Jonathan Gorman The need for pragmatism in historical theory Abstract I present the history of philosophy, and history more generally, as a context of ideas, where philosophers and historians share concerns about the meaning of the texts they both use, and where for some there is a principled contrast between seeing meaning in quasi-mathematical terms (“a philosophical stance”) or in terms of context (“a historical stance”). I introduce this imagined (but not imaginary) world of ideas as temporally extended. Returning to my early research into the epistemic problems of historiography, I present my view that foundational was meaningful language in a shared world, and I display some difficulties found in handling the “wholeness” of historical accounts. I came to realise that it was epistemic opposition between historical accounts that mattered. I concluded that analytical philosophy was wrong to assume that individual sentences were free-standing meaningful units that could be juxtaposed with others at whim, and that an understanding of the rational grounds for determining relevance was needed. I used in due course Quine’s conception of the “web of belief”, and noted that a historical account could be treated as a “unit of empirical significance” in his terms. The epistemic problems of history came for me before pragmatism, and attention to those problems required me to adopt the form of pragmatism I describe. I came to realise that I had wrongly adopted a synchronic view of the web, thereby adopting a “philosophical stance”. Rather, the web should be conceived in diachronic terms as a rolling web, so forming history itself. It is wrong to think that language started in atomistic terms so that, following Aristotle, it first consisted of simple concepts forming sentences of brief and narrow subject-predicate form. Instead, early communications took the form of oral traditions usually in narrative form. Meaningful wholes such as historical accounts are conceptually prior to atomistic sentences and need to be seen in extended temporal terms, so that an Aristotelian subject-predicate metaphysics is implausible. Quine’s pragmatism framed and facilitated my historical stance despite the unashamed philosophical stance that he adopted. It may be that there is some connection between pragmatism and the theory of history. If one tried to characterise particular pragmatists, then one might perhaps observe such a feature. But what would be the nature of such a supposed “observation”? What method should we choose to determine the truth of such a claim? The claim might be interpretable as a factual assertion about a concern with or interest in the epistemic dimension of historical inquiry on the part of some pragmatists. Even if expressed in the present tense, this assertion would then, not implausibly, be warranted by historical methods, that is, warranted by informed and scholarly reading of relevant texts and other interpretable remains. Here are possible outcomes of such imagined scholarship, offered here as possible truths so warranted: Morton White, a pragmatist, was concerned with the epistemic dimension of historical inquiry. 1 W.V. Quine, another pragmatist, was not. 2 1 See, for example, White 1965. 2 Quine’s entire oeuvre is evidence for this. He did, however, display a fondness for etymology. See Quine 1990, where the alphabetically ordered entries jump from “Gödel’s Theorem” to “Ideas” with no mention of “History”, “Future” has a place, with a rare (for Quine) reference to an ethical issue (74-5); “Past”, “Present” and “Time” do not