part0007

This book is an attempt to explore some special consequences of one of the greatest changes which have come over our view of the world. Until not so very long ago we believed that nature was steady and unchanging, without a history; and that human culture had a history but that that history was not part of the steady existence of nature but more like an ephemeral dance performed on nature’s stage. In our new view of the world which has firmly established itself in the course of the twentieth century, nature and history have come together. Nature herself, we have come to see, has a history and human history is inserted into it. Thus, there must be some kind of link between the historicity of nature and the historicity of man. The history of nature influences the history of man; and the history of man, in the shape of man’s knowledge of nature, in turn, reflects upon the history of nature. If there still are two ‘cultures’ the extension of historicity has made their practitioners realise that they have a lot in common.

Unfortunately, the clarity of this vision tends to be clouded when we expect too much from our knowledge of history. It is one thing to be aware of the historicity of nature and of man. But it does not follow that we can be equally certain of the actual course of these histories. On the contrary, historical knowledge is subject to the same doubts and uncertainties as all knowledge and cannot be used to establish any final view about the growth of knowledge, let alone firm thoughts about a lack of growth or about the finality of the relativism of all knowledge.

In writing this book I was very much the beady-eyed historian who seeks to explain the limitations of historical knowledge and the conditions it is subject to. Bearing those limitations in mind, I am arguing in favour of a philosophy of knowledge which, while encompassing the historicity both of nature and of man, does not depend on historical knowledge alone. Again, writing as a historian I have little interest in conceptual analysis. The form of discourse I employ is not coercive, but explanatory in Robert Nozick’s sense. But unlike Nozick I do not believe that any explanation can be self-explanatory. On the contrary: in explaining I have to have constant recourse to a theory in terms of which any explanation holds good. In this case, the theory in question is the theory of evolution and for the purposes of this book, that theory is itself not a subject to be explained. However, lest the reader think that in saying that all explanations are relative to a theory I am subscribing to Richard Rorty’s view that all truths and meanings are relative to a speech community or a tradition of rhetoric, I wish to state that I hold the opposite view. In saying that explanations are never absolute but always in terms of something else, I mean that whatever they are relative to must, in turn and on a different occasion, be open to criticism and be explained.

Not counting the Introduction, the book falls into three parts. In the first part (chapters 1 and 2 ) I try to explain the historicity of our knowledge and specify the conditions to which our knowledge of all historicity is subject. The second part (chapters 3 , 4 and 5 ) is devoted to a critique of widespread contemporary attempts to cull too much from our knowledge of history. In the third part (chapters 6 and 7 ) I return to the main theme by developing Karl Popper’s evolutionary philosophy of knowledge and by sketching the major transformations of thought which become possible and desirable when one takes historicity seriously.

The shape of my argument is almost wholly dependent on the fact that I was a student of Karl Popper in Christchurch, New Zealand (1940–4) and of Wittgenstein in Cambridge (1946–8). At the time these early influences were the result of accidents: I had come to Christchurch as a refugee from the Second World War, and to Cambridge to study medieval history. There was no plan to learn from either Popper or Wittgenstein and it took me several decades to discover how this educational accident came to be turned into a fundamental and meaningful philosophical experience. I have since recorded this extraordinary accident in a paper on ‘Transformation in Philosophy through the Teaching Methods of Wittgenstein and Popper’ (Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences , New York, 1982, vol. 2, pp. 1235–65).

In writing the present book which spans so many disciplines – history and sociology, the history of science, philosophy, biology and physics as well as the philosophy of science and of knowledge – I have relied on the help of a large number of friends and colleagues who, though they do not all share all of my views, have given me generous support and encouragement, both moral and substantial. First of all I owe an immense debt to W.W. Bartley III (Stanford) and to Gerard Radnitzky (Trier) and Anthony O’Hear (University of Surrey), who provided much more than mere inspiration; and Peter Webster (Wellington, NZ) whose personal interest in the progress of the book has been invaluable. Gerhard Vollmer (Glessen), Eric Geiringer (Wellington) and Georg Süssman (Munich) have been my mentors in both biology and physics; I ought here also mention my colleague David Beaglehole, Professor of Physics at the Victoria University of Wellington, who was always happy to explain physics to me but kept adding sceptically: ‘Your trouble is that you read too many books.’ Eduard Bonsel (Harlem), Bob Tristram (Wellington), Peter Wilson (Otago University, Dunedin), Anthony Flew (Reading and York Universities), Colin Davis (Wellington) and John Blackmore (Vienna) have all read the first draft of the book and made valuable criticisms and comments. For more generalised sympathetic encouragement I want to thank Paul and Eva Hoffmann in Tübingen, Ian Jarvie and Jagdhish Hattiangadi of York University (Canada) and Hans Albert in Heidelberg. Last, not least, I wish to thank Eugene Kamenka (Canberra) for a fruitful comment of ten years ago. ‘If you believe,’ he said to me in his inimitably avuncular way, ‘that universals are nothing but thoughts, you have a thing coming to you!’ It did. I am equally grateful to Paul Levinson (New York) for first encouraging me to put down on paper my thoughts on the evolutionary fruitfulness of dogmatism. Without this initial invitation, work on this book would never have been started.