【セミナー情報】（10月24日）No Unity Without Humanity: What Historiography Teaches Us About the Quest for the Unity of Science

2026年10月24日（土）に、下記のセミナーを開催いたします。皆様のご参加をお待ちしております。

【セミナーの紹介】

In contemporary theorizing about science, various forms of pluralism and a practice-oriented focus have become the norm. Few would want to defend any strong unity-of-science thesis, and many are happy with a very inclusive and liberal notion of “science.” I myself certainly fall into the latter camp.

Having said that, I will approach the topic from an unusual angle this time. I will ask how this inclusive notion of “science” actually shapes debates about the scientific status of the traditionally labelled “soft” and “social” sciences; namely, I will take historiography as my use case. I will argue that attempts to show that historiography is – or is not – a “real” science exemplify a theoretically unresolved (and recently neglected) tension between the general continuity of all human inquiry and more specific forms of methodological pluralism.

The continuity I have in mind, however, is not reductive: it rests on the essentially human character of science, rather than on the imposition of a single method or the ontological reduction of the “social” to the “natural.” My main task is to point out that the continuity among the sciences might be much greater than our current pluralist intuitions allow us to think.

This will create space for me both to talk about contemporary developments in the philosophy of history and to address persistent worries within the philosophy of the social sciences.