Beliefs, Desires, Weak Intentionality and the Identity of the History of Ideas

Abstract

The question why Bevir's account of intentionality is conceptualized purely in terms of individual beliefs is important as such a conceptualization appears to depart from standard accounts of intentionality within the philosophy of mind, that include reference to individual desires. It is beliefs and desires which are usually considered the rock‐bottom components of individual intentional states, yet Bevir defines weak intentions solely in terms of the former while explicitly rejecting attention to the latter. There are a number of difficulties which an account of meaning that excludes reference to desires faces. Nevertheless, there are a number of reasons for historians of ideas to embrace a theory of meaning that includes reference to beliefs but not desires. Through an extension of a different argument put forward by Bevir, it is suggested that such a belief‐based definition of the nature of meaning is made defensible through reference to an account of the identity of the history of ideas as a discipline, a distinct area of academic enquiry that can be – and for good reasons is – individuated from the history of human action.

Notes

¹ This paper was presented at the UK Political Studies Association conference in Manchester in April 2009 and to the American Philosophical Association (Pacific Division) conference in San Francisco in April 2010 and I am grateful to both audiences for useful comments.

² M. Bevir, ‘Clarifications’, History of European Ideas, 28:1 (2002), 83–100 (90).

³ Bevir has written considerably on the history of political thought, particularly on nineteenth‐century socialist and social democratic ideas. His early philosophical/methodological articles were mostly critical pieces, directed at proponents of ‘linguistic contextualism’. See M. Bevir, ‘The Errors of Linguistic Contextualism’, History and Theory, 34 (1992), 276–98 and ‘Mind and Method in the History of Ideas’, History and Theory, 36 (1994), 167–89.

⁴ See the symposia held in Philosophical Books, 42 (2001), 64–86; Rethinking History, 4 (2000), 301–50; History of European Ideas, 28 (2002), 1–117; and History and Theory, 41 (2002), 198–217.

⁵ Yet it is interesting to note that Bevir's philosophical work has been influential in the study of political science: he and R.A.W. Rhodes have established ‘interpretivism’ as one of the dominant approaches to the study of British politics. Though interpretivism in many respects can be viewed as an extension of Rhodes's earlier work on governance, it is clearly defined as a philosophy of the social sciences by its adherence to the conceptions delineated in The Logic, most obviously a rejection of agency/structure dichotomies, a suspicion of scienticism and method, commitments to procedural individualism and a pragmatist account of objectivity and the centrality of concepts such as narratives and dilemmas.

⁶ M. Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 318.

⁷ As he observes, ‘criticisms of intentionalism have become so widely accepted that intentionalists have been reduced to a besieged minority’ (Bevir, The Logic, 33).

⁸ For example, in the writings of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, the ‘New Critics’, Stanley Fish and, in the history of ideas, J.G.A. Pocock.

⁹ Skinner, ‘Interpretation and the Understanding of Speech Acts’, in Visions of Politics I: Regarding Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 118.

¹⁰ Bevir, The Logic, 68. Bevir draws a conceptual distinction between a ‘text’ and a ‘work’ (57–8), but since that distinction is used only to flesh out the nature of weak intentionalist commitments, I will use the two terms interchangeably.

¹¹ Conceiving of meaning in this way highlights the problems with contextualist and conventionalist theories of meaning who cannot explain phenomena such as the creative use of language (e.g. sarcasm, malapropisms). Bevir, The Logic, 31–52.

¹² According to which objective (though necessarily provisional) understanding is achieved through an anthropological epistemology and a view of history as a fallible human practice with shared standards of evidence that are contingent but not arbitrary.

¹³ See K. Stueber, ‘Intentionalism, Intentional Realism and Empathy’, Journal of the Philosophy of History, 3:3 (2009), 290–307.

¹⁴ For an amplification of this point and the philosophical assumptions behind it, see Bevir's response to Vivienne Brown, ‘How to Be an Intentionalist’, History and Theory, 41:2 (2002), 209–17.

¹⁵ Mark Bevir, ‘Clarifications’, History of European Ideas, 28 (2002), 88.

¹⁶ A. Munslow, ‘What is History?’ review, available at http://www.history.ac.uk/ihr/Focus/Whatishistory/munslow2.html. Then again, Munslow also suggested that the book ‘could only be written by a non‐practitioner’, even though Bevir is an established historian of nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century British political thought.

¹⁷ M. Bevir and F. Ankersmit, ‘Exchanging Ideas’, Rethinking History, 4:3 (2000), 351–72 (362).

¹⁸ V. Brown, ‘On Some Problems with Weak Intentionalism for Intellectual History’, History and Theory, 41:2 (2002), 198–208.

¹⁹ M. Bevir ‘Response to Alun Munslow’, http://www.history.ac.uk/discourse/bevirMark.html. His response to Ankersmit is similar. See Bevir and Ankersmit, ‘Exchanging Ideas’.

²⁰ See, for example, John Searle, Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

²¹ Searle, Intentionality, 8. See also Bevir, The Logic, 286–7.

²² Bevir, The Logic, 132.

²³ Bevir, The Logic, emphases added.

²⁴ Bevir, The Logic, 133.

²⁵ A similar confusion is said to undermine the claim that meaning can incorporate illocutionary force. Bevir argues that once we grasp the distinction between illocutionary viewpoints and illocutionary motives, we will see that they are separable and not necessarily coincidental and because of this the latter can be excluded from our accounts of the meaning of utterances. Bevir, The Logic, 136–7.

²⁶ Bevir, The Logic, 139.

²⁷ T. Hobbes, Leviathan, edited by R. Tuck, 145.

²⁹ Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, xv. For a general (though significantly revised) digest of Skinner's writings on the methodology of the history of ideas, which expands on his understanding of Wittgenstein's ‘words are deeds’ maxim, see Skinner, Visions of Politics, Volume I.

²⁸ Q. Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). See 124–77 for the full development of Skinner's claim that Hobbes's account of liberty in Leviathan indicates his desire to undermine ideologically the proponents of the ‘neo‐Roman’ account.

³⁰ It does not much matter for the purposes of this discussion whether or not the desire‐based approach to the history of ideas is the most accurate description of Skinner's often ambiguous methodological approach.

³¹ Bevir, The Logic, 139–41.

³² J. Gorman, ‘The Normativity of Logic in the History of Ideas’, above, in this issue of Intellectual History Review.