what i learned today

analytical philosophers really, really like to define things. they get mad when you don't define things very exactly and hold to your original definitions exactly. i'm not an analytical philosopher. on the contrary, i make them mad. i must try harder to stick to tightly defined definitions in my papers. history and philosophy are funny things. history seems to want to describe, describe, describe. it's likely that with all the description, you can't find one "normative" element--an essential quality that holds all these things that you're describing together. so you sometimes make things up--ideologies, personal preferences, national character, thesis-antithesis-synthesis, etc. for example: if something happened that we don't understand in, say, the Soviet Union's biology program in 1949, we might speculate that it's unusual because it's marxist/dialectical materialist. but there's no actual evidence that marxism/dialectical materialism is causing things to turn out different than we expected. we make these inferences based on widespread tendencies we see in other places nearby our area of inquiry. so if we read Stalin saying something like "[communists] must storm the fortress of science" and then we see biology changing, we assume that the two things are tightly connected. but we don't actually know that they are empirically. when doing history, that's okay. you can make these connections and it's up to other scholars to show you're wrong. that's not okay in philosophy. that's something i've been learning. likewise, if you come into a history discussion/reading/lecture and attack the book/speaker for not holding to tight definitions of things like "marxism" or "ideology" or "causation" they might: (1) be sympathetic but try to defend themselves by showing how these definitions are fuzzy anyway, (2) shoot a look of bemusement at you for being overly analytical and not appreciating the fuzziness of history, or (3) shoot at you. does this mean history and philosophy are bad roommates? how then can history and philosophy of science (HPS--the program i'm in at notre dame) (co-)exist? with lots of work and patience, i guess. somewhere in my idealistic imaginiation, i guessed that critical thinking was important in both history and philosophy. and that critical thinking was the underlying "methodology" of both. but i was/am wrong. critical thinking is of the same type as philosophizing or historicizing, but not exactly the same thing. philosophy and history both have methods. those methods are not unrelated. but, just like with the northern and southern Irish, just because they're kissing cousins doesn't mean they can't have really big fights over who is more right. can't we all just get along?