Mark Bevir on Skinner and the ‘Myth of Coherence’

Abstract

Bevir has argued that Quentin Skinner’s attack on the alleged ‘myth of coherence’ in the history of ideas depends on mistaken views of the nature of mind, namely a focus on illocutionary intentions at the expense of beliefs. An attempt is made to clarify just what the myth of coherence is and what kind of coherence is at issue, with a view to assessing the criticism.

Notes

² M. Bevir, ‘Mind and Method in the History of Ideas’, History and Theory, 36:2 (1997), 167–89 (167).

¹ I take the liberty to call it recent, since Bevir himself reports on the very article of a recent onslaught by Skinner and Pocock referring pretty much or even mostly to their work from the 1960s and 1970s.

³ Bevir, ‘Mind and Method in the History of Ideas’, 168.

⁴ There may, of course, also be a conflict between my interpretation of Bevir and his self‐understanding, but that question I will leave to be discussed.

⁵ Bevir, ‘Mind and Method in the History of Ideas’, 168.

⁶ Bevir, ‘Mind and Method in the History of Ideas’, 173.

⁷ See Bevir, ‘Mind and Method in the History of Ideas’, 174. Skinner quote from Q. Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, in Meaning and Context. Quentin Skinner and his Critics, edited by J. Tully (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 29–67 (39).

⁸ In any standard bibliography of Skinner, this would be the first publication, but Skinner had already published a couple of articles as an undergraduate.

⁹ Bevir, ‘Mind and Method in the History of Ideas’, 175.

¹⁰ Bevir, ‘Mind and Method in the History of Ideas’, 175.

¹¹ Bevir, ‘Mind and Method in the History of Ideas’, 175.

¹³ Skinner, ‘Motives, Intentions and Interpretation’. That Skinner uses verb may in this and some other occasions, hints to the direction that he is not alleging that this meaning could be recovered with certainty. This is also a point that Bevir misses when he on other occasions claims that Skinner regards his methods as sufficient for achieving historical knowledge (see discussion below).

¹² Skinner, ‘Motives, Intentions and Interpretation’, in Meaning and Context, edited by Tully, 68–78 (68).

¹⁴ Q. Skinner, ‘The Idea of Cultural Lexicon’, in Visions of Politics, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 158–74 (161).

¹⁵ See Skinner, ‘The Idea of Cultural Lexicon’, 162.

¹⁶ Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, 55. The formula to which he is referring is in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, remark 43. It should be noted that Wittgenstein is commenting on the use of the concept ‘meaning’ and claiming only that in most cases our employment of the word ‘meaning’ could be defined as ‘the meaning of a word is its use in the language’. Wittgenstein does not actually claim that the meaning of a word is always its use.

¹⁷ Skinner, ‘A Reply to My Critics’, in Meaning and Context, edited by Tully, 231–88 (283).

¹⁸ This is also a theme in Bevir’s The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 135–6.

¹⁹ In general, regarding meaning/use‐theses it is worth to keeping in mind that the answer to the question, what is the use of a given concept, can refer to a variety of different types of ‘uses’: some might refer, e.g., to the definition (or to the locutionary act) (‘using in the sense of …’), while others might refer to illocutionary power or acts, and others to perlocutionary acts.

²⁰ See, e.g., J. Femia, ‘An Historicist Critique of “Revisionists” Methods for Studying the History of Ideas’, in Meaning and Context, edited by Tully, 156–175; E. Åsard ‘Quentin Skinner and His Critics’, Stats Vetenskaplig Tidskrift, 2 (1987), 101–16; K. Palonen, Quentin Skinner. History, Politics, Rhetoric (Cambridge: Polity, 2003). Some commentators who criticize Skinner’s views on anachronisms pay no attention at all to his typology and build their whole criticism on one or two of the ‘slogans’. See N. Jardine, ‘Uses and Abuses of Anachronism in the History of the Sciences’, History of Science, 38:121 (2000), 251–70; M. Leslie, ‘In Defence of Anachronism’, Political Studies, XVIII:4 (1971), 433–47; and G. Prudovsky, ‘Can We Ascribe to Past Thinkers’ Concepts They Had No Linguistic Means to Express?’, History and Theory, 36:1 (1997), 15–31; and see also K. Palonen, ‘Retorinen käänne poliittisen ajattelun tutkimuksessa’, in Pelkkää retoriikkaa, edited by K. Palonen and H. Summa (Tampere: Vastapaino, 1998), 137–59. Nick Tosh seems to be jumping freely from one category to another, namely from the mythology of parochialism (type D.1.) to the mythology of doctrines (type A.1. converting shattered remarks into a doctrine). See N. Tosh ‘Anachronism and Retrospective Explanation: In Defence of a Present‐Centered History of Science’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 34 (2003), 5–27. G.J. Schochet, ‘Quentin Skinner’s Method’, Political Theory/August (1974), 261–76 gives a rather brief and not very detailed description of some of the mythologies. Pocock comes up somewhat randomly with two of the mythologies (J.G.A. Pocock, ‘Quentin Skinner. The History and the Politics of History’, Common Knowledge, 10:3 (2004), 532–50) and Lamb seems to deal with only one form of mythology, namely what in my reconstruction of typology is called ‘Criticism for failing to discuss doctrine proper to subject’ (A.2.1.), even though he uses the plural form (R. Lamb, ‘Quentin Skinner’s “Post‐modern” History of Ideas’, History, 89:295 (2004), 424–33.

²¹ Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, 48. There are other phrases that repeat the same message in ‘Meaning and Understanding’: ‘[I]t will never in fact be possible simply to study what any given classic writer has said (especially in an alien culture) without bringing to bear some of one’s own expectations about what he must be saying’ (31) and ‘It is obviously dangerous, but it is inescapable, that he [the historian] should apply his own familiar criteria of classification and discrimination […] Otherwise it is hard to see how there can be any understanding at all’ (45, and note 105). Unfortunately these passages, which clearly state that there is no absolute escape from the contemporary point of view, have mainly been neglected in response to Skinner.

²² When it comes to a‐priori argumentation and interpretation, I am becoming more interested in it when reading Bevir, and as you will see later, Skinner himself is also leaning on a‐priori arguments at certain points. Skinner’s point could possibly be put in Kuhnian terms: the scientific revolution which overthrows the prevailing paradigms should be allowed to take place within the interpretative process of a given historical object.

²³ There is no need or room to discuss the typology in detail, but more about it can be found in Sami Syrjämäki, Sins of a Historian. Perspectives to the Problem of Anachronism in Intellectual and Conceptual History (forthcoming, Tampere University Press).

²⁴ Although in ‘Meaning and Understanding’ Skinner seems partly to give the final word to the author, he also admits that an outsider could also give a better description on what the author was doing.

²⁵ Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, 42.

²⁶ Skinner, ‘Motives, Intentions and Interpretation’ (revised version), in Visions of Politics, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 90–102 (36). For the Bible on witches, see Deuteronomy 18.10–12 (Skinner mentions 13.10–12 but that is probably a mistake); Galatians 5.20; Exodus 22.18.

²⁷ I am not sure if this is actually the best example to be offered. Since one could consider that maybe it was not so rational to hold the belief at that point that witches existed or at least that there could have been rational persons not believing in witches, it could have been irrational publicly or even in private to confess this, and this might be what Skinner had in mind as he starts to speak of the ‘prevailing norms for acquisition’ in the particular contexts. Maybe a better example would have been the belief in the idea of earth as the centre of the world.

²⁸ Q. Skinner, ‘Interpretation, Rationality and Truth’, in Visions of Politics, vol. 1 (2002) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 27–56 (36.)

²⁹ Skinner, ‘Interpretation, Rationality and Truth’, 37.

³⁰ G.E.R. Lloyd, Ancient Worlds, Modern Reflections (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 5 (and fn 4).

³¹ Lloyd, Ancient Worlds, Modern Reflections, 5.

³⁴ Skinner, ‘A Reply to My Critics’, 258.

³² Skinner, ‘A Reply to My Critics’, 257.

³³ Skinner, ‘A Reply to My Critics’, 257–8.

³⁶ Skinner, ‘A Reply to My Critics’, 278.

³⁵ Skinner, ‘A Reply to My Critics’, 278.

³⁷ Bevir, ‘Mind and Method in the History of Ideas’, 168.

³⁸ Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas, 81. Skinner quotes from ‘Motives, Intentions and the Interpretation of Texts’ (77). The same quotation appears in Bevir’s ‘The Errors of Linguistic Contextualism’, History and Theory, 31:3 (1992), 276–98 (277) to make the same point.

³⁹ Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, 64 (italics are mine).

⁴⁰ Skinner ‘Analysis of Political Thought and Action’, in Meaning and Context, edited by Tully, 97–118 (99).

⁴¹ Skinner, ‘A Reply to My Critics’, 281.

⁴² See Bevir, ‘Mind and Method in the History of Ideas’, 175–6. The referred‐to texts from Skinner are from 1972 and 1988 (although the collection containing both of Skinner’s essays is from 1988).

⁴³ See Bevir, ‘The Errors of Linguistic Contextualism’, 276–7. The texts are ‘Some Problems in the Analyses of Political Thought and Action’ from 1972 and ‘A Reply to My Critics’ from 1988. In the same article, Bevir also sees unproblematic continuity when it comes to Skinner’s ‘soft linguistic contextualism’. See the references to articles originally from 1976 and 1988 on pages 288–9.