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121 pages

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John Dewey and the Ethics of Historical Belief addresses the ethics of the representation of the past with a focus on the justification of historical belief within religious and critical historiographical traditions. What makes a belief about the past justified? What makes one historical belief preferable to another? A great deal rides on how these questions are answered. History textbook wars take place across the globe, from California to India. Cultural heritage protection is politicized and historical research is commonly deployed in support of partisan agendas.

This book explores not only John Dewey's relatively unknown contribution to this topic, but also the leading alternatives to his approach. Author Curtis Hutt focuses attention on the debate among those most influenced by Dewey's thought, including Richard Rorty, Richard Bernstein, James Kloppenberg, Wayne Proudfoot, and Jeffrey Stout. He also reviews the seminal work of Van Harvey on the relationship between historians and religious believers. Dewey is cast as a vigorous opponent of those who argue that justified historical belief depends upon one's religious tradition. Strongly resisted is the idea that historical belief can be justified simply on account of acculturation. Instead, Dewey's view that beliefs are justified as a result of theorized historical inquiry is emphasized. In order to prevent moral blindness, the responsible historian and theologian alike are advised to attend to witnesses to the past that arise from outside of their own traditions.
Preface

Historical Introduction: Providing Reliable Witness to the Past: The New Troubled Relationship between Historians and Believers

Testes Veritatis: An Old Debate
Testes Veritatis: New Developments
The Ethics of Historical Belief: Religion and the Representation of the Past

1. The Ethics of Finding and Making the Past

Discovering the Past: The Epistemological Ethics of Scientific Historiography
Creating the Past: The Ethics of the Interpretation of the Past
Summary: Ranke and H. White

2. Dewey and the Ethics of Historical Belief

Dewey on the Justification of Historical Belief
Dewey’s Critique of Finding and Making the Past
Dewey’s Alternative Approach to the Ethics of Historical Belief

3. The Two Faces of Deweyan Pragmatism

Pragmatism without Method?
Richard Rorty on the Ethics of Historical Belief
Richard Bernstein on the Ethics of Historical Belief
Dewey on Interpretation and Inquiry

4. Justification, Entitlement, and Tradition: Debate After Dewey

From Van Harvey to the New Traditionalism
The Historian and the Believer: The Morality of Historical Knowledge and Christian Belief
Justification, Entitlement, and Tradition

5. Dewey and the Ethics of Historical Belief

Representing the Past

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

Philosophie

Épistémologie

Philosophie de la religion

Ethics in religion

Pragmatism

Philosophy of religion

History of religions

Historiography

Epistémologie

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Publié par	State University of New York Press
Date de parution	08 avril 2013
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781438445700
Langue	English

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JOHN DEWEY AND THE ETHICS OF HISTORICAL BELIEF
Religion and the Representation of the Past
CURTIS HUTT
S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS

Published by S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS , A LBANY
© 2013 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production, Laurie Searl Marketing, Michael Campochiaro
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hutt, Curtis.
John Dewey and the ethics of historical belief: religion and the representation of the past / Curtis Hutt.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4569-4 (hardcover: alk. paper)
1. Dewey, John, 1859–1952. 2. Historiography. 3. Religion. I. Title.
B945.D44H88 2013
191—dc23
2012014844
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
PREFACE

Part of this monograph is the result of work done in my doctoral dissertation in Religion and Critical Thought defended at Brown University in 2007. This text was titled “The Ethics of the Representation of the Religious Past.” I want to especially thank John P. Reeder Jr., Stanley Stowers, and Matthew Bagger for help along the way. The project would not have been possible without the consideration and constant support of my wife, Anna Dunaevsky, and children, Maia and Aidan.
HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION
PROVIDING RELIABLE WITNESS TO THE PAST

The New Troubled Relationship between Historians and Believers

TESTES VERITATIS: AN OLD DEBATE
Religious believers consistently turn to and are provided with knowledge of the past, produced in several different ways at various times and places, for guidance and authorization. History, even prior to its marriage to criticism in the modern age in the West, supplies precedents and legitimacy for behavior in countless presents. 1 The vocations of ancient court chroniclers, compilers of traditions, exegetes, and others are thereby customarily secured. Throughout much of the long history of Christianities in the West even heretics and non-believers could be counted upon to provide reliable witness ( testes veritatis ) to a momentous past. 2 While sectarians occasionally questioned this tactic seeking to preserve the purity of their religious practices and beliefs, it has of late come to face its most sophisticated and sternest test. This book is in general a reply to the following question: If our beliefs—specifically about the past—are justified vis-à-vis our other beliefs which result from social training in specific historical contexts and communities, then why is it necessary to attend to the observations of those outside of our traditions or respond to the live challenges to our convictions that they raise?
The last few centuries in the West have been marked by both an increased fear of the errors to which human judgment is prone and the hopeful development of strategies—most usually labeled “scientific”—designed to secure reliable knowledge. Knowledge of what actually occurred in the past was frequently deemed attainable by historians, that is, if eisogetical contamination was limited. 3 Scholars in their jobs as excavators of the past needed only to focus on historical facts secured independently of their interpretation which were discovered, not manufactured. Expert knowledge of the past determined in accordance with ethical standards guiding the work of professional historians made it possible to accurately discern and represent the actions and even intentions of forebears. In such a way, historians provided believers with models for current and future behavior. Effective retrieval, it has been commonly argued, leads to present-day revival and renewal. I will begin chapter 1 by outlining the view, upon which modern scientific historiographical methods are customarily based, that “what actually happened” is a viable object of investigation.
This characterization of the work of the historian, while unchallenged by many religious believers who actively engaged in attempts to prove the accuracy of their inherited accounts of the sacred past, 4 skeptics disputed in both the ancient world and the modern. The second part of chapter 1 will concern itself with one type of contemporary opposition to the projects of scientific historiographers who claim to discover and represent some aspect of a once real past. These doubters have emphasized the constructive nature of the historian's tasks whether as historiographer, historical anthropologist, ethnographer, archaeologist, and/or conservator. Understanding is characterized as invariably saturated by the linguistic, social, and cultural contexts of interpreters. The eisogetical, according to this view, always conditions the exegetical. The historian's interests and values, therefore, ought to be the primary focus of investigation into their representations of the past as no one has direct recourse, unmediated by cultural-linguistic influences, to the “brute” data or evidence from which knowledge of the past is gleaned. Some have taken this to mean that the past never amounts to anything more than opportune fiction—the product of specific instances of storytelling. To represent the past as anything more determinate is unethical. Ultimately, everything is “spin,” that is, propaganda of one sort or another. Historians, in the opinion of many who hold such views, are incapable of offering reliable witness to the past.

TESTES VERITATIS: NEW DEVELOPMENTS
In recent decades, not only have the strategies of modern scientific historiographers endeavoring to discover the past been questioned by those stressing the “made up” character of representations of what has come before, but the common reasoning underlying each of these rival positions has been put to the test. As maintained by each of the views just outlined, beliefs about the past are taken to be true or false, and hence justified or unjustified, 5 insofar as they are grounded or not grounded, represent or fail to represent facts of the matter that are purportedly incontrovertible since they are established prior to and independently of specific socially situated instances of narrativizing about them. These privileged facts—established independently of the historian's cultural-linguistic reconstruction of them—are thereby understood to ground, even cause, true beliefs about them. What actually happened provides, or fails to provide, an anchor for contemporary interpretation. Those who claim that the past is the product of the historian's creation simply deny that access to such secure foundations is possible at all.
In chapter 2 , inspired principally by the arguments of John Dewey, who in a little-known piece of writing applied his famous critique of “a spectator theory of knowledge” to the work of historians, I will not only reject all appeals to historical facts which serve as foundations—recourse to which might secure authentication—but also attempt to outline a way forward for academic historians which preserves widespread confidence in their discipline. Extrapolating from the arguments of Dewey and others, historical facts will never serve for the historian as unmediated, uninterpreted grounds—that is, not dependent upon a cultural perspective—for beliefs about the past. The fact/interpretation or fact/value dichotomy in historical studies is thoroughly undermined. Going one step further beyond his negative critique, Dewey additionally maintains that judgments concerning what has occurred in the past are understood in the broadest sense to be justified holistically, that is, by integration into the historian's own web of preferred and supporting beliefs in the present. 6 Historical facts, by this new view, are always informed by the social context within which the historian is trained and finds herself immersed. Statements about the past, however, are never reducible to mere interpretations, valuations, or fictions. The Deweyan equally opposes both those who endeavor to “find” the past via recourse to brute historical foundations and their opponents who prefer to characterize the past as the product of imaginative construction. The critique of finders does not entail that claims to knowledge about the past cannot be justified.
According to Dewey, the post-positivist pragmatic insistence that beliefs about the past—like all others—were justified relative to our other beliefs about the world in the present did not undermine scientific historiography but instead provided it with much needed legitimacy and potency. For Dewey, it was precisely this insight that supported his contention that justified historical belief was derived as a result of theorized historical inquiry. The experimental method championed in the natural sciences was thereby introduced as a tool for investigating the past. Simultaneously, Dewey's work undermines the traditional, though underdeveloped, neo-Kantian ethics of historical interpretation. Ultimate values or “ends-in-themselves” that served to anchor valuations or interpretations, rather than impartial scientific descriptions, of past events were rejected by Dewey in favor the procedural use of “ends-in-view” for guiding human action.

THE ETHICS OF HISTORICAL BELIEF: RELIGION AND THE REPRESENTATION OF THE PAST
While pragmatists of all stripes share Dewey's view that our beliefs—whether they concern the past or subject matter conventionally associated with the humanities or natural sciences—are justified relative to our other beliefs, they have often disagreed over just what this means. Some of Dewey's “scientistic” fo