UC Berkeley

This paper elucidates aspects of a post-empiricist humanism within the human sciences. It makes three main arguments. First, a rejection of naïve empiricism implies that we necessarily construct the past in part using our theories, where these theories always have, at least implicitly, a normative force. Second, the logical theories we deploy to construct the past ought to allow for agency in that they should not postulate social contexts as defining or limiting the beliefs an individual can express in an utterance or action. Finally, while we can construct the past to serve any number of purposes, these purposes always have epistemic content, albeit that this content is not always historical.