ankersmit 2011 history and theory

History and Theory, Theme Issue 50 (December 2011), 136-149 © Wesleyan University 2011 ISSN: 0018-2656

THE TRANSFIGURATION OF DISTANCE INTO FUNCTION

FRANk ANkERSmIT

AbSTRACT

The point of departure of this essay is the intuition that the relationship between the past and the present (or between the past as the object of historical investigation and what is said about it by the historian) should be conceived of in terms of temporal distance. The spatial metaphor of distance at work in this intuition is thought to provide the basis for the epistemological model appropriate for understanding the nature of historical knowledge. This results in two claims: 1) epistemology is the philosophical instrument we must rely upon for understanding historical writing, and 2) the metaphor of distance is—whether one is aware of it or not—the model for most, if not all, epistemological thought. This essay discusses the pros and cons of these two claims. It argues that the two claims are indeed the best way to begin our analysis of the relationship between the past and the historical text or representation. However, we cannot afford to stop there; indeed, we must ask ourselves where the associations we have with the metaphor of temporal distance may, in the end, be misleading. This will enable us to recognize that the notion of distance will, finally, have to yield its prerogatives to that of the notion of function. Historical writing is functionalist in the sense that the historical text is a substitute for the past discussed in it. That is its func-tion. Hence the essay’s title.

Keywords: distance, metaphor, epistemology, function, representation, Donald Davidson

I

Distance is a spatial concept: its proper and literal use refers us to objects in differ-ent places in (three-dimensional) space. Self-evidently, this should make us wary of using the notion outside contexts where spatial distance is at stake. For in such contexts the notion can make sense only in a metaphorical way. Such metaphori-cal uses of the notion of distance may yield illuminating insights, but the validity of such insights can be ascertained only after having translated the language of spatial metaphor into that of non-metaphorical literal prose.

but it is often far from easy to satisfy the demand for the literal translation of spatial metaphors. This is the danger of spatial metaphor, in the sciences no less than in philosophy.

Think of history. History investigates the past, hence what is temporally remote from us. but can we conceive of “what is temporally remote from us” without an appeal to the notion of temporal distance—and, hence, of the spatial metaphor of distance? Anyone thinking of the past has to rely on the axis of time on which the so-called arrow of time moves from left to right, where the past is to the left of

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us, the future is on the right, and the present is in the middle. Suppose you were required to imagine the past without any reference, either explicit or implicit, to this openly spatial notion of distance. I must confess I have no idea how to do this. In matters of time, and of the past, there is indeed something ineluctable about the spatial metaphor of “distance”—and this undoubtedly is what made the organiz-ers of this conference put the notion of distance on the agenda. It is as if you can speak about time and the past only metaphorically. Or, to put it differently, you can clarify the notion of time only in terms of that of space—and vice versa.

Kant’s first Critique seems to confirm this intuition. In his transcendental aes-thetics kant deals with space and time as forms of perception (“Anschauungsfor-men”), and hence as a priori schemata that are conditional of all experience and knowledge. It must strike us to what extent kant’s accounts of space and time are similar—even in the way both are phrased: sometimes he simply copies verbatim what was said on space to what he tells us about time.1 Especially suggestive is kant’s chiastic comparison of space and time: “different times do not coincide with each other, but follow each other successively, just as different spaces do not follow each other successively, but do coincide with each other.”2 Again, the implication is that what is typical of space is best expressed in terms of its contrast with time—and vice versa.

kant’s transcendental aesthetics is instructive for one more reason. kant’s ac-count of the nature of space and time comes close to that of Leibniz, in fact so close that kant feels compelled to invest a lot of time and energy in demarcating his own position from that of his illustrious predecessor. As kant himself insists, the big difference between his own account and Leibniz’s is that, whereas Leibniz completely disconnects the ideality of space and time from sensory perception, he presents both as the schemata conditional of all sensory experience and knowl-edge.3 Obviously, kant’s argument here for the ideality of space and time might invite us to conclude that the past is, in the end, a mental construction. For does the ideality of time not compel us to embrace the ideality of the past as well? Of course, not in the sense that the past is a reality existing only in our imagination (as Leibniz might perhaps choose to see it—though he might wish to qualify his claim by saying that the past certainly belongs to the category of the phenomena bene fundata), but rather in the transcendental sense of being a category that we project onto the world such that it is not part of the world “an sich.”

but putting things this way confronts us with an unpleasant and worrying di-lemma from the perspective of historical writing. For does the past, as investi-gated by the historian, then belong to phenomenological or to noumenal reality? If the former, the historian investigates basically the transcendental schemata we project onto the world. but it is not easy to tally this with what we know histori-cal writing to be like. If the latter, all historical writing could be accused of being guilty of the transcendental abuse of reason. The sciences can avoid this dilemma

1. Especially in the two sections on the metaphysical clarification of space and time. See I. kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Hamburg: meiner Verlag, 1956), b 38, 39 and b 46, 47.

2. Ibid., b 47 (my translation).3. F. C. beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism (Cambridge, mA: Harvard

University Press, 2002), 80.

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since the transcendental conditions of their possibility do not invade their subject matter, as is the case with history.4 For in history no content or meaning that one might wish to give to the notion of “the noumenal past” could possibly prevent it from being a potential object of historical research. To put it succinctly, the notion of “the history of transcendentalism or of epistemology” is not a contradictio in terminis—as Gadamer was at pains to point out. History invades and digests epis-temological barriers as easily as anything else. Epistemology can be historicized (think of Foucault, Latour, Rorty, or social constructivism), but history cannot be epistemologized. In sum, transcendentalism, whatever one may think of its mer-its, surely is an option for the sciences, but not for history.

II

but the immense metaphorical power of the notion of distance—quite rightly rec-ognized as such by the organizers of this conference—arguably has had more unwitting victims than our concept of the past. For epistemology itself, as it has developed since Descartes, is also quite hard to conceptualize without the notion of distance. Epistemologists discuss the relationship between a knowing subject on the one hand and a known object on the other—and then the perennial epis-temological problem is how to bridge in some way or other, yes, the distance between the two of them. Of course, one might now protest that I’m projecting here a primitive metaphor onto a philosophical subdiscipline of unparalleled tech-nical refinement where one never, or only in some particularly sad cases, allows oneself to be guided by the kind of associations we happen to have with the notion of distance.

I wonder, however, whether this protest does sufficient justice to the facts. Sim-ply recall what goes on in your mind when reading and commenting on the work of the great epistemologists of the past and present. Is the situation not that, when you ponder what they say, there is always some spatial model in your mind and onto which you project their argument? Just try to think away this spatial model, with its quasi-spatial “distance” between subject and object, between language and the world, and observe what is left. Your mind will then irrevocably turn into a tangle of incoherent ideas in which all sense of direction—one more spatial metaphor, by the way—is lost. Just as epistemology presents us with a scheme for

4. Just think of the impossibility of differentiating, à la kant, between a phenomenological and noumenal conception of the past. What is one here, and what the other? We lack any believable cri-terion that might help us to distinguish between the two. It is as if history inexorably places us in the realm of the Spinozist One Substance comprising both subject and object—and it might be added that there is no better way of expressing this than Vico’s verum et factum convertuntur. It might be argued that hermeneutics has always been an attempt to find the juste milieu between these two equally unat-tractive kantian alternatives. A still better way of dealing with the problem would be to simply drop time (and space) as potential candidates for a transcendentalist account of historical writing, and to replace them by the notion of narrative. That notion undoubtedly is far more appropriate for an under-standing of the nature of historical writing than those of space and time. For an example of what such an approach in fact might look like, see H. m. baumgartner, Kontinuität und Geschichte: Zur Kritik and Metakritik der historischen Vernunft (Frankfurt am main: Suhrkamp, 1972), chapter 6. but the very best solution would be to retain the gist of baumgartner’s argument while refraining from for-mulating it in transcendentalist language. This is how one might describe Louis mink’s position; see L. O. mink, Historical Understanding (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1987).


conceiving of the relationship between word and world, so only spatial metaphor presents us with the scheme in terms of which epistemological thought can ad-equately articulate itself. It is the precondition for epistemology.

Or think of the situation in which you have to compare different epistemologies with each other. For example, you have to explain to your students Foucault’s The Order of Things. Spatial metaphors are then hard to avoid. You will then say that in the Renaissance episteme the two “planes” of language and the world are still entangled with each other, so that words may give us access to a thing’s nature no less than the thing itself—and you will tell your students that this is why in the sixteenth century, etymology and text-commentaries could so strangely fascinate the scholars of that time. For if language is seen as just one more thing in the world, it may be just as informative about what the world is like as anything else that is part of the world. Obviously, we’re not talking here about what is stated expressis verbis about the world in language, but about language as being no less a thesaurus of fascinating and unexpected discoveries about the world than nature as investigated by the physicist.5 You would then presumably go on to say that in the classical episteme the plane of language emancipated itself from reality, with the result that the plane of language and that of the world are then presented as two parallel planes, allowing you to move from the one to the other, just as you may argue from some place on a map to a certain place on the globe’s surface and vice versa. Whereas, finally, in the modern episteme beginning in the early 1800s both parallel planes begin to shift with regard to each other, so that any correspondence between the two of them will have to be dated historically. This inaugurated the age of the human sciences, and of “man,” as Foucault notoriously claimed, where asking epistemological questions inexorably reduces us to history. When expounding this shift from epistemology to history Foucault quite openly embraces spatial metaphors himself:

[T]he domain of the modern episteme should be represented rather as a volume of space open in three dimensions. In one of these dimensions we would situate the mathematical and physical sciences. . . . In the second dimension there would be the sciences (such as those of language, life and the production and distribution of wealth) that proceed by relat-ing discontinuous but analogous elements in such a way that they are then able to establish causal and structural constants between them. The third dimension would be that of philo-sophical reflection, which develops as a thought of the Same.6

So the idea is that we should situate the human sciences in what Foucault char-acterizes, with one more spatial metaphor, as an “epistemological trihedron,” and that all the uncertainties peculiar to the human sciences arise from the impossibil-ity of fixing once and for all the epistemological relationships between language and the world in this trihedron. As Foucault puts it:

5. What Foucault describes as the Renaissance episteme has an eerie resemblance to how Rorty conceived of the relationship between language and the world as defined by his so-called “pure phi-losophy of language,” in distinction to the classical episteme, which introduced “impure” philosophy of language in Western philosophy. See also note 10.

6. m. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon books, 1970), 347.

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What explains the difficulty of the “human sciences,” their precariousness, their uncertain-ty as sciences, their dangerous familiarity with philosophy, their ill-defined reliance upon other domains of knowledge, their perpetually secondary and derived character, and also their claim to universality, is not, as is often stated, the extreme density of their object; it is not the metaphysical status or the inerasable transcendence of this man they speak of, but rather the complexity of the epistemological configuration in which they find themselves placed, their constant relation to the three dimensions that give them their space.7

Hence, it is spatial metaphors we shall have to rely upon when accounting, with Foucault, for the great epistemological sea-changes of the last five hundred years, culminating in the emergence of the human sciences and how these, as exempli-fied by psychoanalysis, ethnology, and history, result in the demise of the regime of epistemology. So both the triumphs of epistemology and its nemesis in the historicism of the human sciences can only understandably be accounted for if we tell our story in terms of spatial metaphors.

This is worrying for epistemology. Admittedly, metaphors may deepen our in-sight by explaining one thing in terms of another, for example by saying that the heart is a pump or that our present economic system is no less threatened by bubbles than it was before the credit crisis. In these examples what we ordinarily associated with pumps or bubbles is projected onto hearts and economic systems in order to achieve a better understanding of them. And as many theorists since max black and mary Hesse have insisted, this may be very illuminating, no less in the sciences than in ordinary life.8 but the omnipresence of spatial metaphors in epistemological thought is not to be considered with such equanimity, espe-cially since epistemologists themselves never openly and candidly explain what their argument owes to spatial metaphors. Indeed, spatial metaphors can safely be assumed to function like the double bottom of the boxes that conjurers use for their tricks, thereby rendering the cogency of the arguments of epistemologists to considerations tacitly smuggled into them, considerations that have not been sub-jected to the most rigorous and painstaking philosophical scrutiny. Debate among epistemologists then feeds on assumptions that were never explicitly stated. The fact that spatial metaphor seems to be ubiquitous in epistemological argument, though its presence is never actually signaled, is sufficient reason for alarm about epistemological thought as it has developed in Western philosophy since the days of Descartes, Locke, and kant down to the present.

More specifically, dependence on spatial metaphor may explain why epistemol-ogy even in the heyday of logical positivism resisted all attempts at formalization: metaphors mix two different vocabularies, and no formalization can cope with that. Their incommensurability will effectively ruin any effort at formalization.9 One could read this as one more argument in favor of Rorty’s condemnation of

7. Ibid., 348.8. See, for example, Knowledge and Metaphor. Volume III: Metaphor and Knowledge, ed. F. R.

Ankersmit and J. J. A. mooij (Dordrecht and boston: kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993). 9. And insofar as historical writing can be described as using one vocabulary (that of the present)

to account for another (that of the past), it follows that all attempts to formalize historical knowledge in one way or another are doomed to fail. It does not follow, obviously, that there should be no room for formalization in theoretical reflection on the nature of historical knowledge.


epistemology as “impure philosophy of language.”10 Epistemology has a chance of success only on the condition that it is radically cleaned of all spatial models. I shall return to the issue of formalization and its relation to epistemology at the end of this essay.

III

Now, truth has traditionally been the main topic of research in epistemology. In-deed, the spatial metaphor of the “distance” between subject and object, between language and the world, has always invited the question of how this “distance” could be bridged by truth. Just think of the correspondence theory of truth and the more than two thousand years of philosophical debate occasioned by it. Or of epistemological research on how the notion of reference ties together world and language in much the same way as you might nail together two pieces of wood.

This should provoke our interest in Donald Davidson’s philosophy of language. For Davidson presents us with an account of truth that apparently leaves no room for spatial metaphors such as that of “distance” between subject and object, or between language and the world. At the same time, Davidson’s thought developed more or less naturally from the still predominantly epistemological concerns of his former teacher W. V. O. Quine. This may give rise to the question of whether we may credit Davidson with having developed a philosophy of language that is happily free of spatial metaphors, and whether it may guide us toward a “pure” epistemology à la Rorty ready for its desired formalist take-off.

When accounting for the features of Davidson’s philosophy of language rele-vant in the present context, I had best begin with the question of meaning—hence with the question of what it means to say “s means that p” (a phrase, by the way, that is typically inhospitable to spatial metaphor: it is simply impossible to project any spatial metaphor onto “s means that p”).11 The phrase “s means that p” is sug-gestive of substituting s with p—and what spatial metaphor could adequately ex-press what we associate with substitution? Substitution is basically anti-, or rather, a-spatial. So that looks promising. Now, the main step in Davidson’s philosophy of language is to conceive of meaning in terms of truth, as defined in Tarski’s se-mantic theory of truth. For Tarski the truth-predicate typically appears in contexts in which we use a sentence in order to express the truth of some other sentence. The sentence predicating truth is then in a meta-language that has an object-lan-guage as its object, an object-language that includes the sentence to which truth is being predicated. In agreement with this picture, Tarski argues that the predicate “is true” can be defined for each individual sentence s in an object-language by

10. For Rorty, “impure philosophy of language” originates from our tendency to juxtapose language and the world as the battle-lines of two hostile armies before actual fighting begins. R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford: basil blackwell, 1980), 257ff. In F. R. Ankersmit, “Rorty and History,” New Literary History 39 (Winter 2008), 79-101, I made a first attempt to relate philosophy of history to the “pure” philosophy of language that Rorty opposes to the “impure” variant.

11. meaning can be described as legitimating semantic substitution: “s means that p” can be read as “s can be substituted with p” without loss of meaning. meaning can therefore be said to be the domain of application of the substitution theory of representation that will be discussed in the next section. In both cases there is no room for spatial metaphor.

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providing a matching sentence p in the meta-language. For example, the sentence in the German object-language “Schnee ist weiss” is true if and only if snow is white (where “snow is white” is in the English meta-language). Such sentences, hence sentences of the form “s is true if and only if p” are called truth theories, since they formulate empirically verifiable theories about the correct use of the truth-predicate in the object-language. Obviously, one would need, in principle, such a truth theory for each sentence in the object-language.

We will all agree that “Schnee ist weiss” means the same as “snow is white.” It follows that in Tarski’s theory of truth, questions of truth and meaning begin to shade off into each other—such that one can understand truth in terms of meaning (as Tarski preferred to do) or, inversely, explain meaning in terms of truth (which is Davidson’s preferred strategy). Davidson explains meaning in terms of truth by replacing in the statement “s means that p” the component “means that” by Tarski’s “is true if and only if.” The result is that “s means that p” becomes “s is true if and only if p,” so that we now have a satisfactory theory of truth for the sentences in an object-language, which, moreover, will enable us to explain mean-ing in terms of truth. Finally, all this became possible without ever referring to or relying on ontological or epistemological argument and the spatial metaphors always haunting it. So here we have a theory of truth where truth bypasses the traditional “confrontation model” of language and the world, and that seems to avoid—I explicitly say here “seems to avoid,” for we shall see in a moment that, in fact, things are different—the perennial temptation to measure the distance be-tween the two of them in terms of reference or of epistemological categories such as subject and object. The demons of spatial metaphor would then successfully have been exorcized.

However, this claim may turn out to have been premature. When comment-ing on Davidson’s appeal to Tarski’s theory of truth, bjorn Ramberg writes: “[I]ts promise lies in the fact that whatever the logical and ontological resources the theory uses, it produces theorems which state the truth-conditions for the sen-tences of the object-language by giving the translations of these sentences in the meta-language. This means that no resources available in the object-language are needed to see the theorems are true, as long as we take for granted the correctness of the translation.”12

It must strike us in this passage that, whereas we had believed we were talk-ing about meaning and truth, it now becomes clear that we have been talking all along about translation. Indeed, Davidson uses Tarski’s truth theory to give us a translation of sentences in an object-language, such as the (German) sentence “Schnee ist weiss,” into a sentence in our own (English) meta-language, namely “snow is white.” And this is no mere accidental feature of Davidson’s application of Tarski, but truly belongs to the essence of his argument, as will be clear if we turn to what Davidson called “radical interpretation.” For in his essay entitled “Radical Interpretation” Davidson explicitly argues that the operation of transla-tion is structurally identical with his Tarskian definition of the truth-conditions of

12. b. R. Ramberg, Donald Davidson’s Philosophy of Language (Oxford: Wiley-blackwell, 1989), 53-54.


sentences in an object language that we discussed a moment ago.13 This need not surprise us, if we recall that I began my account of Davidson a moment ago with the statement “s means that p” before getting to Davidson’s Tarskian truth-theory for s. For what else is translation from one language into another but the genera-tion of statements of the form “s means that p”?

So the fates of Davidson’s theory of truth and that of his theory of radical inter-pretation are identical: the final truth about the one is also the final truth about the other, and vice versa. This provides all the more reason to closely scrutinize his theory of radical interpretation. Decisive in this context is Davidson’s linguistic holism, which he took over from Quine, and which several of his commentators believe to be the Achilles’ heel of Davidson’s philosophy of language. Davidson is compelled to this linguistic holism since his theory of truth pretends to be a theory for all of a language, that is, for a language as a whole. Now, as Quine had already insisted in Word and Object, each body of evidence always allows for sev-eral competing theories, with the result that if all translation must always remain merely tentative, it will always be based on a certain body of evidence and there-fore be subject to correction by new evidence. So all we can strive for is an ever better match of the meanings of sentences in the object-language and those in the meta-language—with the ever unattainable ideal of achieving a complete “fusion of horizons” of the two languages, to use the most appropriate terminology here.

Now, as we all know, this notion of the “fusion of horizons” (“Horizontver-schmelzung”) is a pivotal concept in Gadamer’s Heideggerian hermeneutics. We will recall that it is a spatial metaphor that Gadamer relied upon to explain what historical understanding (“Verstehen”) is all about, and that he discussed in a sec-tion of Truth and Method characteristically entitled “the hermeneutic meaning of temporal distance.”14 The notion of the “fusion of horizons,” in terms of which Gadamer wishes to capture what is at stake in translating past into present mean-ings, is, in its turn, a spatial metaphor, if ever there was one. It need not surprise us, then, that it has become a thriving intellectual industry to compare Davidson and Gadamer, and, next, that the spatial metaphors abounding in hermeneutic the-ory from Schleiermacher to Gadamer can now also be projected onto Davidson’s radical interpretation. In this way Davidson’s theory of truth can, contrary to our initial intuitions, be said to tacitly depend on and employ all the spatial metaphors functioning as the skeleton of hermeneutics and (“impure”) epistemology.

This claim finds extra support in Davidson’s notion of the so-called Charity Principle. The principle has its origins in Quine’s “radical translation,” which, as the name suggests, is the ancestor of Davidson’s own “radical interpretation.” In Quine’s radical translation, words are translated from one language into another in a context in which we have nothing else to go on than how the world presents itself to us. For example, if the speaker of a foreign language always uses the word “Gavagai” when a rabbit is around, we may infer from this that “Gavagai” means “rabbit”—but on the condition that the speaker of the foreign language

13. D. Davidson, “Radical Translation,” in idem, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 130, 131.

14. my italics. H. G. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik (Tübingen: mohr, 1972), 275-290. See especially 289, 290.

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is not trying to systematically fool us and will generally speak the truth in his language. The assumption that this condition is met is what Davidson calls the Charity Principle, which he defines as the principle “assigning truth conditions to alien sentences that make native speakers right when plausibly possible, ac-cording, of course, to our own view of what is right.”15 However, “speaking the truth” as understood in the Charity Principle is not Tarskian truth, but truth as defined by the correspondence theory—hence the matching of word and fact (a rabbit manifests itself under that tree over there, and we utter the word “rabbit” or “Gavagai”). Self-evidently, this gets us back to the epistemologist’s confrontation model of language and the world, where truth is expected to bridge the “distance” between the two. Indeed, the ground has then been prepared for a return of all spatial metaphors in the philosophy of language.

Speaking more generally, in their accounts of “radical translation” and “radical interpretation” Quine and Davidson seem to make use of two conceptions of truth instead of just one. On the one hand, there is the conception of truth they explicitly discuss when dealing with the question of how their holism affects the relation-ship between word and world, but on the other their argument also presupposes the embrace of a fairly trivial and commonsensical variant of the correspondence theory of truth.16 One may well wonder what will be left of their theory of truth in the former sense if it is radically purged of its less illustrious rival.

IV

This sends us back to our initial question of whether we can conceive of a philoso-phy of language that avoids an implicit or explicit reliance on spatial metaphors. I shall now argue that a philosophy of language that sees it as giving us representa-tions of the world satisfies this condition. “Representation” is an imprecise term, so I should clarify how I shall understand it here. The best way to do so is to distinguish between two theories of representation: the resemblance theory and the substitution theory. According to the resemblance theory, a representation should resemble what it represents—meaning that there should be certain rules or algorithms allowing us to move safely from represented reality to its representation and vice versa. The re-semblance theory has an obvious elective affinity with epistemological thought—it is based on the assumption of a clear distinction between language and its objects, and proposes a way to bring them back together—which is why we may expect it to be just as hospitable to spatial metaphor as epistemology itself.

In spite of its immediate appeal, the resemblance theory is riddled with thorny problems, and this is why most (though not all) people nowadays prefer the al-ternative, the substitution theory of representation. The theory was first expressed by Edmund burke in his essay on the sublime and the beautiful, where he pointed out that words may represent things not because words resemble things—for they do not—but because they are linguistic substitutes for things (hence, the theory’s

15. Davidson, “Radical Translation,” 137.16. It is of interest, in this context, that in the definition of the Charity Principle mentioned a

moment ago, Davidson uses the notions of “truth” and of “what is right”—where the latter stands for this trivial variant of the correspondence theory of truth that remains unanalyzed in his argument.


name).17 But it was Ernst Gombrich who gave us the canonical definition of the substitution theory.18 Going back to the images we associate with the birth of art, Gombrich writes:

In many case these images “represent” in the sense of “substitution.” The clay horse or servant buried in the tomb of the mighty takes the place of the living. The idol takes the place of the God. The question whether it represents “the external form” of the particular divinity . . . does not come in at all. The idol serves as the substitute of the God in worship and ritual—it is a man-made God in precisely the sense that the hobby horse is a man-made horse. . . . Can our substitute take us further? Perhaps if we consider how it could become a substitute. The “first” hobby horse . . . was probably no image at all. Just a stick which qualified as a horse because one could ride on it. The tertium comparationis, the common factor, was function rather than form.19

This gives us all we need. To begin with, as Gombrich insists, the relationship between the represented and its representation cannot be defined or explained in terms of schemes or frameworks encompassing both the represented world and its representations and enabling us to define their relationship. For that would reduce us again to the resemblance theory, which he explicitly rejects. There is no plane—another spatial metaphor!—embracing the represented reality and its representation as their tertium comparationis that both have in common so that we can map their relations in terms of that plane’s coordinates. However, there is a tertium comparationis—but, as Gombrich insists, this tertium comparationis is not a matter of form but of function. So representation is basically functionalist, and decisive is whether a representation can function as what it represents. This, then, gets us out of the magical circle of spatial metaphors, as I shall argue.

We need only think, in this context, of the prototypical function, that in math-ematics. Take the equation: f(x) = x2. Admittedly, we can draw on paper a dia-gram of that function—and then we do have a figure in space. We might then feel tempted to say that the diagram is a “representation” of the function—which would reduce representationalist functionalism to spatial metaphors again. but we should resist this temptation. The function defines a rule for coupling a certain numerical value to a certain value of x. This is what it does, and this is all it does. It does not actually state what number corresponds to a certain value of x, as is the case in the diagram. The function gives the rule, and the diagram the application of the rule. Observe, furthermore, that there is no room for truth in the equation itself. It is a rule, and the truth-predicate does not apply to rules. but it does to the

17. “but descriptive poetry operates chiefly by substitution; by the means of sounds, which by custom have the effect of realities. Nothing is an imitation further than as it resembles some other thing; and words have no sort of resemblance to the ideas for which they stand”; see E. burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful [1757] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 157. but perhaps one could even go back as far Herodotus and Thucydides. They distinguished between “autopsy”—the perception of something with one’s own eyes—and “historia,” which gives us an account of what we have seen. They then argue that the latter should have just as much presence, evidence, or “energeia” as the former—which clearly anticipates burke’s formulation. See F. Hartog, Évidence de l’histoire (Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2005), 11-21, 169-191.

18. It is worthwhile to remind the reader here that we found in section III that substitution is essentially a-spatial.

19. E. H. Gombrich, “meditation on a Hobby Horse,” in Aesthetics Today. rev. ed., ed. E. Philipson and P. J. Gudel (New York: meridian, 1980), 175 (my italics).

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diagram. For the diagram truthfully states that the values of 3, 4, and 5 for x will give us the numbers 9, 16, and 25 (or falsely, if other numbers are given). It is much the same with (historical) representation. For one might say that a histori-cal representation proposes20 a rule for how to conceive of part of (past) reality. That is its (functionalist) meaning. And, indeed, applying the rule may then give us a mental image or picture of the past, just like the diagram of a function. but the representation itself does not do this; again, it only proposes the rule. Nor are representations true or false,21 as I have argued on many occasions, though their application may give rise to questions of truth and falsity—though not necessarily so.22 Finally, the functionalism of historical representation enables us to decide the old question of whether historians describe or explain the past: they do neither.

The foregoing also sheds some more light on the shortcomings of the resem-blance theory of representation. Correct is the insight that there should be a rule for connecting the represented world and its representation. but wrong in the re-semblance theory is conceiving these rules as telling representers in general, and historians in particular, how to move from represented reality to its representation. Instead, the rules require us to move in the opposite direction, and hence from representation to how we are required to imagine part of the past. They tell us what to project onto the past. And since the past can only passively undergo such projec-tions without protest, these rules can never be taken in an epistemological sense.23

Since metaphor is an operator knowing of few restrictions—almost anything can be seen in terms of anything else—we could say that, though the substitu-tional account gets us out of the magical circle of spatial metaphors, the function’s diagram, and the pictures or images of the past that history provides, are spatial metaphors of the function or, as the case may be, of a historical representation. This is a useful observation, for it correctly reflects the hierarchical relationship between representationalist functionalism and spatial metaphors by making admi-rably clear that the latter can never express relevant information about the former that is not yet present in the former. This, then, is why representationalist func-tionalism can never fall into the epistemologist’s trap of inferring claims from the spatial metaphors we associate with epistemological argument, claims that have no support in that argument itself. Trying to do so would be repeating the error of the resemblance theory.

20. I deliberately use here the word “propose” and avoid saying that representations “are” rules; representations do not say what the world is like; instead they invite us to conceive of it in a certain way. This is one more reason why epistemology is unable to account for representation.

21. Even though they consist for the better part of statements about the past that are either true or false.

22. In the last section of this essay I shall argue that truth arises from representationalist meaning. but this transition from meaning to truth is possible only if the web of our representations of the world is so dense and so closely knitted together that it will permit formalization. This is typically true of our representations of daily reality—and, indeed, then there is room for truth and falsity—but it will rarely be the case with historical representations where overlap will at best be only very partial. moreover, historical representations are ordinarily written with the explicit intention of avoiding overlap. For only this will attract the interest of other historians; overlap does not.

23. I emphasize that this should certainly not be taken to imply that the rules in question are wholly arbitrary: though many hats will fit your head, some of them will fit better than others.


V

Finally, I wish to address the admittedly somewhat egotistical question of how the foregoing argument fits into my own intellectual development. But I may perhaps be forgiven for addressing it since it may clarify some of my previous arguments. In my 1983 book on narrative logic I developed a theory of the historical text or representation (the terminology I adopted in the 1990s) from which I have never deviated. That theory is, basically, the same as the one that I presented here as the substitution theory of representation, according to which there exist no fixed rules, algorithms, or epistemological schemata tying a representation to what it represents. This is why I warmly welcomed Rorty’s notorious attack on episte-mology in his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature—which I read shortly after the publication of Narrative Logic.

I had my doubts, nevertheless. In fact, I was, and still am, a little less radical than Rorty. Rorty never discusses texts, whereas I have always felt the need to strictly distinguish between how singular true statements and texts relate to the world (when speaking of texts, I primarily have in mind historical texts or repre-sentations). It is an illusion to believe that the singular true statement gives all one needs for explaining how texts relate to the world. For even though the historical text consists of singular true statements, its logical form cannot be reduced to, or modelled on, the singular true statement. So when discussing epistemology we must make sure to be aware of whether we are talking about statements or about texts as exemplified by the historical text or representation.

Precisely this is why philosophy of history is of so much interest for philosophy of language and where it may substantially add to contemporary philosophy of language. The significance of philosophy of history exceeds by far that of being a theoretical account of the discipline of historiography: it fills an intolerable lacuna in philosophy of language insofar as the latter has somehow succeeded in ignor-ing, from the days of Frege up till the present day, the problem of how we may ac-count for how complex texts represent a complex reality. This problem is, indeed, best exemplified by historical representation, but it is really a substantial, if not the major, part of all of our use of language. Philosophy of language will remain a mere torso as long as it goes on stubbornly ignoring the problem of the text. So whereas the sciences have been for one and half centuries the main compass for philosophy of language, the latter should now be ready to learn from the writing of history as well. This is the idea that has inspired all of my writings and to which I shall adhere until the moment that the pen drops from my fingers.

Or, to rephrase my doubts about Rorty in the terminology adopted in this paper, whereas I agree with Rorty’s rejection of epistemology from the perspective of (historical) representation, I am less skeptical of epistemology when we are deal-ing with singular true statements. For example, though I am fascinated by Dav-idson’s account of the truth of singular statements, I believe that its anti-episte-mological implications derive from its weaknesses rather than from its strengths.

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Let me put it this way. Davidson’s holism is an important ingredient of what one might see, with Rorty, as the anti-epistemological implications of his philosophy of language. He took holism over from Quine, who had argued that scientific statements face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but collectively. but if one decides to agree here with Quine, it does not automatically follow that such holism also holds for natural languages. Rather the reverse, for the state-ments made in natural languages can only rarely be pulled together within the kind of holist webs of scientific statements that Quine had in mind. Moreover, if one removes this dimension of holism from the statements made about the world in natural languages, they seem “to face the tribunal of sense experience” indi-vidually rather than collectively. Historical writing is illustrative here: there is no web tying together a statement about, say, the reign of Septimius Severus to one on Schiller’s aesthetics—unless one embraces some speculative philosophy of history24 that provides you with a common ground for these two statements about the past.25 In the context of singular statements the questions that were typically asked by the epistemologist make sense again.26 As a result, the less coherence you have on the level of language (and history certainly has less coherence on that level than science) the stronger the case for epistemology will be.

but as far as (historical) representation is concerned, I am an anti-epistemol-ogist. I am so for roughly for the same reasons that Nelson Goodman rejected the resemblance theory of representation (though I hasten to add that there is a good deal of ambivalence in Goodman’s criticism of it in his Languages of Art and in his later writings, owing to his unfortunate metaphor of “the language of art.” For that metaphor invites us to see language as the most appropriate model for an understanding of art—and of representation and the text, and then all the epistemological specters driven out the front door reappear at the back door.27).

This raises the question of whether my position reflects an inconsistent attitude toward epistemology. How can one deny—with me—to epistemology its raison d’être in one case, while acknowledging it in another?

The main idea in replying to this question is the singular obtrusiveness of the notion of the “I,” whether as a transcendental, empirical, or simply as the knowing subject. Fichte was right: it all begins with the “I” positing a world. but why is

24. The historian’s so characteristically unreliable counterpart to the scientist’s scientific theories. 25. This may also explain why historians feel a natural affinity with an empiricist account of their

discipline, and why this account is, in fact, less “naive” than is often argued to be the case.26. It is, therefore, most paradoxical that the “linguistic turn” has been welcomed so warmly in

the reflection on the humanities because of its holism. For the holism that Quine had in mind has no counterpart in historical writing. It might be objected to this that 1) historical texts or representations mutually define each other, as is suggested by so-called inter-textualism, going back to Saussure’s theory of the sign, and 2) that this implies holism as well. The objection is to the point. However, holism in history and the humanities is a holism of meaning and not of truth (as is the case with Quine’s and Davidson’s holism). So, indeed, there undoubtedly is some truth in the current popular argument that Quine’s and Davidson’s holism builds a bridge between the sciences and the humani-ties. but this is a most treacherous bridge, for in spite of its air of solidity, one will fall through it as soon as one steps upon it.

27. Illustrative is Goodman’s effort to break down narrative in art—for example, the story of Psyche as told in the painting by Jacopo del Sellaio in the museum of Fine Arts in boston—into a chronologically ordered set of statements about some (imaginary) history. The place where narrative and representation do not accord with the model of the statement is then eliminated. See N. Goodman, Of Mind and Other Matters (Cambridge, mA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 11ff.


this so: why does every philosophy begin by embracing this insolent and impe-rialist “I”? Certainly, the notion of the “I” has its genealogy as well; it must have emerged somehow from some primeval situation in which there was not yet an “I.” It was not there at the creation of the world. but this is where representation comes in, for representation does not need an “I.” For example, a painting is a rep-resentation—but where is the “I” of the painting? Representations can exist with-out “I”s, just as things can. There may still be representations after humanity has ceased to exist. The case is different with knowledge: you cannot have knowledge without someone having it. knowledge dies with the last man, whereas represen-tations—for example, paintings and history books—may well survive him.

Representation precedes the “I,” as is clear from the quasi-Heideggerian ob-servation that one should not say “I have my representations” but rather “I am my representations,” where only the latter can do justice to how our conception of selfhood emerges from our representations. Self-evidently, this emergence of the notion of selfhood always goes together with the production of a not-self. So in this way the unity of representation falls apart in the duality of the “I” on the one hand and the world on the other. Representation, not knowledge, gives the deathblow to solipsism. Recurring patterns in representations guide this process of pulling apart representations into a knowing self and a known object—thus paving the way for epistemological reflection. Representationalist meaning then bifurcates into truth (the subject) and what truth is true of (the world)—and only then does epistemology become possible.

So the main error of epistemology has always been to start with truth instead of with representationalist meaning. When this happens, spatial metaphors are then inevitable. If, however, epistemology derives truth from representationalist mean-ing, spatial metaphors can be avoided. Of course, then epistemology will have to pay the price of recognizing its dependence on representation: no representa-tion, then no epistemology either. This is, again, why history is so important to philosophy (of language). History is the discipline that still reminds us of the fact that representation and meaning, not truth, refer us to the ultimate origins of our cognitive conquest of the world; truth merely registers or codifies recurrent pat-terns in representationalist meaning. There is no knowledge and no truth without first having representation and meaning. The more technical details of this evolu-tion from representation to truth I presented already in my book on narrative logic, now some thirty years ago.28 As may be clear from this, I have never changed my mind about this issue since then. Whether this is proof of an admirable constancy or of an intolerable self-conceit is for others to decide.

University of Groningen

28. F. R. Ankersmit, Narrative Logic (Dordrecht and boston: martinus Nijhoff, 1983), 155-169. I shall add a new dimension to the story told there in my forthcoming book The Semantics of Historical Representation (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2012). The book’s main thesis is, indeed, that whereas in most of contemporary philosophy of language one moves from Truth to meaning, in (historical) representation Truth can be derived from meaning.

ankersmit 2011 history and theory

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