Temporal Provincialism: Anachronism, Retrospection and Evidence, Scientia Poetica, Vol. 10 (2006), 299-317.

Temporal Provincialism: Anachronism, Retrospection and Evidence

Aviezer Tucker

This article attempts to explain anachronism and distinguish it from
retrospection according to its relation with the evidence. I argue first
that understanding the past in its own terms is neither possible, nor
desirable. Yet, anachronism, temporal provincialism, is pernicious. I use
the method of cases to list paradigmatic cases of anachronism and
retrospection to argue that anachronism is distinguished by the epistemic
vices of avoiding the evidence and ignoring alternative hypotheses that may
offer better explanation of the evidence. Anachronism is distinct of other
collections of epistemic vices by its inability to distinguish aspects of
the present that preserve information about the properties of their origins
in the past from aspects of the present that do not preserve such
information. I conclude with some reflections on the two cultures of
temporal provincialism and globalism.
Arguably, historians should attempt to understand the past exclusively
in its own terms. This prescription may be interpreted in phenomenological
or conceptual-linguistic terms. As a phenomenologist, the historian may
attempt to gain knowledge of consciousnesses of historical agents; how they
perceived the events they participated in, against their historical
horizons and intentions. What is common to the consciousnesses of all
members of a particular group, especially groups that are unaware of
alternative ways of perceiving the world, may be their zeitgeist, episteme,
stage in the history of being, tradition etc. Alternatively, in conceptual
or linguistic terms, historians may attempt to understand historical events
exclusively using the concepts or languages that were available to
individual historical agents or would have been available to them whether
or not they were aware or utilized them. Both interpretations would
prohibit the use of concepts that have been acquired since the studied
historical events took place, or had been forgotten prior to the events.
The phenomenological analysis partly overlaps with the conceptual analysis
and both rely on linguistic analysis as evidence for hypotheses about
concepts and conscious states. All three, like all hypotheses about the
past must rely on contemporary evidence to corroborate their claims. When
the evidence is insufficient, it underdetermines historiographic
hypotheses, including those about past states of consciousness or
conceptual frameworks (Tucker 2004).
All interpretations of the anti-presentist edict to understand the
past in its own terms must use concepts, terms of trade, that were
unavailable during most of history such as "conceptual framework,"
"consciousness," "language game," "anachronism" and so on, to distinguish
the past's "own terms" from present terms. Kuhn's overturning of the
anachronistic historiography of science that imagined a continuous
progressive process of approximating the truth required the use of concepts
like "scientific revolution" "normal science" "anomalies" and "paradigm"
that had been unavailable to scientists in the past.
We can never be acquainted directly with the historical past, perceive
the past directly without the mediation of evidence. Historians must use
historiographic theories and applied methods to gain any knowledge of the
past. Such theories use concepts that have become widely available only
during the last two hundred years, like primary vs. secondary sources,
reliable and unreliable testimonies, collation of sources etc. The theories
and concepts that historians must use to corroborate hypotheses about past
consciousnesses and conceptual frameworks would undermine any normative
commitment to understand the past exclusively in its own terms.
Understanding the past exclusively in its own terms is impossible[1].
Even if understanding the past exclusively in its own terms were
possible, it would not have been in many cases desirable. Slow processes
of historical change such as the Industrial Revolution, the Scientific
Revolution, and the Renaissance were not noticed and conceptualized by the
people who made and witnessed them. Yet, such historiographic
conceptualizations have immense heuristic and explanatory values. Most of
the people who made and witnessed the Industrial Revolution and the
democratization of the United Kingdom around the turn of the 19th century
were concerned mostly with religious disputes about dissent and
Catholicism. Understanding that era in terms of the consciousnesses of its
agents or their conceptual framework, avoiding Danto's (1985) narrative
sentences or Skinner's (1988, 44) "mythology of prolepsis" would deprive us
of understanding the process of industrialisation which in retrospect was
the most radical break with the past to take place during that era. Brush
(2004, 260) criticized Contextualists for missing the "big picture" by
emphasizing events in context. Metaphysicians debate the distinctions
between events and processes, whether processes are protracted events or
series of events. But nobody denies that there are processes. The
Contextualist position may amount to the denial of historical processes.
Historical agents may have possessed a more limited understanding of
the processes they took part in or witnessed than historians because
historians use new well corroborated theoretical frameworks for describing
history. For example, the classical ancients did not know economic theory.
They would observe prices going up or down, but would not describe
inflationary and deflationary processes. Nevertheless, historians may
infer ancient rates of inflation or deflation by comparing prices for
standard commodities such as grain or olive oil in different periods.
Deflationary pressure may then explain, for example, Pompey's conquest of
the Near East as an anti-deflationary measure, fuelled by the Roman demand
for gold to mint coins, in similar terms to the explanation of the Spanish
occupation of South America. Even Skinner conceded that "we must classify
in order to understand, and we can only classify the unfamiliar in terms of
the familiar." (Skinner 1988, 31)
Historical agents fail to understand their own actions when they
deceive themselves about their motives. For example, material motives
often appear in religious or ideological guises, since people prefer to
present their actions to themselves as motivated by their "higher"
ideological or religious aspirations rather than by their "lower" material
needs. An historian committed to understanding the past in its own terms
would then be committed to explain, say, the Hussite revolt in the 14th
century in terms of disputes over the details of Christian ritual rather
than as an economic, social or political conflict over resources, status or
power.
Understanding the past in its own terms is limited to a thin outer
layer of historical consciousness and/or conceptual framework, ignoring
large processes such as the Industrial Revolution and deeper causes such as
socio-economic changes that generate political or ideological upheavals.
Skinner seems torn between recognizing this and the demand to understand
the past as the agents would have. Note the following incoherence: "no
agent can eventually be said to have meant or done something which he could
never be brought to accept as a correct description of what he had meant or
done. This special authority of an agent over his intentions does not
exclude, of course, the possibility that an observer might be in a position
to give a fuller or more convincing account of the agent's behaviour than
he could give himself. (Psychoanalysis is indeed founded on this
possibility.) But it does exclude the possibility that an acceptable
account of an agent's behaviour could ever survive the demonstration that
it was itself dependent on the use of criteria of description and
classification not available to the agent himself." (Skinner 1988, 48)[2]
Psychoanalysis, behavioural economics, rational choice theory etc. as well
as many if not most explanations in historiography are all based on
descriptions and classifications that were not available to their objects.
Skinner's middle sentence is inconsistent with the rest of the
paragraph[3].
Granting that the historiographic use of contemporary concepts,
theories and perspectives is not just inevitable, but in many cases also
desirable, does not imply that "anything goes," and historians may project
and impose their contemporary perspectives on a defenceless past. We need
criteria to distinguish pernicious anachronism from benevolent
retrospection that also explain why and how the first can be avoided and
the second recommended. To clarify this distinction, I use the method of
cases, I list and examine obvious cases of anachronism and retrospection
and find what is common and distinct to each type.
Anachronisms
Jesus in the Old Testaments
I chose the following cases from a tract by a British Christian
fundamentalist (Carswell 1990) that was presented to me by one of my
students in the vain hope of saving my soul because they display
paradigmatic types of anachronism. Carswell collected interpretations that
attempted to prove that the appearance of Jesus was prophesized in the
Bible since "the Old Testament is basically a Jewish book, and therefore
Christians cannot be open to the charge of `tampering' with or changing
these prophecies." (Ibid 19)
The book of Malachi (3:1) prophesizes the sending of a Malachi, which
means in Hebrew a messenger or an angel or could be a person named Malachi.
Carswell concludes that the messenger must be John the Baptist, rather
than any of the many people who claimed to bear messages from God since
Malachi was written, or an angel, or the Malachi himself. Carswell
interprets Isaiah's foretelling of the birth of his son Immanuel (7:14) as
prophesizing the virgin birth of Jesus. Partly this results from the
mistranslation of the Hebrew word alma that means a young woman (that could
be a virgin--or not) as virgin in the King James version. But in this
context, when the young woman in question is Isaiah's wife, she was clearly
not a virgin. This interpretation ignores the overwhelming evidence from
the rest of Isaiah where each birth of one of Isaiah's sons is presented as
a sign from God of what the future holds and the new child receives a
symbolic name accordingly. Given the youth of Isaiah's wife, and the usual
biblical overlooking of the birth of females, the birth of a son was a
practical certainty. Carswell's hypothesis does not explain the difference
between Immanuel (which mean in Hebrew God with us) and Jesus (Yeshua in
Hebrew, meaning saviour or salvation ).
Micah (5:1) promises that the king of Israel will come out of
Bethlehem. Carswell interprets this as prophecy of the birth of Jesus in
Bethlehem. He ignores the frequent biblical reference to Bethlehem as King
David's hometown and by implication the birthplace of the royal dynasty of
Judea, the house of David. Micah expresses then the aspiration that there
will be a new king of the Judean royal dynasty, after its devastation by
the Assyrian, as a contemporary Briton may express a similar aspiration by
saying that a good king will come from Windsor. Actually, it is more
likely that the Nazarene Jesus is described as having been born in
Bethlehem to connect him with the Davidian dynasty rather than the other
way round.
In Psalms 41, the poet contrasts the possibility of betrayal by
friends with the steady support of God. Carswell interprets this general
theme as foretelling Judas' betrayal of Jesus. Similarly, Carswell
interprets a metaphoric story in Zechariah 11 about Zechariah's experience
as a shepherd and the contribution of his salary, thirty pieces of silver,
to the Jerusalem temple as foretelling the betrayal of Jesus, though the
only similarity between the two stories is the sum of money involved.
Finally, Poetic descriptions of the misery of the righteous in Isaiah and
Psalms are interpreted as descriptions of the misery of the crucifixion out
of all the possible references to such sufferings, most notably by the
authors of Isaiah and Psalms.
Jesus' tomb in Japan
40,000 Japanese visit each year a grave in the village of Shingo in the
far north of Japan which they believe is the grave of Jesus. The evidence
is the alleged last will of Jesus, written in ancient Japanese and
discovered by a priest in 1935. According to the will, Jesus arrived in
Japan when he was 21 and learned Japanese. He returned to Judea 12 years
later to engage in the events told in the New Testaments. But Jesus'
brother was crucified instead of him, allowing him then to return to Japan,
where he married Miyuko and became a rice farmer till his death at the age
of 106. A local priest suggests as proof the local traditions of drawing
charcoal crosses on babies and making kimonos incorporating the Star of
David (Lewis 2006).
The Patriarchs' tombs in Hebron
According to Genesis 23 Abraham bought a burial site in Hebron for 400
silver shekels. Given the rough era when Abraham should have lived, this
makes as much sense as reading a document that claims that somebody bought
a house in New York during the 18th century for ten million dollars (and
paid for it with a credit card). This price tag fits better the level of
prices in the fourth century BC. During that period the town of Hebron was
a disputed border town between the Jewish province in the Persian Empire
and its neighbour. This is the only place in the bible where a Jewish
connection to Hebron is mentioned. More than two millennia later, Israelis
and Palestinians violently dispute sovereignty over the purported site of
the caves of the patriarchs in Hebron, a Moslem structure that houses a
group of graves from the Roman period. They also fight over similar
structures traditionally associated with the graves of other Old Testament
characters like Joseph and Rachel. Interestingly the similarly traditional
`grave' of Jacob's son Ruben just south of Tel Aviv, firmly in Israeli
territory, receives no attention from either practicing Jews or Moslems….
The challenge of interpreting the old and new testament is in peeling
off the anachronistic layers that were imposed on early texts by later
creative editors who were interested in adapting the texts to their
contemporary interests and contexts. In the case of the Old Testaments,
the interests of the returning exiled Babylonian Judean aristocracy in
creating a precedent for their own return to Zion in the story of the
Egyptian Exodus, staking a claim for the territory, and imposing monotheism
and its rules on texts that were generated among polytheists who took
Jehovah to be first among many Gods. The New Testaments on one level
attempt to present Jesus as the epitome of the Jewish prophetic tradition,
a combination of Moses and Elijah. On a later level they attempt to
present him as a divinity.
The Conceit of Scholars
"[W]henever men can form no idea of distant and unknown things, they
judge them by what is familiar and at hand." (Vico 1984, paragraph 122)
Consequently, people judge distant periods when crude people spoke poetic
language "on the basis of their own enlightened, cultivated and magnificent
times." (Ibid 123) Vico distinguished two types of such anachronisms, the
conceits of scholars and nations.
The conceit of scholars is in believing that what they think they know
is as old as the world, leading to the projection of their beliefs on the
ancients. Skinner (1988, 32-38) similarly warned against "the mythology of
doctrine," scholars finding their own doctrines in classical writings, or
criticizing the ancients for not developing those doctrines. Accordingly,
Vico rejected not only the Renaissance era Hermetic fabrications of ancient
writings attributed to an ancient Egyptian priest, but also the
philosophical allegoric misinterpretations of Greek fables, and most
significantly, natural law theories (Vico 1984, 127-128). Vico criticized
the 17th century founders of natural law theory, Grotius, Selden and
Pufendorf for projecting backwards in time the rationality of modern
enlightened civilization on the origins of human society and law, on people
whose minds followed poetic logic rather than justice born of rationality
(Ibid 394). From a Vichian perspective, most ironic are the modern
conceited interpretations of Vico himself, as a Hegelian, a Marxist, a
Pragmatist and a half dozen other philosophic feds of the previous century.
The projection back of contemporary beliefs, views or theories resembles
the projection back of religious ideas like survival of the soul, heaven
and hell, and messianism on the Old Testaments.
The negative version of the conceit of the scholars is the
construction of intellectual scarecrows, phantom enemies by projecting on
past cultures or individual thinkers opinions that one wishes to criticize,
though they would have made little sense to the objects of criticism. For
example, though better known in his own days as a historian than as a
philosopher, David Hume was notoriously oblivious of how ideas and
mentalities evolve historically. He believed in a universal unhistorical
and conceptually robust human nature. Therefore, as he put it, in order to
understand the Greeks and the Romans, it suffices to look at the British
and the French. In his famous little treatise on the subject of miracles,
Hume considered miracles to be violations of the laws of nature to argue
that since the prior probability of exceptions to the laws of nature is
nil, miracles are impossible. However, Hume failed to note that the
concept of laws of nature was introduced only during the scientific
revolution of the 17th century. Since the ancient Jews and Christians who
introduced the concept of miracles had no concept of an inviolable law of
nature, it makes no sense to impute to them a concept of miracle as a
violation of such laws. Unsurprisingly, none of the descriptions of
miracles provide sufficient details about their initial conditions to
justify or even support a retrospective interpretation of these miracles as
violations of laws of nature (Tucker 2005). Likewise, Popper attacked in
his The Poverty of Historicism (1964) an amalgam of positions attributes to
19th century philosophers that nobody has actually defended, just as he
attributed modern totalitarianism to Plato and Hegel (Passmore 1975).
The conceit of scholars survives due to the temporal provincialism of
too many philosophers who do not study history and remain unaware of how
ideas and concepts change in history and how historians can use evidence to
learn how people very different from themselves thought. Richard Rorty
contended that when the conceited scholars are philosophers, their
misinterpretations may be fruitful in developing philosophy. This may be
true in some cases. But in most cases of anachronistic misinterpretation
the result is not new ideas, but temporal provincialism, the inability to
comprehend how people distant in space and time thought, for example,
Rorty's own misinterpretation of the philosophers that founded the Czech
dissident movement of Charter 77, Jan Patočka and Václav Havel (Rorty 1998,
228-243). The Czechs combined phenomenology with Platonic humanism to
found a human rights movement based on a concept of the essence of man that
needs to be protected. But Rorty misinterpreted them as anti-
foundationalist relativists who were not humanist and offered no
philosophic reason for democracy. These post-modernist clichés hardly
contribute anything to philosophy at the cost of losing the possibility of
understanding why Czech philosophers embarked on the course of establishing
a dissident movement (Tucker 1997). Other projections of philosophies and
ideologies such as socialism and libertarianism; post-modernism and pre-
modernism; universalism and relativism, on the same group of dissident
Czech texts and persons was just as misleading (Tucker 2000, 4-5, 43).
Conceit of the Nations
Vico (1984, 125) characterized the conceit of nations as the claim for
primacy in the invention of civilization founded on national memory that
stretches back to the dawn of civilization. The conceits of nations
intensified after Vico's time as a result of the rise of modern
nationalism. The first nationalist manifestation of this conceit was
probably the forging of heroic sagas for new nations like the Scots
(Ossian) and the Czechs to prove both their antiquity and their heroic
essence. The second kind of conceit, the claim that nations stretch back
in time, rather than being a 19th century construction has been far more
prevalent. Nationalist intellectuals at least since Herder and Palacky
constructed narratives of continuity of ethnic and linguistic national
identity and characteristics since time immemorial, ignoring the
overwhelming evidence to the contrary (Tucker 2000, 93). Human migrations
constantly create and solidify new ethnic combinations and identities.
Before the standardization of language by empires and intellectuals, there
were interconnected dialects and shades of dialects, but no single language
associated with an ethnic group. Yet, the conceits of the nations have led
them to consume intellectually constructed anachronistic historiographies.

Traditions and other imaginary historical processes
When seeing islands or mountaintops from the air, it is easy to construct
gestalt patterns, connections between the islands or mountaintops where
there are none. Historical events may also appear to form patterns though
they are disconnected from each other. When the events examined are ideas
or political structures, it is easy to imagine a pattern leading to the
present. For example, Aristotle's historiography of philosophy in the
first book of his Metaphysics presented the history of philosophy as
groping in the direction of his own system of four causes, though different
philosophers were concerned with different problems without necessarily
concerning themselves with the issue of causation. The `old', pre-Kuhnian,
historiography of science described a continuous progressive process of
gradual approximation of the truth in the history of science through a
continuous application of the same scientific methodology. The designation
of a scientific `precursor' of a later development, likewise, assumed in
many cases a non-existing causal link. It was left to historians of
science like Kuhn to prove that scientific methodologies vary in the
history of science and there has been no continuous process, but ruptures
and revolutions. Conceited nationalist historiographies connect any
isolated manifestation of nationalist sentiments or intimation of
sentiments, to a movement of "national awakening/ revival," whether or not
they were causally disparate. The underlying foundation is the sleeping
beauty theory of nationalism. Since there is practically no evidence for
nationalist sentiments prior to the French Revolution, nationalist
historians must assume that the beauty had been sleeping and awakened
gradually when kissed by provincial intellectual princes.
The construction of imaginary processes culminating in the present is
described sometimes as teleological or Whiggish historiography. I avoid
these labels because one does not have to assume metaphysically loaded and
highly problematic backward causation to imagine a causally connected
process that leads to a present result when there is no such process.
Whiggish historiography that sees continuity in English history from Magna
Charta, or even the ancient Anglo-Saxons Germanic tribes as described by
Tacitus, to the Reform Act, as a history of the progress of liberty, need
not assume teleology. But it must assume a causal continuity that somehow
skips the period of Tudor absolutism, though there is no evidence for such
continuity and much evidence for discontinuity. Such causal continuities
receive often the name of traditions, from the Latin tradere, to hand over.
Tradition is a continuous process of handing over, usually of information,
from one group of people or generation to another. The assumption that
such handing over can preserve information is common to myth, priestly
religions (where the priests should hand over the arcane divine knowledge
from generation to generation), Gadamer, and Saul Kripke's theory of proper
names (cf. Tucker 2004, 46-53, 167, 203-204)
Skinner (1988, 44-45) cautioned against a variation on this
traditional anachronism, when the properties of a cause in the history of
ideas are assumed to resemble its effects, though information has not been
preserved in the process. For example, Locke and Rousseau respectively can
be said to have caused modern liberal democracy and totalitarianism.
However, this does not imply that Locke was a liberal-democrat and Rousseau
a Jacobin.
Literalism
Literalism is the conscious or assumed belief that each word has only a
single meaning and that the literalist knows it. Literalism therefore does
not recognize that the meanings of words can change according to their
contexts and that words can be used ironically, understated or overstated,
cynically etc., which Skinner (1988, 50-53) called the `obliqueness' of
texts. Literalism further cannot distinguish a translation from an
original and consider possible gaps. Literalism cannot comprehend as the
later Wittgenstein and Austin did that languages, meanings and references
of words, change and mutate through time and therefore need to be analysed
through their uses in the contexts of statements. Literalism is
particularly common among people who are mono cultural, monolingual, know
little or nothing of history, and lack a sense of humour because without
puns or irony there is no humour or parody. Literalism, like anachronism
in general, is temporal provincialism (cf. Tucker 2004, 194ff).
Retrospection
Retrospection offers greater insight into the past by understanding it in
our own terms. Its most obvious types are:
Description of Historical Processes, Colligation and Narrative Sentences
As Arthur Danto (1985) noted, historiography uses sentences that have two
temporal references such as The First World War started with the
assassination of Archduke Ferdinand or The covering law model debate in the
philosophy of historiography started with Hempel's 1942 article. Such
sentences refer to two temporal zones, the assassination and publication,
and five years of war and decades of debate, respectively. Narrative
sentences are not a distinct feature of historiography as they can be found
in science as well, e.g. The universe began about 14 billion years ago in
the Big Bang (Tucker 2004, 12-14, 138-139). Narrative sentences are
essential for the description of processes. To be sure, nobody imagined in
their worst nightmares during the assassination or the publication that
they would result in the most deadly war in human history or decades of
fruitless tiresome debates respectively. Yet, a historiography that does
not put events in the context of the processes they constituted is limited
to the perspectives and limited temporal horizons of the historical agents.
Most people expect historiography to offer more. Colligation is another
method by which historians construct a whole that explains its parts, like
the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution or the rise of nationalism
explain their constituent parts.
Theoretically Laden Descriptions
Some historiographic descriptions use theoretical language that was
unavailable at the time of the events, for example the language of economic
theory: inflation and deflation; recession and economic growth,
productivity and capital; or the more controversial concepts of psychology,
hysteria, narcissism, bi-polar disorder and psychotic hallucinations can
all be applied to describe and explain the behaviour of historical agents
who neither understood themselves nor were understood by their
contemporaries in those terms. Economics can describe macro-processes that
participants in micro-level economic activities cannot perceive. The
integration of historiography, sociology and philosophy of science has been
so fruitful exactly because historically informed philosophy of science,
like Kuhn's, can provide conceptual frameworks that offer better
understanding of the processes of theory change and paradigm shift in the
history of science. The applications of theories and their conceptual
frameworks to historical events allows better understanding of the
historical events than was possible while they were taking place[4].
Evidence, Anachronism and Retrospection
Understanding the past in contemporary terms, rather than in its own terms,
can be both a manifestation of temporal provincialism, anachronism, or of
historical sophistication and understanding, retrospection. The obvious
question then is how to distinguish the two?
The answer is the relationships between historiography and evidence.
Retrospection displays the virtue of epistemic diligence in searching for
relevant evidence for description of the past, while anachronism lacks that
virtue. Retrospection compares alterative hypotheses that explain the same
evidence while anachronism does not. Anachronism considers contemporary
religion, language, politics and ideas to be evidence for the past, whereas
retrospection does not because they do not preserve reliably information
about their origins.
Virtue epistemology (cf. Montmarquet 1987; Fairweather & Zagzebski
2001; Steup 2001) argues that epistemic responsibility, courage,
conscientiousness and diligence are conducive for the attainment of truth.
The virtue of epistemic courageousness includes diligent search for
relevant evidence for one's beliefs and following its implications on one's
web of beliefs. This virtue is assumed in everyday life: When we buy an
appliance we look for evidence for its performance rather than just take
the salesperson word for it; when we embark on a course of academic study
we should look for evidence about the employment and other achievements of
its graduates, the pedagogic competence of the faculty and its publication
record. Epistemically virtuous, courageous and competent historians,
journalists and detectives who specialize in corroborating beliefs about
the past diligently work to find and collate sources of evidence such as
archived documents, sources in government, and eye witness testimonies.
Anachronism follows epistemic vice, epistemic cowardice and laziness,
neglecting relevant available sources of evidence. Epistemically virtuous
interpreters of verses in the Bible should examine other relevant verses in
that book, to note that the symbolic birth of Isaiah's first son, Immanuel,
fits that of his other sons and that the Davidian dynasty originated in
Bethlehem and is closely associated with it. They should examine terms in
the original Hebrew in the various places they appear in the Bible to avoid
confusions based on mistranslations of words that refer to messengers and
young women who may be virgins. They should examine extra-biblical
evidence for property prices in different periods. The Japanese who take
the tradition of making kimonos that incorporate the Star of David as proof
for 2000 years old Judaic traditions should look for evidence that
associates Jews with the Star of David prior to the European Middle Ages
and find none; the symbol of Judaism during the Roman period was the
menorah. Scholars who write about texts from different times and places
should bother to do more than read translations, they should read them in
the original and read other texts that shared the same context to discover
that the ancient concept of miracles had nothing to do with laws of nature
but was a symbol for the superiority of Jehovah over other lesser gods.
Natural law theorists should benefit from the evidence that anthropologists
have collected, and philosophers who interpret texts need to read other
texts from the same period and by the same author to determine their
interpretations. Nationalist historians ignore evidence for the non-
nationalist identity, self-perception and aspirations of the ancients they
consider their forbearers. They also ignore evidence for unheroic
histories of what they take to be their nations. Historians who see
imaginary processes ignore the evidence for discontinuities and alternative
reasons for similarities between earlier and later events in perceived
traditions. Literalists ignore evidence for how languages and words change
their meanings in time and context and rarely know foreign languages.
By contrast, retrospection is marked by epistemic virtue, active
search and use of evidence to generate better knowledge of the past.
Narrative sentences rely on evidence that had been unavailable at the
earlier of the two time references. Obviously, we have today plenty of
evidence for the results of the assassination of archduke Ferdinand that
was unavailable in 1914, and contemporary philosophers of history are
familiar with the dire effects of Hempel's 1942 article. Theory laden
descriptions add also further evidence indirectly, through the use of
theories that had been tested against a much broader range of evidence
earlier. For example, when historians discuss Roman inflation, they bring
to bear the results of a broad range of evidence that has been used to
examine theories of inflations earlier.
Many philosophers of science consider accepted scientific hypotheses
to be the best among competing explanations of the evidence according to
various criteria, cognitive values (Lipton 2004). Hypotheses are almost
never examined in isolation, but in competition with each other. Better
hypotheses increase the likelihood of the evidence more than other
hypotheses, as well as explain a broader range of different types of
evidence, are simpler and more fruitful. Likewise, in virtue epistemology
the consideration of alternative competing beliefs to one's own is a
virtue. Anachronistic hypotheses are not compared with alternative
hypotheses. A phrase from Malachi may be explained as the prophetic
prediction of the activities of John the Baptist. But it may well be
explained much better by alternative competing explanations that may have
considerably higher prior probabilities, as a phrase from Zechariah may
predict the betrayal of Jesus but is more likely to describe a symbolic
episode from the life of Zechariah himself. Descriptions of the misery of
righteous prophets may refer to Jesus, but they are more likely to be
universal poetic descriptions of the moral absurdity of the universe or
self-pitying contemplations about their authors. Vico's philosophy may be
an early version of Hegel, but is more likely to be a late version of neo-
Platonism. Retrospection, like scientific historiography in general, is
the best among competing explanations of the widest breadth of evidence.
It is trivially true that all knowledge of the past originates with
information transmitted in the present, evidence that preserves information
about its origins. However, historians distinguish aspects of the present
that preserve information about the past with high fidelity, such as eye
witness testimonies that were written immediately after the events or
bureaucratic reports, from aspects that do not preserve information with
high fidelity, such as oral traditions or memoirs that change and mutate
too often and quickly to be reliable sources of information about the past
(Tucker 2004). Anachronism is founded on an inability to distinguish the
aspects of the present that preserve information about the past from those
that do not. "Anachronism is always a matter of temporal mis-location of
something within an historical description." (Condren 2004, 289) The
ancient authors of the story about Abraham's purchase of the burial cave in
Hebron failed to notice that real-estate prices in the present do not
preserve information about past prices, as the forgers of nationalist sagas
during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the literalist
readers of the bible today have failed to note that language in the present
does not preserve with high fidelity information about its shape in the
past: since the Hebrew of the Pentateuch is not distinct of that of Kings,
it could not have been written by Moses five centuries earlier. The
conceits of scholars and nations likewise are based on the inability of
scholars and nationalists to realize the high rate of change of ideas and
identities. Retrospection, in contrast, is based on the distinction
between information bearing signals from the past and less reliable sources
of information in the present that are contaminated with `noise', and the
inference of descriptions of past events from their information preserving
effects, the practices of scientific historiography (Tucker 2004).
The three above criteria are necessary and sufficient for
distinguishing anachronism from retrospection. It is worth noting that
the first two criteria, epistemic virtue in search for evidence and the
comparison of competing hypotheses or explanations of the evidence are
universal, whereas the last, the identification and use of aspects of the
present that preserve information about their historical origins with the
aid of theories to infer descriptions of past events and processes, is
particular to the historical sciences, historiography, historical
comparative philology, textual criticism, archaeology, evolutionary
biology, geology, and cosmology.
Independence of Anachronism from Teleology and Necessity
Some contributors to the literature on anachronism associate it with
teleology—temporally backward causation, and necessity. They seem to think
that anachronistic descriptions of historical events and processes also
assume that they had a telos, a predestined purpose. But most of the
paradigmatic cases of anachronism presented above do not assume a
metaphysical commitments to either backward causation or an epistemic
commitment to knowing all the necessary forward and/or backward causes for
the historical processes in question. Hume's anachronistic misunderstanding
of miracles makes no assumptions about the direction of the historical
process or its necessity, nor is literalism. Religious anachronistic
interpretations of the Bible may assume teleology, but if they take free
will seriously, they cannot assume necessity. If a historical process has
an end that causes it backwards, it does not imply that it was necessary,
just as the existence of a necessary historical process does not imply that
the reason for this necessity is teleological. A teleological substantive
philosophy of history does not imply anachronism. Vico and Hegel, the
founders of historicism, both believed that history has a teleological end.
But they recognized a historical process of change towards that end where
cunning providence or reason uses the baser, historically changing, motives
of men towards that end. Considering their respective philosophical
environments, Cartesianism and Kantian universalistic enlightenment, Vico
and Hegel were incredibly sensitive to the differences between historical
periods and cultures. Historical teleology, necessity and anachronism are
then conceptually independent of each other.
The Two Cultures: Temporal Provincialism vs. Globalism
Anachronism is temporal provincialism founded on epistemic vice,
historical illiteracy, a failure to comprehend the human condition in time,
how society, language and concepts change and remain in constant flux. It
is a moral failure to practice epistemic virtue, have sufficient courage to
look for and consider the relevant evidence and weigh alternative competing
hypotheses about the past.
I see a growing cleavage between two cultures, temporally provincial
and global. The first is composed of people who tend to be monolingual,
mono cultural, historically illiterate, and humourless. They form their
beliefs following the oldest epistemic vice, wishful thinking. Wishful
thinking leads to seeing in the past what the believer wishes to believe,
projections of their present desires and fears. The historically
illiterate live then in a mythical story, often constructed to manipulate
them. Most of the trenchant ethnic, nationalist, and religious conflicts
in the world, from the Middle East to Northern Ireland are entangled with
such temporally provincial and historically illiterate narratives.
Manipulative wishful thinking about the past is an effect of a conflict
more than its cause: for two thousand years the story about Abraham's
purchase of the caves of the patriarchs in Hebron did not generate any
conflict because it was in nobody's interest. Only when sections of the
Jewish and Arab population became infected with nationalism and its
accompanying violent xenophobia did the story become effective again, first
in the Arab riots in 1929 that annihilated the ancient Jewish community of
Hebron, and then following the Israeli capture of the town in 1967, when
groups of Israeli religious and nationalist fanatics settled there. It
would be naïve to expect Israelis and Palestinians to realise that hundreds
of lives were lost in a struggle over Roman era graves anachronistically
identified with an earlier story that had been anachronistic as well, about
the purchase of a cave in a disputed border area between two provinces in
the Persian Empire during the fourth century BC. They would in all
likelihood come up with some other excuse to kill each other over. The
conflict would end only once people awake to the fact that in our day and
age territory and population size do not bring wealth or happiness and
embrace modernity, end patriarchy get an education and start working for a
living, temporal globalism would then be a side effect of economic
globalization. Yet, I believe it is the epistemically virtuous duty of
historically literate, temporally global, people to assault such
anachronistic murderous myths. A second, temporally global, culture is
marked by retrospection, an understanding of change in time, epistemic
virtue, curiosity, search for evidence and a culture of debating competing
hypotheses by devising methods for distinguishing information bearing
reliable evidence from less reliable one. Having a non-literal
understanding of language allows then the appearance of humour, being
funny.
Academic institutions and research reflect these two cultures. In my
opinion there is too much temporal provincialism about. It is too easy to
receive a PhD in the humanities and social sciences without being
historically literate or even knowing foreign languages, understanding how
to infer descriptions of events from evidence and the extent to which
present events do not preserve information about their origins. In my own
discipline, philosophy, temporal provincialism is reflected mostly in
literalism and the conceit of scholars. Literalist philosophy misreads
philosophic and other texts without considering their context, language,
conceptual framework and the uses of humour and irony. The conceit of the
scholars leads philosophers to consider their ideas universal whereas they
are not, natural law in the philosophy of law, common sense morality in
ethics, and laws of nature and covering laws of explanation in the
philosophy of science. In that respect, some philosophers are just as
temporally provincial as the religious fundamentalists whose literalist
interpretations of the scriptures they like to denigrate.

Sources


Fairweather, Abrol & Zagzebski Linda eds., (2001) Virtue Epistemology
Essays in Epistemic Virtue and Responsibility, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.


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

Brush, Stephen (2004) "Anachronism and the History of Science: Copernicus
as an Airplane Passenger," Scientia Poetica, 8, 255-264.

Carswell, Roger (1990) Why Believe? Milton Keynes: Authentic Media.

Condern, Conal (2004) "A Reflection on the Problem of Anachronism in
Intellectual History," Scientia Poetica, 8, 288-293.

Danto, Arthur (1985) Narration and Knowledge including the integral text of
Analytical Philosophy of History, New York: Columbia University Press.

Lewis, Leo (29 May 2006) "Japan is proud home of Christ's tomb," The Times,
30.

Lipton, Peter (2004) Inference to the Best Explanation, 2nd ed., London:
Routledge.

Montmarquet, James A. (1987) "Epistemic Virtue," Mind 96, 482-497.

Passmore, John (1975) "The Poverty of Historicism Revisited," History and
Theory, 14, 4, 30-47.

Popper, Karl (1964) The Poverty of Historicism, New York: Harper & Row.

Rorty, Richard (1998) Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Skinner, Quentin (1988) "Meaning and understanding in the history of
ideas," in James Tully ed., Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his
Critics, Cambridge: Polity Press, 29-67.

Spoerhase, Carlos (2004) "Zwischen den Zeiten: Anachronismus und
Präsentismus in der Methodologie der historischen Wissenschaften," Scientia
Poetica, 8, 169-240.

Steup, Matthias ed., (2001) Knowledge, Truth and Duty: Essays on Epistemic
Justification, Responsibility and Virtue, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Tucker, Aviezer (1997) "Contemporary Philosophy of Historiography," (A
Review Essay) Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 27, 102-129.

Tucker, Aviezer (2000) The Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence from
Patocka to Havel, Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press.

Tucker, Aviezer (2004) Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of
Historiography, New York: Cambridge University Press.

Tucker, Aviezer (2005) "Miracles, Historical Testimonies and
Probabilities," History and Theory, 44, 373-390.

Vico, Giambattista (1984) [1744] The New Science, trans. Thomas Goddard
Bergin & Max Harold Fisch, London: Cornell University Press.
-----------------------
[1] I do not examine here the epistemic and methodological problems
involved in inferring past states of belief, consciousnesses and conceptual
frameworks. Mark Bevir (1999) argued against the conventionalist school
associated with Skinner and the contextualist school associated with Pocock
that language and society, respectively, influence but do not determine
beliefs and ideas. Bevir claimed that these theories cannot account for
conceptual innovations, the ability to step beyond linguistic conventions
and social and cultural contexts and convey new thoughts by using new
linguistic conceptual tools. Yet, Bevir claimed there is no general
methodology, no logic of discovery, in the historiography of ideas, just
insight, intuition and good luck. He acknowledged that the reconstruction
of ideas is based on the relics of the past in the present, on evidence,
but did not elaborate how. I think that linguistic conventions and social-
historical contexts may function as non-exclusive evidence for
discriminating between competing hypotheses about the beliefs, concepts and
consciousnesses of historical agents. In that respect Conventionalism and
Contextualism may be progressive research programs that widen and broaden
the scope of evidence in the historiography of ideas. However, these types
of evidence may well be insufficient for determining some hypotheses about
the consciousnesses of individual historical agents. The unavailability of
certain conceptual tools to an agent in an institutional context does not
ensure that the concepts were not developed independently by inquiring
minds (Spoerhase 2004). For example, it is implausible that during two
millennia of reading of the Bible before the emergence of Biblical
Criticism in the late 18th century, nobody noticed the inconsistencies,
repetitions, and linguistic layers that led to the formulation of the
documentary hypothesis. Yet, it would have been too dangerous for most of
those two millennia for anybody to communicate these findings in public.
Hypotheses about such beliefs are therefore often underdetermined by the
evidence. Further, assigning to academics the task of circumscribing what
was imaginable for historical agents is likely to result in a more limited
realm of possibilities than actually was the case.
[2] Skinner's vague "be brought to accept" is misinterpreted by Rorty
(1998, 247-273) as allowing practically any attribution of position to
anybody an ideal world. As Rorty suggests, in an ideal world a gulag guard
may be brought to recognize that he betrayed his fellow Russians. Sure….
[3] Skinner goes on then to discuss the meaning of an action for its
performer as its intention, but that is already a different issue.
[4] Retrospection, understanding the past in a new light, given new
evidence or theories in the present, should be distinguished from its
opposite, the understanding of the present given a new perspective from the
past. Historians may suddenly develop a greater interest in some events
because they display a certain similarity to a new feature of the present.
In such cases "Whiggism is not all bad" (Brush 2004, 259). For example,
Vico's philosophy did not cause semiotics and hermeneutics, but it received
greater attention following the emergence of these philosophic schools.
This should not have altered the interpretations of Vico, but the
interpretations of Vico may shed a new light on twentieth century
hermeneutics and semiotics. The emergence of totalitarianism in the 20th
century led to greater interest in totalitarian or semi-totalitarian
episodes in the past like the Münster Anabaptist 16th century theocracy and
the Jacobin regime in 18th century France. Neither caused modern
totalitarianism. However, historians of ideas and political historians are
interested in these episodes because of their similarity with modern
totalitarianism. But as long as the past is used to put the present in
perspective, rather than the other way around we are dealing with neither
anachronism nor retrospection but with a historical perspective on the
present.