History of European Ideas 28 (2002) 1–12

Discussion

History, meaning, and interpretation: a critical

response to Bevir
Robert Stern
Department of Philosophy, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10 2TN, UK
Accepted 10 January 2002

Abstract

This paper is a discussion of Mark Bevir’s The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 1999). It focuses on three topics central to Bevir’s book: his weak
intentionalism; his anthropological epistemology; and his priority claim regarding sincere,
conscious, and rational beliefs. It is argued that Bevir’s position on these issues is problematic
in certain important respects, and that some of his related critical claims against Pocock,
Skinner and others are misconceived. r 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Intentionalism; History of ideas; Epistemology; Bevir; Pocock; Skinner

Mark Bevir has written an ambitious, combative, and wide-ranging book, which
argues stoutly for a ‘moderate’ position on how we should think about the study of
the history of ideas. Thus, on the one hand he rejects various forms of post-
modernism, scepticism, and relativism, which cast doubt on the whole enterprise of
uncovering stable meanings from past writers and texts, whilst on the other hand he
rejects various forms of foundationalism or positivism, which make that enterprise
seem more clear cut and scientific than in fact it can be. Along the way, he challenges
many current orthodoxies, established authorities, and fads, while employing
arguments and insights from an impressive array of disciplines and thinkers
(including epistemologists, philosophers of language, philosophers of mind, and
linguists, as well as historians and historians of ideas).
Bevir treats the history of ideas as concerned with the meanings generated by
human cultures, and he believes the historian of ideas needs to know how to go
about determining those meanings. Bevir starts by arguing for the priority of what he

E-mail address: r.stern@sheffield.ac.uk (R. Stern).

0191-6599/02/$ - see front matter r 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
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2 R. Stern / History of European Ideas 28 (2002) 1–12

calls ‘hermeneutic meaning’ over ‘structural meaning’: according to Bevir, what an

historian of ideas should be concerned with is not the semantic or linguistic
properties of an utterance (either verbal or written), but by what individuals
(either speakers or audience) understand the utterance to mean. Bevir sees
this as a defense of what he calls ‘weak intentionalism’: that is, the meaning
of an utterance derives primarily (but not exclusively) from the final intentions
of its author. He then goes on to consider the epistemology of the history of
ideas, so construed. He argues that while no method enables us to have certain
or conclusive knowledge of the meaning of some past utterance (the fallacy
of foundationalism), we can still arrive at warranted but defeasible claims regarding
the meaning of these utterances (thereby avoiding scepticism). Bevir calls this middle
way ‘an anthropological epistemology’, which basically involves a coherentist
approach to justification, assessing claims about meaning by seeing how well they fit
agreed facts into a web of theory. Bevir then turns back to weak intentionalism,
arguing that weak intentions can be reduced to beliefs, and that there is a conceptual
priority of sincerity over deception, of conscious beliefs over unconscious ones, and
of rational beliefs over irrational ones. Having established the centrality of belief to
the enterprise, he next considers how the historian of ideas should go about
explaining why an individual believed what they did, and why beliefs held by
individuals change. Here again, Bevir defends a broadly coherentist approach,
arguing that ‘explanations of belief should refer to intellectual traditions’ (p. 177),1
and how those traditions have responded to problems or dilemmas over time.
Finally, Bevir considers how the historian of ideas should handle the ascription of
insincere, unconscious, and irrational beliefs.
Now, in considering Bevir’s overall position, I do not find much reason for
wholesale disagreement: many of his conclusions strike me as sensible and
supportable, and I find his ‘moderate’ stance attractive. In these remarks, therefore,
I will not be attacking his position as a partisan of some radically different approach.
Rather, my critical comments (such as they are) are more ‘internal’ than this, and fall
into two broad classes: first, I will identify some places where I think Bevir’s position
is rather less stable than he allows, and second, I will identify respects in which I
think he is somewhat unfair or quick with his opponents. I am therefore afraid that
my comments have a somewhat ‘piecemeal’ air, instead of constituting a systematic
root-and-branch critique.
I will focus on the following issues:

(a) Bevir’s weak intentionalism;

(b) Bevir’s anthropological epistemology;
(c) Bevir’s priority claim regarding sincere, conscious, and rational beliefs.

These issues come up respectively in Chapters 2, 3, and 4 of Bevir’s book: I will

have nothing to say here about material from other chapters.
1
Unless specified otherwise, references are to Mark Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 1999).
R. Stern / History of European Ideas 28 (2002) 1–12 3

(a) Weak intentionalism

As I have said, ‘weak intentionalism’ is the characterisation Bevir uses for his
position on the meaning of utterances. The basic idea of intentionalism is that ‘the
meaning of a given utterance derives from the intentions of its author’ (p. 32). Bevir
argues that theorists have wrongly rejected this basic idea, because they have
mistakenly taken intentionalism to be strong rather than weak, and as a result they
have abandoned hermeneutic meaning in favour of structural meaning, works in
favour of texts. This raises the question I would like to explore: does Bevir succeed in
showing that weak intentionalism is a stable position, or by modifying the stronger
position, does Bevir leave it fatally compromised?
Bevir distinguishes between weak and strong intentionalism as follows (pp. 67–75):
(1) Strong and weak intentionalism take different views of authorial intentions:
Strong intentionalism identifies authorial intentions with prior purposes; weak
intentionalism focuses on the final intentions of the author.
(2) Strong and weak intentionalism differ in their accounts of the conscious nature of
authorial intentions: Strong intentionalism identifies all authorial intentions
exclusively with conscious ones; weak intentionalism does not commit itself to
any particular view of the awareness authors have of their intentions.
(3) Strong and weak intentionalism differ about the relation between intentions and
hermeneutic meaning: Strong intentionalism says that authorial intentions, and
authorial intentions alone, constitute hermeneutic meanings; weak intention-
alism allows that utterances can have non-authorial meanings: an utterance can
mean something because of how the reader or listener so understands it.
Now, my general worry is that while these distinctions show how strong and weak
intentionalism differ, they in fact make weak intentionalism into an unstable
position, which is in danger of collapsing back into the kind of view that Bevir is at
pains to reject.
The first question we could ask is: in what sense is weak intentionalism a form of
intentionalism? At one point, Bevir himself raises this worry, with respect to
characterisation (1), remarking that ‘because we typically think of intentions as prior
purposes, to call a weak intention an intention is somewhat misleading’ (p. 76), the
reason being that Bevir is happy to talk about ‘final intentions’ and not just prior
purposes. But in fact, it seems to me that characterisation (3) is the greater worry
here: for, if we allow that the meaning of an utterance can be fixed by the way that
utterance is understood by its audience, how can we speak of it being fixed by
intentions at all? A speaker may plausibly be said to have intentions in saying
something: but how can an audience be said to have intentions in understanding it?
Now, perhaps this doesn’t matter much: perhaps Bevir does not expect us to take
the ‘intentionalism’ in the label for his position very seriously, and that all he means
is that his theory is simply akin to strong intentionalism (though with the differences
mentioned) in that both take hermeneutic meaning more seriously than other
theories, as both adopt the principle of procedural individualism: that is, meaning is
fixed by individualsFrather than linguistic conventions, truth conditions, or
whateverFbut whereas strong intentionalism treats the author as the key individual
4 R. Stern / History of European Ideas 28 (2002) 1–12

in this respect, weak intentionalism accepts a role also for individuals qua audience.
Thus, the emphasis here is not so much on intentions, as individualism: the meaning
of some utterance is the meaning that utterance has ‘for particular individuals,
whether they be authors or readers’ (p. 54), so that ‘weak intentionalism thus insists
on little more than a procedural individualism, according to which historical
meaning must be a meaning for particular people’ (Mark Bevir in Mark Bevir and
Frank Ankersmit, ‘Exchanging Ideas’, Rethinking History, 4, 2000, pp. 351–272,
p. 356). This explains how according to Bevir’s weak intentionalism, both authors
and readers can get in: utterances can have meaning for an audience as well as for
their authors, so both can give what is said a meaning.
If this much is correct as an account of Bevir’s position, however, there are still
problems to be faced. One issue is this: Suppose we accept weak intentionalism, and
so allow the audience to get into the act as well as the author, and suppose we think
the author intended one thing by the utterance, but the audience understood another
by it. On this account, is it then intelligible for the historian of ideas to ask about ‘the
meaning of the utterance’? One advantage of strong intentionalism is that this puzzle
does not arise, given its simple, purely author driven, account of meaning fixing; but
it does seem to arise for Bevir, and I am not sure how he would go about answering
it. Of course, some will be happy to embrace an open-ended hermeneutic relativism
at this point, and accept that utterances have multiple meanings: but I take it Bevir
would be opposed to an indeterminacy of this sort. Perhaps it might be felt that such
indeterminacy is attractive or even obligatory when it comes to historical texts. But if
Bevir’s position is taken as a general theory of meaning, it would seem to have the
counterintuitive consequence that genuine cases of misunderstanding are impossible;
for if utterances can get their meaning simply by being interpreted by an audience
in a certain way, how can we give content to the idea that the audience has
misunderstood what was being said to them?
In fact, it is not just the author/audience complexity introduced in characterisation
(3) that causes this sort of difficulty. The same kind of issue arises with
characterisation (1) as well. On characterisation (1), meaning is fixed not just by
the author’s prior purposes, but by their final ones. A first question is to ask what
Bevir has in mind with this distinction. Consider two cases:

(A) At first, I intend to say something romantic, but then I change my mind and
decide to say something hurtful instead.
(B) I intend to say something romantic, but having said it, I realise that it could be
interpreted as something hurtful.

Now, if ‘prior purposes’ means that in case A, we should consider the very first
intention rather than any subsequent one, then strong intentionalism looks crazy, as
it would have to ignore any change of intention on the part of the speaker even prior
to the utterance being made; so to avoid the strong intentionalist becoming a straw
man, I think we should allow strong intentionalism to operate with the intention the
speaker had on making the utterance, and so in case A fix the meaning of the utterance
as hurtful. However, where strong intentionalism may differ interestingly from weak
R. Stern / History of European Ideas 28 (2002) 1–12 5

intentionalism is in case B: for here, the intention the speaker had in uttering X is not
properly conveyed in what was said, so that the speaker’s audience (including the
speaker himself on reflecting on what was said) sees that it has an effect rather different
from the speaker’s original purpose. Now, presumably the strong intentionalist would
claim that despite this, what I said was romantic, even if I later saw it as hurtful. Bevir,
however, claims that the weak intentionalist can accept that what I actually said was
hurtful, because case B is really like case A, in that my purposes have changed in both
cases, so if we accept that this brings about a change of meaning in case A, we should
accept that it can bring about a change of meaning in case B.
But I don’t see this. In B, it seems to me that my purpose hasn’t changed at all: I
wanted to be romantic all along. And again, even if my purpose has somehow
changed, why should any authority in a case like B be given to my ‘final purpose’? If
by ‘final purpose’ is just meant ‘what I came to view as the meaning of my utterance’,
why should this be given any authority over my ‘prior purpose’, that is, my intention
as I uttered it? That Bevir has this very weak conception of ‘final purpose’ is
suggested by his example: ‘if a poet set out to write a sad poem but during the course
of writing came to look on what he was writing as a joyous poem, then a description
of the meaning of the poem to its author must refer to the final conception of a
joyous poem but it need not refer to the original conception of a sad poem’ (p. 69).
‘Come to look on’ suggests a kind of reflection on what has been said or written,
rather than a change of purpose determining the content of the saying or writing
itself, and so the strong intentionalist can simply deny that there is any distinction
between ‘prior’ and ‘final’ purpose at all.
As well as having some doubts about the stability and coherence of weak
intentionalism, I also have a worry about Bevir’s negative arguments in this
discussion, and in particular whether at times he is fair to his opponents. Bevir tends
to be quite lurid in his accounts of those theorists who reject intentionalismFvar-
iously labelled contextualists (Foucault, Pocock), conventionalists (Skinner), and
occasionalists (Putnam, Burge). He sees them as ‘denying the ability of human beings
to act creatively in any given context’ (p. 33), and as restricting individuals to ‘bit
parts as the mouthpieces of the script-writing paradigms which constitute their
conceptual frameworks’ (pp. 34–35), by limiting what people can mean to what the
social context lets them mean, thereby ‘reducing’ intentions and meanings to these
contexts. Thus, while Bevir allows that our social contexts can ‘influence’ what we
can say and mean, he denies that those contexts can ‘determine’ what we say and
mean: ‘Intentionalism fails only if we conclude that society determines our beliefs or
the way we use language, even if the social context influences the way we use
language’ (p. 34). Bevir thus sets out to defend intentionalism by establishing that we
can use language creatively or idiosyncratically (cf. his discussion of Mrs. Malaprop
on p. 50), and so that we are not hapless puppets caught in the prison of language in
the way the anti-intentionalist suggests.
Now, at times I felt that this picture of his opponents’ position went too far. So, he
cites Pocock as saying that languages function ‘paradigmatically to prescribe what he
[the author] might say and how he might say it’ (cited p. 35); but all Pocock arguably
means by this is that linguistic actors are confined in what they can say by the
6 R. Stern / History of European Ideas 28 (2002) 1–12

linguistic resources (or paradigms) at their disposal, which hardly constitutes the
kind of social determinism Bevir warns against. Likewise, he disregards Skinner’s
explicit rejection of the kind of position Bevir fears and which he imputes to Skinner,
namely that ‘authors are nothing more than ‘‘prisoners of the discourse within whose
boundaries they take pen in hand’’’; in rejecting this kind of linguistic determinism,
Skinner argues rather for the more minimal position, that ‘we are all limited by the
concepts available to us if we wish to communicate’ (Skinner, ‘A Reply to My
Critics’, in James Tully (ed), Meaning and Context, Princeton University Press,
Princeton, 1988, p. 276).
In general, then, I would question Bevir’s characterisation of his opponents’
position, and also his characterisation of their motivation. He sees them as rabid
anti-individualists and social determinists, seeking to pin the speaker into a rigid
linguistic framework. I would see them rather differently, as simply suggesting that
these frameworks form the vital resource within which we as speakers and
interpreters work, and so form the prior or default way in which to recover
meanings, where (to put it simply) to understand someone is first to ask what
linguistic significance their words have. Working this way normally or standardly
gives us access to what people have said, because people normally do work within
this framework; but the system is also flexible enough to allow for deviations, and to
allow for the sort of creativity Bevir highlights. This balanced view is suggested by
Pocock when he writes: ‘an author is himself both the expropriator, taking language
from others and using it to his purposes, and the innovator, acting upon language so
as to introduce momentary or lasting changes in the ways in which it is used’
(‘Introduction: The State of the Art’, in Virtue, Commerce, and History, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 1985, p. 6). In a similar vein, Skinner writes ‘This
means that, if we wish to do justice to those moments when a convention is
challenged or a commonplace effectively subverted, we cannot simply dispense with
the category of the author’ (Skinner, ‘A Reply to My Critics’, p. 276). I think had
Bevir read his opponents as just post-Strawsonian, post-Wittgensteinian philoso-
phers of language, and not as rather extreme social theorists, he might have captured
their position more accurately.

(b) Anthropological epistemology

This brings me to the second issue I wish to raise, concerning the epistemological
questions Bevir addresses in Chapter 3 of his book. Here again I have two kinds of
worries: namely, about the stability of his own position, and about his
characterisation of that of his opponents.
As regards Bevir’s own position, which he calls an ‘anthropological epistemology’,
some aspects are clear: as we have already said, on the one hand he wishes to avoid
out-and-out scepticism and relativism (we know nothing, or all knowledge is
relative), and on the other he wishes to avoid a kind of Cartesian foundationalism
(we have direct and infallible access to the truth). Thus, he wants to say that our
theories about past ideas should fit facts (so not anything goes), but that these facts
are not theory-independent; rather, ‘we construct their character in part through the
theories we incorporate in our observations. Thus, we cannot say simply that such
R. Stern / History of European Ideas 28 (2002) 1–12 7

and such a theory does or does not fit the facts’ (p. 99). His conception of truth and
objectivity here seems constructivist: witness his claim that ‘objectivity does not
depend on our having direct access to things in themselves’ (p. 128). On the other
hand, Bevir adopts what appears to be a realist, non-constructivist argument to
defend the reliability of our cognitive methods: namely, that if they weren’t reliable,
we wouldn’t last long (p. 108). But this argument is usually used by those who think
that facts are independent of theory, to show that despite this ‘gap’ we should not be
concerned by sceptical worries, as the reliabilist argument can give us confidence that
we are able to bridge this gap with our cognitive methods. Given Bevir’s
constructivism earlier in the chapter, I am therefore puzzled by his use of this
argument. It seems that in the end he thinks that constructivism cannot avoid
relativism without this underlying realism: but then his anthropological epistemol-
ogy seems to lose its ‘anthropological’ edge, as truth and objectivity would seem to
be independent of human practices and our perspective on the world after all.
In fact, Bevir’s epistemology is rather Kantian, and so inherits all the instabilities
that notoriously dog this position: just as Kant (on one reading) took ‘content’ from
the world and ‘form’ from us, and so hoped to incorporate the best of realism and
idealism, so Bevir tries to do the same:
Because theory enters into observation, we cannot describe a fact as a statement
of how things really areyNone the less, the role of observation does not mean, as
some idealists suggest, that facts depend solely on theories. We cannot describe a
fact as a theoretical deduction because observations enter into our theories about
the world. Even a theoretical argument must rest on premises, the content of
which will come from observations in so far as the argument employs terms that
refer to states of affairs and events. Facts entail observations, and observations
stick to the world, so facts too must attach themselves to the world. Thus, we can
fend off idealism simply by insisting on the presence of an independent reality,
correspondence with which constitutes truth (p. 98–99).
We therefore have the following picture: Facts are in part made up by theories (the
idealist moment), but they are also ‘worldly’ (the realist moment), just as theories in
part structure observations, and in part conform to them. But then: the realist will
want to know, what makes our theories true, fitting the facts or fitting the world? If
the answer is the former, then this looks like idealism, as truth now relates to how we
see the world rather than how it is; but if the answer is the latter, how does fitting the
facts help us get to the truth, as facts appear distinct from the world, no matter how
they ‘stick to’ it (whatever than means)? Compare Kant: Kant says the world as it
appears to us is a combination of subject-derived form and world-derived content.
But then the realist will want to know: what makes our beliefs true, fitting the world
as it appears to us, or fitting the world as it is independently of us? If the answer is
the former, this looks like idealism, as truth now relates to how we see the world
rather than how it is; but if the answer is the latter, how does the conformity between
our beliefs and how things appear get to the truth, as this world of appearances is
distinct from the world as it is in itself, no matter how much the world of
appearances is somehow in part constituted by how the world is?
8 R. Stern / History of European Ideas 28 (2002) 1–12

My second worry under this topic concerns Bevir’s handling of his opponents,
particularly Skinner. In this chapter, he characterises Skinner as putting forward a
‘logic of discovery for the history of ideas’, and so of claiming ‘either that their
favoured method is a foolproof way of reconstructing historical objects, or, more
usually, that their favoured method is a prerequisite of reconstructing historical
objects’ (p. 80). Now, here Bevir doesn’t take the moderate stance, of quarrelling
with the method Skinner and others have put forward, and suggesting a different and
better one: rather, he takes the more radical stance, of rejecting it because it is a
method, on the grounds that its proponents (he thinks) are committed to the claim
that we can only discover what people meant using this method, and that by using
the method we will be guaranteed to get it right. In other words, he thinks that
Skinner and others who are committed to a ‘logic of discovery’ are committed to the
claim that a method is both necessary for doing the history of ideas, and sufficient
for doing it in a foolproof manner. Bevir then argues, however, that we might
successfully find out what people thought using all kinds of methods or even none at
all (‘success can be the result of insight, intuition, or good luck’ (p. 87)), while on the
other hand, any method could lead us astray. He therefore concludes: ‘No method
can guarantee good history because someone who sets out with a correct prior
theory might reach a faulty passing theory. And no method can be a prerequisite of
good history because someone who sets out with an erroneous prior theory might
reach an adequate passing theory. There cannot be a logic of discovery for the
history of ideas’ (p. 85).
Now, Bevir’s attack on Skinner here rests on two assumptions: first that Skinner
thinks his method is a logic of discovery because first it is foolproof, and second it is
the only method that can ever get at the truth. But does the idea of a ‘logic of
discovery’ have to be that strong? Might not Skinner be read as simply saying that
his method is better than othersFthat is, it is more reliableFbut not that it is
infallible, and that while other approaches to the past might work (including just
guesswork or good luck), his approach makes our beliefs about the past justified or
warranted, in the way that ‘insight, instinct, or good luck’ do not, even if in some
cases they work better than his method (cf. ‘A Reply to My Critics’, pp. 280–281,
where Skinner explicitly rejects any sort of infallibilism)? Skinner’s position may
therefore be compared to someone who defends induction as a scientific method;
such a person does not have to claim that induction is foolproof, or that no other
method will work on occasionsFhe just has to claim that it is more reliable than any
other method, and that while other methods may succeed in getting us to the truth,
this is just ‘luck’, and so provides no rational warrant for our beliefs or knowledge
claims arrived at using those methods.
Of course, it is possible for someone to say at this point that as long as our
beliefs and theories are true, it doesn’t matter how we have arrived at them; or, as
Bevir puts it:

Historians can try to systematise past experience in methodological hints, or they

can try something new; they can rely on instinct and guesswork, or they can wait
for inspiration. What matters is the result of their endeavours. Just as we judge
R. Stern / History of European Ideas 28 (2002) 1–12 9

mathematical proofs and scientific theories without asking how their exponents
hit upon them, so we should evaluate accounts of historical objects without
considering the methods used by historians (p. 87).

In saying this, however, Bevir arguably aligns justification too closely to truth. For,
while there must be some connection between the two (for example, for a belief to be
justified it must be arrived at by a reliable method (externalism) or a method the
believer is warranted in believing is reliable (internalism)), it nonetheless seems clear
that a true belief is not in itself a justified one, merely because it is true. For example,
suppose I believe that you are from Greece by counting tea leaves in my cup, and that
in fact you are from Greece: does this belief merely being true make it a rational
belief, and make me a rational believer for holding it? To many people, myself
included, the answer would be that it does not; and if this is so, ‘results’ (simply being
right, however this came about) are not all that matter to whether or not historians
have rationally warranted theories about the past. Hence the importance of method,
as Skinner suggests (cf. ‘A Reply to My Critics’, pp. 231–235).

(c) The priority of sincere, conscious, rational beliefs2

I turn now to my third area of concern, namely Bevir’s claim that:

ythe grammar of our concepts commits us to logical presumptions in favour of

sincere, conscious, and rational beliefs. Sincerity is conceptually prior to
deception because the very possibility presupposes a norm of sincerity. The
conscious is conceptually prior to the unconscious because the only access we
have to hidden beliefs and pro-attitudes is our ability to make sense of things in
terms of open ones. The rational is conceptually prior to the irrational because the
existence of any language presupposes a norm of consistency governing its use.
The conceptual priority of sincere, conscious, and rational beliefs establishes
presumptions in their favour. Because these presumptions, unlike expectations,
are given to us by the grammar of our concepts, they are conceptually prior to our
actual investigation of the past. Historians should presume that the expressed
beliefs they study were held sincerely, consciously, and rationally by the people to
whom they ascribe them. They should try initially to explain why an individual
expressed a given viewpoint by treating it as a set of sincere, conscious, and
rational beliefs (pp. 128–129).

Now, my difficulty with Bevir’s handling of this topic is in getting clear what
exactly he wants to claim here.
Bevir wants to argue for the priority of sincere, conscious, and rational beliefs, in
the sense that ‘historians should presume that the expressed beliefs they study were
held sincerely, consciously, and rationally by the people to whom they ascribe them’
(p. 129). The question is, what is the force of the ‘should’ here? Let me distinguish the
2
Some of the issues raised in this section are discussed further in my Transcendental Arguments and
Scepticism: Answering the Question of Justification, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000.
10 R. Stern / History of European Ideas 28 (2002) 1–12

following senses in which the ‘should’ could be understood, in ascending order of

strength:

(1) In our community, we generally presuppose that expressed beliefs are held
sincerely, consciously, and rationally by the people to whom we ascribe them;
this therefore constitutes a general norm that historians of ideas (like the rest of
us) should conform to.

Now, the obvious worry about (1) is that it seems rather weak, and invites the
following question: well, even if people in general do as a matter of fact go on in this
way, why should they do so, why is this the right thing for them to do? In response to
this question, we might strengthen (1) to (2):

(2) In our community, we generally presuppose that expressed beliefs are held
sincerely, consciously, and rationally by the people to whom we ascribe them;
and this constitutes a norm because without this presupposition, we could not
successfully inquire into what people believe; so this is a norm that historians of
ideas should accept.

On this view, we are treating these presuppositions as what Kant called ‘regulative
ideas’: that is, things we feel entitled to assume, because they help guide our inquiries
in a fruitful manner. There are two points to note about this position, however:
(a) there is no claim here that our presuppositions are true, and so we are not using
truth as a grounds for presupposing them, and (b) it is not clear what the force of
‘could not’ is here.
Point (a) may seem to make Bevir’s position troubling, especially when combined
with his Wittgensteinian talk of being ‘committed’ to these presuppositions by the
‘grammar of our concepts’: someone might worry that although this ‘grammar’ may
force us to accept these presuppositons, should we not be concerned at being obliged
to accept what has not been shown to be true? One response could be to say that if
we are not in a position to claim that the presuppositions are true, we should not
treat them as beliefs, as it is arguably incoherent to believe (or claim to believe) a
proposition that one does not think to be true. Thus, some have argued that these
presuppositions are at best hopes, rather than beliefs (this was Peirce’s position, for
example, while Wittgenstein himself tended to speak of them as ‘rules’). Point (b)
raises another difficulty: if we must make presuppositions P1yPn because without
them we cannot undertake a certain inquiry for psychological reasons, this leaves (2)
looking weak (e.g. unless I thought the world was a rational place, I’d be too
depressed to bother doing any experiments on it). But, if we make the claim here
stronger, we need to give grounds for its support, and it looks as if these grounds
might be hard to present plausibly. Consider the following ways of spelling out (2):

(20 ) In our community, we generally presuppose that expressed beliefs are held
sincerely, consciously, and rationally by the people to whom we ascribe them;
and this constitutes a norm because without this presupposition, we could
R. Stern / History of European Ideas 28 (2002) 1–12 11

undertake no investigation into what people believe; so this is a norm that

historians of ideas should also accept.
(200 ) In our community, we generally presuppose that expressed beliefs are held
sincerely, consciously, and rationally by the people to whom we ascribe them;
and this constitutes a norm because without this presupposition, we could not
successfully inquire into what people believe, because in fact people do mostly
have sincerely, consciously, and rationally held beliefs; so this is a norm that
historians of ideas should also accept.
(2000 ) In our community, we generally presuppose that expressed beliefs are held
sincerely, consciously, and rationally by the people to whom we ascribe them;
and this constitutes a norm because without this presupposition, we could not
successfully inquire into what people believe, because in fact people must
mostly have sincerely, consciously, and rationally held beliefs; so this is a norm
that historians of ideas should also accept.

Now, (2000 ) is clearly stronger than (200 ), but both offer a broadly reliabilist defense
of the presupposition: the world is or must be a certain way, and to successfully find
out about it, we need to make the presuppositions in question. (200 ) obviously rests on
an empirical claim, about the status of people’s beliefs: but Bevir wants to make this
matter a priori, so (200 ) does not seem to be an option for him. On the other hand,
(2000 ) could be thought of as a priori, as it seems to involve the sort of metaphysical or
logical claim about the dependence of X on Y that some people think of as knowable
a priori; but at the same time many people are highly dubious of such (in Kantian
language) transcendental arguments, so (2000 ) looks vulnerable. (20 ) does not seem to
suffer from these difficulties: but it appears problematic in different ways, mainly
because it is rather mysterious. There certainly are some cases where it does seem
plausible to claim that without presuppositions P1yPn we could not begin any
investigation at all, where this is not a psychological ‘could not’: for example, it is
hard to see how any inquirer could get going unless he accepted certain logical
principles, as otherwise, how could he process his information? But Bevir’s claims
about sincerity, etc., do not seem to be of this order: they do not seem to relate to the
‘information processing’ side of inquiry. But then, why else would we need to
presuppose these facts about people’s beliefs? Why couldn’t we begin to find out
about people’s beliefs, while assuming they were held insincerely, and so on?
Moreover, if (as Bevir seems to admit) our inquiries might lead us to discover that in
fact most people’s beliefs are largely insincere etc., if we can discover that through
our investigations, why can’t we assume it at the outset?
Now, perhaps Bevir could respond to this worry, and argue for something like (20 )
in the way that Davidson has argued for the Principle of Charity (the assumption
that most people’s beliefs are true) on the grounds that otherwise we could not begin
to identify the objects they are talking about. My concern, however, is that Bevir
seems to neglect the distinctions I have tried to bring out, so that his presentation of
his position is often ambiguous between them. Thus, sometimes he seems to be
adopting position (1): that is, he simply appeals to how we in fact go on. So, he says
on p. 152 (my emphasis) ‘we invoke the unconscious only when we cannot make
12 R. Stern / History of European Ideas 28 (2002) 1–12

sense of human activity in terms of the conscious. For example, if people thought
they went to the cafe! because they were hungry, we would normally accept their
conscious assessment of their actionyThe conscious is prior to the unconscious in
that the unconscious enters our accounts of human activity only on occasions when
the conscious fails us’. This may be a reasonable account of our practice: but why
does this show the practice to be one we should adopt? At times, however, Bevir
seems to want something stronger. Here, for example, he seems to go as far as the
sort of position outlined in (2000 ): ‘Although deception occurs, and although we
expect it to occur in some circumstances, its occurrence, and our expectation of its
occurrence, always presupposes a logical presupposition of sincerity’ (pp. 144–145).
He also says (p. 172), ‘The priority of the sincere follows from the dependence of
deceit on a general expectation of truthfulness’. This looks like a transcendental
argument, to the effect that sincerity is a necessary condition for insincerity, and
(given this) we should therefore presuppose that people’s beliefs are held sincerely.
And yet, Bevir also backs off this sort of position, admitting that ‘[l]ogically,
perhaps, there might be a norm of insincerity as a background to acts of deception in
which people spoke sincerely’, asserting only that ‘this inverted world is hard to
conceive of and certainly not one we can recognise as our own’ (p. 145). But this
leaves Bevir’s position too weak to constitute a defense of his presupposition: for
now he seems merely to be claiming that we find it hard to imagine a world in which
insincerity was widespread; but unless that entitles us to believe that the world isn’t
that way (and so move back to the stronger claim), what grounds does this give us
for thinking that in making the presupposition that beliefs are mostly sincerely held,
we are more likely to be right than wrong? It may be, then, that the position Bevir
wants to defend is really (20 ): but if this is the case, then many of his statements
concerning his position would seem to be misleading, as they appear to fit the other
possibilities (arguments of type 1 or 2000 ) better.
In conclusion, I should perhaps apologise for taking a rather drily philosophical
attitude to Bevir’s book (making distinctions, criticising arguments, examining
presuppositions); but in mitigation, let me observe that this is largely the way that
Bevir himself proceeds. To some readers, this may itself seem a fault in his handling
of the topic, which as a result does not itself attempt any contribution to the history
of ideas, and even contains very few examples, so we are shown almost nothing
about how Bevir’s approach would work in practice: certainly for a book on this
subject, it operates at a fairly high level of abstraction. But I will leave objections of
this sort to those who are not themselves mainly concerned with philosophical issues,
as I can hardly criticise Bevir for vices that my own treatment of his book may seem
to share.3

3
This paper was presented at a panel on The Logic of the History of Ideas at the Political Studies
Association conference in Manchester in April 2001. I am grateful for Mark Bevir’s comments at the
panel, and to Mike Kenny for organising it, as well as for his remarks on a previous version. I would also
like to thank my colleague Jenny Saul for discussion of some of the issues raised in my paper.