actions. One might explain what an action means by referring to established practices - for instance, the act of hammering is meaningful because it is part of the practice of building. It would not seem necessary to attribute beliefs - specific mental states - to me in order to understand how I could be meaningfully engaged in hammering. Bevir acknowledges such cases: "boxers might shake hands before a fight because it is the appropriate thing to do; not because they think they ought to show respect for their opponents . . . but simply because that is what is appropriate for people like them." It is their "understanding of the done thing" that accounts for the meaning [L288]. Now phenomenology suggests that this "understanding" is nowhere but in the practice itself, as "know-how." Bevir, however, forces the analysis back onto a rationalistic track by conceiving "understanding" as a mental state: if actions are to have meaning they must "express beliefs" [L135]. "Because Petrarch's bodily movements in climbing Mt. Ventoux expressed his idea that beautiful views have value, we can treat his bodily movements as a work possessing meaning"; Petrarch's climb can be understood (is meaningful) because it "embodies a belief in the value of beautiful views" [L140-41].
Now it would be unfair to object that this example attributes to one of the great moments in intellectual history roughly the significance of a Sunday stroll; after all, it is meant to be schematic. However, the banality of the schema points to a genuine phenomenological problem. Assuming that Petrarch set out that day to enjoy a beautiful view - something that is certainly meaningful - why should we describe his action as expressing a belief in a "value"? Isn't it mainly because we are driven to it by the metaphor of the web of beliefs? When Jacob Burckhardt tries to get at the meaning of Petrarch's action, he speaks of an "indefinable longing for a distant panorama" which "grew stronger and stronger in him, till at length the accidental sight of a passage in Livy, where King Phillip, the enemy of Rome, ascends the Hæmus, decided him. He thought that what was not blamed in a grey-headed monarch might be well excused in a young man of private station" [296]. This description suggests that Petrarch's beliefs, at this revolutionary moment, are more or less incohate; that the meaning of his action is not to be found in what he was thinking but is something emerging through the affect of "indefinable" longing itself. To capture this affective aspect of meaning, the theorist committed to the rationalistic idea that meaning is a function of belief must postulate the existence of some object for that belief - hence, a "value." But even if the concept of rationality requires that we distinguish beliefs from desires, moods, and so on, the kind of meaning we want to understand in Petrarch's case cannot be analyzed into such discrete pieces. It is (to use my earlier term) "heterogeneous." The meaning of Petrarch's act cannot be understood by reconstructing what he believed, though this does not imply that reconstructing what he believed would be uninformative.
A further problem with the concept of a web of beliefs lies in establishing its scope. Bevir argues that folk-psychology requires us to presume that the beliefs that explain actions are conscious ones [L143]. But since the set of "self-conscious" beliefs - beliefs which a person is "aware of at that particular moment" [L153], as in self-conscious deliberation - is far too small to serve as the basis for an account of historical meaning, he must expand the category of conscious beliefs to include "pre-conscious" beliefs - those people "hold even though they are not self-consciously aware of them at that particular moment." Such beliefs "must exist if only because we cannot think about all our beliefs at any single moment in time" [L153]. This "must exist" is supposed to be an analytic consequence of our commitment to folk psychology. But is it? Or is it an artefact of the web of beliefs metaphor itself? If it is an analytic consequence, then (I will argue) folk-psychological rationalism does not have an adequate account of meaning. But if phenomenological criticism can motivate a move from theoretical to practical holism, perhaps folk psychology need not be tied to the model of a web of beliefs.
The pre-conscious consists not only of beliefs people have held self-consciously, but also "beliefs we reasonably can ascribe to them even though they have never held them self-consciously." What looks here like a reasonable principle turns quickly into a phenomenological absurdity. Theoretical holism entails that whatever we believe self-consciously must be "the tip of an iceberg," since "we can think self-consciously about a belief only by taking various pre-conscious beliefs for granted" [L155]. But which ones? Logically it may be that certain beliefs in the web of belief lie "closer" to a given self-conscious belief than others, but - given that holism - can I really be said to take just those beliefs for granted? Why not the whole web? If I believe that I will encounter trees on my upcoming walk in the woods, do I take for granted that I will encounter more than five? Do I take for granted that the world will not stop spinning on its axis or that my shoes will not turn into cellophane? It seems that I can reasonably be said to take all this - and much more - for granted, if the idea of a web of beliefs is the best way to explain the meaning of my actions. But if that is so, it will contribute little toward understanding the meaning of any particular action, since the historian needs to attribute beliefs that meaningfully explain the action, and no criterion for what is "meaningful" has been provided.
The phenomenologically questionable nature of this sort of explanation is evident in Bevir's example of fast action on the basketball court. How do we explain what the players are doing? Bevir writes that "their self-conscious mind focuses on where they should direct [the ball] while their pre-conscious deals with such things as the rule forbidding them to handle it" [L155]. He thus explains the success of the dribbler's actions by postulating a pre-conscious belief about rules of the game (and presumably also about the position of the other players, the position of his own body, and so on). But what is the evidence for this? As Dreyfus argues, when one becomes skilled in such a practice it is not that "the rules recede into the Background"; rather, they are "left behind like training wheels" ["Reply" 325]. To play according to the rules it is not necessary to "deal" pre-consciously with a representation of the rules; it is enough to know how to play. (13) To attribute pre-conscious beliefs is a theory-driven construct based loosely on folk psychology. If folk psychology were in fact a theory like physics we might have to accept such extensions of our ordinary talk about beliefs. But since it is not such a theory - since everyday holism is a practical, and not a theoretical, one - the "logic of our concepts" does not force us to abandon the phenomenology of action. On the contrary, we might find the latter useful in getting a better grip on the sources of meaning in everday life, the meaning that is of interest to historians.
Finally, since the question of what pre-conscious beliefs it is reasonable to attribute to an agent in order to explain his actions cannot readily be answered by appeal to logical criteria, Bevir provides a context beyond the individual that restricts the historian's options: an individual's web of beliefs is made possible by "the social context in which individuals exercise their power of reasoning," the "intellectual tradition" [L188]. What it is reasonable to ascribe to me is determined by the intellectual tradition in which I am located. This suggestion has obvious merit - and is of course indispensable to the historian - but its ability to secure the concept of hermeneutic meaning depends on just how it is conceived. On the one hand, it must not lead back to the sort of contextualism that effaces individual agency and creativity. Thus Bevir argues that intellectual traditions are not "limiting frameworks" [L198] but "emergent entities" that "arise from the beliefs of numerous individuals" [L196-97]. On the other hand, it must not merely reproduce the problem it was meant to solve, namely, our inability to find a principle for reasonably attributing specific beliefs to individuals, a problem generated by the "web of belief" metaphor of the mind. Unfortunately, since Bevir thinks of this emergent entity as itself a "web of beliefs" [L193], appeal to the intellectual tradition only pushes the problem back. Even if we grant that the individual mind is a web of beliefs (though this is just what is in question), why should we think that the social context of reasoning is one? How are we to identify the pre-conscious beliefs that must belong to the intellectual tradition itself? The very idea is an absurdity, yet without it there will be no limit to what might be ascribed to the "context" of an individual action, and so no way to limit which beliefs an historian may ascribe in order to explain it. The metaphor breaks down definitively here. The relation between social context and hermeneutic meaning cannot be adequately determined by the "logic" of our folk-psychological concepts.
4. Conclusion: The Phenomenological Option
We need not abandon the anti-scientistic motivation for Bevir's defense of folk psychology, however, if instead of its logic we draw on its phenomenology in our theory of historical meaning. From a phenomenological point of view, the problem arises because the kind of meaning at issue for the historian - what is at stake, for instance, in exploring what Petrarch's ascent of Mt. Ventoux "meant" - is not readily understood as a function of belief and change of belief alone. If we are trying to trace the emergence of a certain idea of "nature," only part of what we are interested in will be captured by specifying the views about nature Petrarch inherited and the new beliefs that he sought to harmonize with those views. For the "nature" we are tracing is not an "idea," such as would show up in a philosophical treatise, but rather a new way in which being in the world is experienced as a whole. This altered manner of gearing into the social (and cosmic) "context" - in various ways common to poets, statesmen, religious figures and everyday folk, as well as philosophers - reflects a shift in what matters, in the salience of things, and this sort of meaning is only dimly captured by focusing on explicit beliefs. For the phenomenologist, to see Petrarch's action as meaningful it would not be enough to reconstruct an intellectual tradition, conceived as a web of beliefs, but Petrarch's world, conceived as a "totality of significance."
This concept of world stems from Heidegger [81], and it would require a separate essay to explain its pertinence here. For now, we should simply not that the notion of world as "significance" - historically indexed and so of relevance to the historian - correlates to an account of our being in the world that avoids the inconsistencies found in the logic of folk psychology. In contrast to the logical approach, Heidegger's concept of significance corresponds to a holistic view of the "faculties" (to speak loosely) of the mind. The world that must be understood if Petrarch's actions and utterances are to be understood is not a function of beliefs toward which he had various pro-attitudes but a whole that (affectively) matters to him as a whole, and for this reason things can appear to him as meaningful in this or that way, puzzling, fresh, and so on. Bevir segregates these moments - "pro-attitudes might be relevant to motives, but they are still not relevant to individual viewpoints" [L132-3], that is, to meaning - and yet we have seen that this segregation does not lead to a clear, consistent concept of hermeneutic meaning. There are occasions where what is believed and the motive for acting on it come apart, but this does not imply that hermeneutic meaning is a function of the former alone. The phenomenological alternative to rationalism insists that something's being intelligible "as" something depends on a mode of being in the world in which things can matter to one, and no account in terms of belief alone can capture this dimension of meaning. When Heidegger argues that being in the world is essentially "care" and only subsequently "reason" - that we are not merely self-conscious beings (having beliefs about ourselves) but are concerned for our own being [10, 178-83] - it is this sort of point he has in mind.
On may still preserve procedural individualism under the phenomenological option, but without Bevir's mentalistic and theoretical holism. With the contextualists we grant that the world is meaningful before it is "assigned" a meaning: individual representations are limitations of structures that are already inhabited as meaningful in my practices. For instance, in taking a walk I rely on my shoes - this is their intelligibility as part of a meaningful practice - and the subsequent belief I express about them when asked does not imply that I was all along taking a whole web of beliefs for granted. Still, the world is not a deterministic episteme with a life of its own. Although practices are basic it is I who engage in them, and the kind of practices relevant for understanding the meaning of my actions and utterances need not be global, maximally anonymous ones. A fine-grained historical analysis can uncover "micro-practices" at work in very local and specific circumstances of family, coterie, or tryst which illuminate what distinguishes me from those many others with whom I share the world. Phenomenologically, practices must be seen as basic in an account of meaning not only because they incorporate the social, contextual character of intelligibility - acknowledged in Bevir's concept of intellectual tradition - but because it is in practices that one finds the indispensable "elements" of meaning - affectivity, understanding, and discourse - as an original whole. If one can subsequently show how individual explicit beliefs emerge in specific (usually rather intellectualized) contexts, it would be a mistake to think that such beliefs were sufficient for an account of meaning. Mephistopheles's old lament is here as relevant as ever: "Whoever wants to know and write about / A living thing first drives the spirit out; / He has the parts then in his grasp, / But gone is the spirit's holding-clasp" [68]. (14)
But if beliefs do not thereby become irrelevant, what is ultimately the relation between the phenomenology of historical understanding and its logic? It seems to me to be this: for all the clarity it brings to a certain dimension of historical inquiry, (and for all its value as a way of answering the hyperbolic skepticism that shares the same "anti-foundational" cognitive space with this logic), the norms of logic cannot claim to be exclusively entailed by analysis of the concept of meaning that is relevant to historians. What accounts for beliefs and change of belief is not necessarily what accounts for meaning and change of meaning. To get at the latter, other narrative strategies - even in the history of ideas, but certainly in a "general theory of culture" - with other discursive aims, and so other norms, may well be needed. It would be crippling to exclude them.
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1. See, for instance, Frank Ankersmit, History and Tropology; Stephen Bann, The Inventions of History; Hans Kellner, Language and Historical Representation; Dominick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History; Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History. For a critical review of this movement, see John Zammito, "Are We Being Theoretical Yet?"
2. See, for instance, Carr, Time, Narrative, and History, and Ricoeur, Time and Narrative.
3. In Narrative Logic Frank Ankersmit writes that "if the content of the narratio cannot be reduced to the meaning of particular statements in the narratio, it is to be expected that the relation between the 'truth of the narratio' and 'the truth of its individual statements' is less clear than we might at first presume" [62]. Indeed "in a philosophical argument the phrases 'the truth (and falsity) of a narratio' should be shunned" [77] since there is no coherent measure of the truth of a narratio as a whole.
4. White, "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality" [21]. See also Crowell, "Mixed Messages," and Lyotard, The Differend [128-150].
5. This is what Rickert calls "the absence of principles [Prinzipienlosigkeit] in intuitive philosophy of life" [34f; on Husserl, 28f, 50f]. See also Natorp, Allgemeine Psychologie.
6. See Husserl's letter to Natorp (March 18, 1909) in which he objects to the way neo-Kantians operate with "fixed formulas" and argues for an "idealism from below" in which one clarifies theoretical norms on the basis of pre-theoretical sources [Schuhmann 110]. Among neo-Kantians, Emil Lask, a student of Rickert, moved in this direction, arguing that "the most elementary logical problems only disclose themselves to the investigator who includes 'pre-scientific' theoretical behavior in the scope of his investigation" [185] - a good description of Bevir's project. The crucial issue is whether the terrain of the "pre-scientific" is still "theoretical." For a recent discussion, see Mohanty [xiii-xxxii].
7. I say "embraces" since Bevir does not so much argue for the anti-foundationalist position as adopts it as a working hypothesis that poses a "dilemma" for the intellectual tradition of idealism with which he identifies. For recent defenses of a kind of post-Quinean foundationalism see Bonjour, In Defense of Pure Reason; Boghossian, "Knowledge of Logic"; and Nagel, The Last Word.
8. Bevir adopts the standard view of logical positivism deriving from A. J. Ayer. But as Michael Friedman has recently shown, the actual views held by positivists like Carnap are considerably less foundational than the common picture assumes. Indeed, the concept of "constitutivity" [7] Friedman finds at the heart of the positivist conception of the apriori is not very different from the sort of "lax analyticity" defended by Bevir himself.
9. In Kant, this is reflected in the claim that "in every special doctrine of nature only so much science proper can be found as there is mathematics in it" [6]. Subsequent neo-Kantianism can be seen as an attempt to circumvent the reasons behind Kant's claim so as to extend the reach of transcendental "logic" to fields beyond the mathematical sciences of nature. See Köhnke [225-39]. In the Crisis, in contrast, Husserl argued that by starting with the cultural construct of "science" Kantians begin at too abstract a level to clarify the norms genuinely constitutive of cognition [91-116].
10. This was originally proposed by Vann McGee [462]. I would like to thank my colleague, Richard Grandy, for calling my attention to it.
11. In a similar vein, Dreyfus points out how John Searle tends to "transfer the logical necessity of constitutive rules" - what "Wittgenstein calls the grammar of the domain in question" - to "the ontological and causal" level, without which it is impossible for him say "how meaningful social acts are created" ["Phenomenological Description" 186-7]. Precisely this slide from the logical to the ontological takes place in Bevir's rationalization of the everyday and of folk psychology.
12. Bevir argues that many problems in the theory of interpretation (for instance, Gadamer's idea that the meaning of a work of art changes through the various historical interpretations it receives) arise through failure to distinguish sufficiently between texts - which are simply unmeaning entities in the world - and works - which are texts as intended by the author or the reader [L73]. A work is constituted by the author's "final intention" (not some intention antecedent to the work, but the intention "as they make the utterance") [L69]. The historian, who is interested in "meanings that actually existed in the past" [L75], can seek to uncover that meaning, but the author's intention need not be what interests us in reading a text. Other readers constitute other works. This view does not help us answer the central question in philosophy of art as to whether these later readings - say, of Hamlet - are of the same work of art, but this is of course not Bevir's concern.
13. This example shows how Bevir ontologizes what are supposed to be grammatical conditions. That we have to appeal to rules in order to understand the action does not entail that, to engage in the action, the player is dealing with the rules pre-consciously. And if one chooses to move to the ontological level to explain the "intentional directedness" of my movements in relation to the ball, to other players, and so on, it is still not necessary to appeal to pre-conscious beliefs. Phenomenological accounts of embodiment, such as one finds in Merleau-Ponty, suggest that such an explanation "might be framed in terms of a sense of deformation from and return to an optimal form or gestalt of the body-world relationship." See Wakefield and Dreyfus [267].
14. The German reads: "Wer will was Lebendigs erkennen und beschreiben, / Sucht erst den Geist herauszutreiben, / Dann hat er die Teile in seiner Hand, / Fehlt, leider! nur das geistige Band."