REVIEW ESSAYS

NOTHING BUT HISTORY?1

NOTHING BUT HISTORY. RECONSTRUCTION AND EXTREMITY AFTER METAPHYSICS.By David Roberts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Pp. xiii, 324.

I

In a recent essay Nancy Partner pointedly asked:

Has the impact of non-referential language theory, deconstruction, and the exposure ofhegemonic interests embedded in what used to pass for neutral description left the ancientdiscipline [of history] shattered beyond recuperation? . . . From the evidence so far, judg-ing from my own non-scientific but not atypical sampling of conference papers, journalarticles, and university press books, it is my impression that the “linguistic turn” was arevolving door and that everyone went around and around and got out exactly where theygot in. For all the sophistication of the theory-saturated part of the profession, scholars inall the relevant disciplines that contribute to or depend on historical information carry onin all essential ways as though nothing had changed since Ranke . . . 2

Partner’s reply is undoubtedly correct. Except for some interesting exceptionsat the margins of the discipline, historical practice is pretty much the same in1997 as it was in 1967: historians seek to describe accurately and to explaincogently how and why a certain event or situation occurred, and they do so bymeans of meticulously detailed research and responsiveness to the evidence as ithas best been ascertained by relevant historians working in the field. For all thetalk of narrativism, presentism, postmodernism, and deconstruction, historianswrite pretty much the same way as they always have (even though what theywrite about may be quite new).

The disjunction between history as practiced and historical metatheory has ledmany to claim that metatheory is more or less irrelevant. It swirls around makingall kinds of pronouncements about the status of history, and generates a lot ofphilosophical argument among those interested in it, but it doesn’t touch what“working historians” do. The windmills of history continue to spin despite thetilting and jousting of philosophers of history; on this view historical metatheo-ry is a twentieth-century Don Quixote.

1. I wish to thank Joseph Rouse for reading a draft of this essay and making insightful and help-ful comments on it.

2. “History in the Age of Reality-Fictions,” in A New Philosophy of History, ed. Frank Ankersmitand Hans Kellner (Chicago, 1995), 21-22.

But this isn’t the only response to the disjunction between history and metahis-tory. Another is that something is deeply wrong with the current dominantmetatheory (which Roberts calls “postmetaphysical” to indicate its blend ofdeconstructionism and postmodernism). According to this response, contempo-rary metatheory fails to do justice both to the actual practice of working histori-ans, and to itself. Let me briefly consider each in turn.

As to the former, postmetaphysical metatheorists as much as any know the dif-ference between propaganda and genuine history; they can recognize the ideo-logical blindness which sanctions revisionist histories bent on denying the exis-tence of the Holocaust, can identify the ways Soviet historiography was contam-inated by Stalinist political correctness, can criticize not just the conclusions butthe entire practice of racist historiography (such as Nazi Aryan history).Moreover, the histories which postmetaphysical metatheorists have written them-selves conform to accepted disciplinary standards; the (intellectual) histories ofHayden White and Hans Kellner and Frank Ankersmit, and the (social) historiesof Joan Scott and Stephen Greenblatt aren’t appreciably different in this respectfrom those that ignore or reject their metatheoretical commitments.Postmetaphysical metatheory often seems to speak out of both sides of itsmouth—to undermine disciplinary history while approving what it has accom-plished and following its dictates.

As to its own internal incoherence, many postmetaphysical metatheories makeclaims about the absurdity or unattainability or danger of the ideas of truth,objectivity, reality, and their cognates, but at the same time implicitly employ orpresuppose such ideas. I will return to this in Part III, but briefly: postmetaphys-ical metatheories claim to tell us what is the case about history (and thus invokethe idea of truth); claim that their accounts better fit the evidence than do theirrivals’ (and thus invoke the idea of objectivity); and claim to reveal somethingabout the ways things are (and thus invoke the idea of reality). Most postmeta-physical metatheories implode because they utilize what they deny is legitimate.

One of the great virtues of David Roberts’s Nothing but Historyis that itavoids such self-immolation. That is, it proffers a (postmetaphysical) metatheo-ry which is consistent with its own and the discipline of history’s practice.Practicing what one preaches is not always very easy (as any parent can attest!);that Roberts has done so is thus no mean achievement, especially given that hisown metatheory is decidedly and explicitly committed to an approach—post-metaphysicalism—which he himself shows is likely to be untrue to itself.

Roberts describes his book as “primarily an exercise in intellectual history, butit also has critical and even prescriptive dimensions” (xi). The bulk of the bookis intellectual history: it provides a history of how historiography got to the post-metaphysical position Roberts believes it is now in. It does this by describing andanalyzing in wonderfully lucid chapters the “cultural moments” opened up by aseries of thinkers (Vico, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Croce, Heidegger, Gadamer,Foucault, Derrida, and Rorty) who Roberts thinks have contributed the resourcesfor current postmetaphysical theorizing. Roberts explores the impact of these

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cultural moments on contemporary historiographers such as Hayden White,Brook Thomas, and Joan Scott. In this he shows in detail how the rich heritagehe has adumbrated has contributed to current thinking about the nature of histo-ry. Anyone seeking a perceptive and clearheaded guide to the contemporaryscene in metahistory and/or to its progenitors need go no further than Nothing butHistory.

But the book is not only a history; it is also a critique because it claims thatcontemporary historiographers have misappropriated their heritage, and that as aresult current historiography is needlessly negative and one-sided (and thereforeuntrue to historical practice and to its own procedures). Indeed, Roberts arguesthat current historical metatheory is extreme in a pejorative sense, and that thisextremity derives from its unwittingly employing the dualist thinking of themetaphysics it eschews. The book is also prescriptive in that it offers an alterna-tive, what it calls a “weak but constructive” framework which it argues is moretruly postmetaphysical than the current historiography which claims to be post-metaphysical. According to Roberts, this “weak but constructive” approach suc-ceeds in illuminating the constructed character of the discipline of history, butdoes so in a way that renders it “responsible,” and that thereby ratifies its achieve-ments.

Since most histories written by “working historians” are responsible in therequisite way, and—more to the point—since Roberts’s own intellectual historyis also responsible in this way, his metatheoretical thought is thereby consonantwith his own practice and the practice of his fellow historians. Thus even as heoffers a “postmetaphysical” metahistory he avoids the disjunction betweenmetatheory and historical practice which has marred much contemporary theo-rizing. One cannot criticize him for failing to account for the way he himself pro-ceeds—cannot, therefore, criticize him in the way one can often criticize con-temporary (postmetaphysical) metatheorists of history.

II

What does Roberts mean by a “postmetaphysical” world in which there is “noth-ing but history”? The answer to this question is not altogether straightforwardbecause Roberts uses the term “postmetaphysical” to express several differentideas. Three in particular stand out.

In its first sense “postmetaphysical” means there are “no privileged methodsor decision procedures affording access to certain super-historical truths” (2).This is an epistemological construal which delimits the epistemic capacities ofknowers by claiming that there is no path to knowledge, no firm foundation ofmethod which can guarantee truth. In this guise postmetaphysicalism might bebest termed anti-foundationalism.

The second interpretation of “postmetaphysical” is ontological in nature.According to postmetaphysicalism so understood, there are no things “that are acertain way we might discover,” no “stable, suprahistorical foundations or

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essences, or origins or purposes, ‘firsts’ or ‘ends’” (6). This is an anti-realistontology, where realism is understood as the twofold thesis that (1) a reality inde-pendent of human perception and cognition exists, and (2) that this reality has itsown inherent order. Postmetaphysicalism in its ontological mode denies the exis-tence of a mind-independent order. In this guise “postmetaphysicalism” mightbest be denominated “anti-realism.”

The third sense of “postmetaphysical” is broadly historiographical in charac-ter. According to this interpretation, no continuities underlie the flow of events,and especially no underlying progressive unfolding (of Spirit, of species-being,of freedom, of human potential, and so on). History is about the contingent, dis-ruption, flux; it contains no “metanarratives” which link all significant eventstogether in a single story. On this view, “postmetaphysicalism” might better becalled “postmodernism.”

These versions of postmetaphysicalism are not all the same. To claim thatnothing (no method; no evidence; no manner of thinking) is certain (sense 1) isnot to claim that there is no Final Answer (sense 2); to assert that there is no sin-gle unifying story of humanity (sense 3) is not equivalent to the assertion thatthere is no Reality except what “we” make of it (sense 2). There may be no pre-given essences of anything (sense 2), but this does not imply that history lacks anorder, that it is merely fragments from here and there (sense 3). In general, onecan consistently believe in postmetaphysicalism in one sense of the term anddeny it in the other two senses.

This is not to deny, of course, that elective affinities exist among these threesenses. Roberts usually invokes these affinities and conceives of postmetaphysi-calism as some combination of all three senses. Taken this way, postmetaphysi-calism amounts to a denial of “reality as such,” a denial of truth about this reali-ty, and a denial of any objective manner by which to pursue such a truth. Reality,truth, and objectivity are myths, and what is called reality, truth, and objectivityare simply the expressions of particular contingent historical configurations (or,more in the spirit of postmetaphysicalism, are simply expressions of those inpower at a particular historical juncture).

How have contemporary metahistorians understood history in light of the anti-foundational, anti-realist, postmodernist world revealed by postmetaphysical-ism? The upshot of these different ideas for the discipline of history is whatRoberts calls “presentism”: “With the erosion of metaphysics, historians couldno longer be conceived as disinterested observers representing the past as it actu-ally happened. Thus they could play a more active, creative role asking new kindsof questions based on their present concerns” (11). Historians can no longeraspire to represent the past “as it actually happened” because there is no way itactually happened; they could no longer be disinterested because all knowing isessentially perspectival in character and—because there is no privilegedmethod—no perspective can claim to be more correct than any other. Instead,historians need to understand themselves as constructing histories based on theirown conceptual and political interests. In this they are more like fiction writers

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than like (the traditional picture of) scientists. In this climate metahistory becamedecidedly “aestheticist”—focusing on the rhetorical and other devices wherebyhistories are fabricated.

In Nothing but HistoryRoberts worries that metahistorians have gone too farin the way they have appropriated postmetaphysicalism, that they have reducedhistory to mere flux or the “play of differences,” and have unwisely overempha-sized the rhetorical and creative dimensions of history as a discipline at theexpense of its attempt to (in some sense) portray the world outside of historiansthemselves. The result has been a slide into relativism in which crucial distinc-tions between history and fiction have been eroded, much to the detriment of his-tory. Roberts conceives his task as reappropriating the endowment of postmeta-physicalism in a “moderate and constructive” manner. History may be all thereis, says Roberts, but this doesn’t mean that anything goes.

III

One of the strengths of Roberts’s book is the revealing way he unearths the inad-equacies of particular historiographies spawned by postmetaphysicalism. Forinstance, he tellingly explores the excesses of Hayden White’s tropology, and heexamines the ways Joan Scott’s work is both inadequate as well as illuminatingthrough a sophisticated analysis of her famous exchange with GertrudeHimmelfarb (262-264; 280-290). But his approach here is essentially piecemeal,examining individual appropriations of postmetaphysicalism in turn. I wonderwhether in this Roberts is rather too easy on postmetaphysicalism itself, whethersomething isn’t amiss in the motherlode and not just in its various incarnations.

To see this, return to my earlier claim that postmetaphysicalist metatheory isinternally incoherent because it requires or presupposes ideas it explicitlyrejects.3 I have already said that Roberts’s term “postmetaphysical” is somewhatunclear. It also seems to me something of a misnomer. The most general claim ofpostmetaphysicalism is that truth, rationality, and mind-independent reality arecontingent and historically constructed. But this claim is not actually postmeta-physical at all: it is not merely a rejection of metaphysical excess, but is itself ametaphysical claim which purports to depict the way the world is (in this casethat truth, rationality, and reality are related to historical epochs in a certain way).

But this means that postmetaphysicalism implicitly rests on the idea that thereis some way the world is. Postmetaphysicalism thus presupposes that there is away reality is—and in this way is as “metaphysical” as the positions it seeks tosupplant. Thus even the most extreme historicist versions of the historicity of ourthought and the world in which we operate end up invoking something which isnot purely historical—something independent of history.

The same is true with regard to the idea of reason. Many postmetaphysicalaccounts claim that reason is simply what a particular (usually powerful) groupthinks is the right way to think, that there is no “objectively correct” way to think

3. In this section I develop ideas proposed by Thomas Nagel in The Last Word(Oxford, 1997).

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but only historically contingent forms of thinking. But what reason do we havefor thinking these postmetaphysical accounts of reason are correct? This questionis meant to show that these accounts—like all accounts—rest on the idea of rea-son because they finally invite rational assessment. In this way rational assess-ment of our beliefs is unavoidable. The logic of the attempt to construe our orothers’ rationality as merely the expression of our culture and particular historyinevitably requires us to invoke or presuppose a rationality which is not merelysuch an expression—to invoke or presuppose reasons which are not just for meor for us, but reasons for anyone looking at the situation. As with the case of amind-independent reality, postmetaphysicalist attempts at deflating rationality aspurely historical flounder by invoking reasons which are themselves transhistor-ical.

This is why postmetaphysicalism is ultimately incoherent: it presupposes orinvokes precisely what it denies. It denies that there is a mind-independent world,but in so doing it presupposes that reality exists in such a way that there is nomind-independent world—which is precisely to invoke a mind-independent real-ity which makes this denial true. Again, postmetaphysicalism denies that reasontranscends its cultural location. But in so doing postmetaphysicalists give reasonsfor this denial, thereby appealing to precisely what they abjure: reasons that arevalid in themselves and not just for those who happen to live in a certain cultureor time. (In an essay of greater length, the same could be shown of the ideas oflogic, truth, objectivity, and evidence.) Postmetaphysicalism eats itself bydevouring what it requires in order to be viable.

These are quite abstract points, but they can be seen to operate in the moreconcrete world of historiography. Take as an example Joan Scott’s insistence thatcategories (say, of gender) are mere historical constructions, and that these con-structions are part of a political process in which meanings emerge and changeas a result of the exchange and deployment of power. On this view the purposeof history is to uncover this process and along the way to reveal the contingent,constructed, and power-affected nature of our categories, all with an eye towardopening up the possibility of alternative understandings of these categories aswell as new categories.

All of this is quite perceptive and has underwritten her exceedingly insightfulhistory of gender. But note that Scott’s approach depends on a claim as to howcategories function in human history. This is a claim as to how things are, a claimin support of which Scott gives lots of reasons which are meant to be reasons forany reader (and not just readers who happen to be from a particular time andplace or readers who share her perspective).Scott’s approach thus depends onthe twin ideas of a world which is a certain way, and of reasons which are meantto be reasons for anyone who reads her analyses. But this means that Scott’sapproach cannot be a general theory about all categories because here are twocategories—“reality” and “reason”—which are not mere cultural constructionsbut which are implicitly history-independent (indeed,mustbe if her approach isto make sense). Perhaps this explains why, despite its metatheoretical commit-

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ment to a version of postmetaphysicalism in its “Introduction,” in its body Scott’sGender in History employs standard historical practices of research, analysis,and argument and makes claims about the nature of the historical world (aboutthe situatedness of gender) supported by evidence meant to appeal to any histo-rian reading her book.

Ironically, this situation of postmetaphysicalism presupposing that which itdenies is exactly the sort of thing to which deconstructionism is meant to sensi-tize us. This is a paradigm instance of the “return of the repressed”—in this case,the return of the ideas of a historically-independent reality and rationality whichpostmetaphysicalism explicitly eschews. In showing that in binary oppositions inwhich one term is valorized and the other is not (male as opposed to female;white as opposed to black; civilized as opposed to barbaric; heterosexual asopposed to homosexual) the former always depends on the latter for its self-def-inition; deconstruction reveals that one side never masters or eliminates thatwhich it opposes. This is why positions of either postmetaphysicalism or meta-physicalism which depend on such binary oppositions will always be unstable,ready to turn into their opposite.

Roberts (rightfully) detects in the important postmetaphysical metahistorianshe examines an excess which has led them to exaggerate the skeptical, political,and relativist moments of postmetaphysicalism and in the process to miss its con-structive side. But he doesn’t apply these analyses to the general level of post-metaphysicalism itself. In this I think he is too generous to postmetaphysicalism,and misses what might be termed the systematic reason why its followers havebeen so fatally extreme.

IV

I need to be careful here because Roberts doesoffer a systematic explanation forthe failures of extreme metahistory. However, this explanation derives not fromthe nature of postmetaphysicalism itself but from what he sees as a (dualistic)misinterpretation of it. Roberts shows how many postmetaphysicalists continueto employ a dualism characteristic of the metaphysicalism which they have sup-posedly transcended; he argues that this dualism contaminates the interpretationsof extreme metahistorians and is in fact responsible for their extremity (see inparticular 292ff.).

The dualism on which Roberts focuses as the source of postmetaphysicalexcess is the “dualism of language and reality” (299). As he puts it:

A dualistic conception of the relationship between human being and reality persisted espe-cially in the French thinking that narrativists like White and Kellner were quick toembrace. Standing opposed to reality “in itself” is human language, which orders or rep-resents reality yet, because of its figured nature, always falsifies reality in the process.Because we are trapped in language, reality and truth are ultimately beyond our grasp.(292-293)

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In other words, according to Roberts once one starts with a dichotomybetween the mind (language, conceptual scheme, discursive regime, and so on)and the world, one inevitably will end up claiming that reality is unknowable initself and that the mind is essentially distortive. But this is an epistemologicaldead-end (in part because the claim that reality is unknowable leads eventuallyto solipsism in which the only thing the mind can know is itself—a position inwhich claims about reality and its unknowability make no sense).

The way out of this dead-end is to eschew the dualism on which it rests. Toprevent the excesses of postmetaphysics, therefore, a new, non-dualistic concep-tion of language and reality is required. Roberts offers such a conception, one hethinks consonant with the basic insights of postmetaphysicalism but lacking theincipient dualism of many of its proponents: “Language becomes the mediumthrough which a particular world comes to be; reality becomes the endlessly pro-visional human world that happens historically, in and through language” (294).One might call this approach the “linguistification of reality.” According to it, theworld is constituted from our ongoing traditions of discourse. In this way our lan-guage is not over and against the world as the dualism of metaphysics wouldhave it; rather it permeates this world, suffusing it with that which makes it aworld:

We take it for granted that any (historical) narrative results from an encounter not withunvarnished “reality” but with other narratives, with discourse, with other ways humanbeings made sense of what had resulted from what their predecessors had done. This isnot to do violence to some way things really are, because there is no such way. . . . Thingscome to be as they do in particularizing language. And through our often-contested usesof language, the particularizing continues. . . .

So an actual world remains even with the eclipse of metaphysics, but it is simply theunstable, provisional resultant of our particular history. (296)

So when Roberts declares that there is “nothing but history” he doesn’t meansimply that all there is are the entities and events which have occurred in the past,and no Transcendent Being or Meaning in addition to them; he means in additionthat all there is are these entities-and-events-as-conceived-by-particular-tradi-tions-of-discourse. Not history as a stream of ordinary, mundane objects andactions, but these objects-described-in-such-and-such-a-way.

By transcending the dualism of word and world, of language and reality,Roberts claims to have opened up a space in postmetaphysicalism for “responsi-ble” history. The world is in and through our history, but such a historicizedworld can serve as the basis on which to assess the various historical accounts wegive. We live in ongoing traditions of interpretation subject to constant revision,and historians as well as others can appeal to these ongoing traditions to justifyand/or to criticize their own and others’ work. In this way Roberts develops a“moderate” postmetaphysicalism in which notions of truth, reality, and objectiv-ity (of a certain sort) have a prominent place.

But does it make historiographical sense to say that the world is constitutedfrom the linguistic and conceptual resources of a particular community? Can this

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really be the whole story? Doesn’t reality consist in part of material which oftenresists our linguistic and conceptual capacities, material which can causally influ-ence what happens to us and what we do even though we don’t know it (and can’tknow it given our conceptual incapacities), material that bears directly on thetruth-value of what we assert?

Either Caesar did cross the Rubicon on 10 January 49 BCE or he did not;either Oswald was a lone assassin or he was not; either Heidegger joined the NaziParty or he did not. These events or situations are what they are independently ofour descriptions of them (though that we can describe them as such is obviouslynot so independent). The sentences which describe them are true (or false) just incase what they say happened actually happened (or did not happen). Thus“Caesar crossed the Rubicon” is true if and only if Caesar crossed the Rubicon.What makes these sentences true is how the world is or was, not whether webelieve them to be true or even whether we have justifiable warrant to believethem to be true. Despite some loose talk from pragmatists, warranted assertibili-ty (which is a function of evidence, standards, criteria, and our conceptual equip-ment) is not the same thing as truth (which is not a function of the evidence athand or our ability to ascertain it, but of how the world is).

Of course histories are much more than collections of (purportedly) true state-ments. They also contain, among other things, causal accounts of the events,properties, relations, and entities which figure in these statements. These causalaccounts can be rather concrete and particular (“Caesar crossed the Rubicon tostrike pre-emptively against Pompey who had been called upon by the Consulsto save the state against Caesar”), or they can be quite general (“All history is thehistory of class struggle”). But here again the aspiration of historians is to get itright, where rightness consists in uncovering the actual causes and effects of theevents under review. Did Caesar act as he did in response to the Consuls’ pleasto Pompey? Is all history the history of class struggle? The answers to these ques-tions depend in part on how the world is (or was). If indeed all history is the his-tory of class struggle, then the history of ancient Greece as well as the history ofcapitalist societies is the history of class struggle even if those in ancient Greecehad no idea that this was the case, and could have had no idea this was the casegiven their conceptual resources (which contained no notion of “class”). Thismeans that what was happening to the ancient Greeks, and what they could do,was the result of processes about which they were not only ignorant but aboutwhich they literally had no idea. In this they were like the ancient Romans whowere being poisoned by the lead in their pottery though they had no knowledgeof this and could have had no knowledge because they lacked the conceptualmeans to ascertain levels of lead and its effect on body functioning.

Historians are also interested in the meaning of the events and entities whichinterest them. Isn’t meaning a function of the interests, values, self-conceptions,and conceptual resources of those seeking this meaning? Of course it is, at leastin part: meaning is always for someone or something; as such it is inherently rel-ative. The meaning of historical objects and processes will thus change as histo-

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rians with their particular temporal and conceptual perspectives change. There isno Single Meaning or Single Right Story about any historical event. But it doesnot follow from this that here the world drops out of the equation (as the“extreme postmetaphysicalists” would have it), or that the world that does play arole is really the-world-as-comprehended-by-particular-historians-and-their-lin-guistic-communities (as Roberts would have it). The world in the sense of whatactually happened plays a role here as well. This can be seen in the two differentsenses of meaning particularly relevant to historians: meaning as causal outcome,and meaning as significance.

That this is so in the case of causal outcomes ought to be obvious. The mean-ing of the bombing of Pearl Harbor (or, to be accurate,a meaning of the bomb-ing of Pearl Harbor) is that it provoked the entry of the United States into thethen-raging world war. That this is part of its meaning derives from the fact thatthis provocation was indeed one of its causal outcomes. That this was one of itscausal outcomes is no more a matter of the conceptual resources of those describ-ing it than is cancer’s being the causal outcome of smoking (though, to be sure,whether these events so related can be described as such is a function of thedescribers’ conceptual resources). The meaning of events derives in part from thecausal outcomes they actually produced, and whether they actually producedthem is a fact about the world, not a fact about the linguistic community whichseeks to describe them. Sometimes an important dimension of the meaning ofevents is unascertainable to historians because they lack the conceptual resourcesto grasp the causal outcomes of these events; but this is not to say that theseevents do not have these dimensions of meaning. Meaning in the sense of causaloutcome is a function of what actually happens.

Even in the case in which the role of historians is most evident—that of mean-ing in the sense of historical significance—the world continues to be important.World War II may have different meanings for different inquirers (it may figurein a wide number of differing narratives—for instance, narratives about the riseand decline of Europe, of the history of warfare, of the globalization of the plan-et, and so on). But that a historian claims a certain significance for this event isnot in itself sufficient for it to have this significance: historians may be wrongabout the significance of events. They can be wrong because part of what consti-tutes an event’s or entity’s significance is how the world is (or was) in fact: isWorld War II the last gasp of Europe as a world power? Is the “total warfare” ofWorld War II a harbinger of things to come? Did the War significantly contributeto the globalization of the planet? Obviously, answers to these questions involvecomplex judgments about which reasonable people can and will disagree. But thepoint here is that one of the elements which figures in these judgments, and onewhich will prove vital to their quality, is what happens in the world.

All of this shows that—to put it epigrammatically—the word needs the world.Where Roberts goes wrong is in reifying the word and so emphasizing it that inhis account the world drops out. Alas, reducing a dualism (here, of word andworld) to one of its components (in this case, the word) does not challenge this

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dualism. Roberts is still playing the dualist game even as he opts for one of itssides. The trick—on which, of course, he himself insists—is to avoid this dual-ism altogether.

This is not easy to do. One might begin by agreeing with Roberts in insistingon the importance of the word for the world (but put in a way somewhat differ-ently from Roberts’s way of doing so). The world only discloses itselfin andthrough the actions and practices of agents (including linguistic agents like our-selves). That is, things in the world gain their identities for some group only inand through their relations with agents who interact with these things in terms ofthese agents’ interests, desires, cognitive and perceptual capacities, motor skills,linguistic or proto-linguistic abilities, and so on. One might put this by sayingthat not the world but the way the world is for someone cannot be made sense ofwithout invoking the concepts, percepts, judgments, and intentions of activebeings working in the world.

But this does not mean that the word (or, as Roberts would have it, history) isall there is. Indeed, our language is meaningful only because we live and act in aworld of things—investigate, manipulate, move amidst, and work on rocks andrivers and living things including other humans. Thus, the truth of our utterances,what they refer to, their role in our ongoing lives, and the way they affect othersis intimately tied up with the things of the world. Without them, our utteranceswould in fact be Babel, meaningless and ineffective.

So—paceextreme postmetaphysicalists—the world and how it is must play acrucial role in any account of the word, just as it must play a significant role inany acceptable historiography. Moreover, the world and how it is (or was) can-not just mean—pacepostmetaphysical moderates like Roberts—“the-world-con-ceived-by-a-particular-conceptual-tradition.” The world here must consist of thepeople, places, and things which act and suffer, with which we interact, andwhose doings and happenings concern or affect us (in particular, render ourclaims meaningful and either true or false).4 By denying this significant role tothe world, postmetaphysicalism of either the extreme variety Roberts rejects orthe weak variety he offers cannot be correct. The world is still with us despite theclaims of postmetaphysicalism. Thereis something more than history.

BRIAN FAY

Wesleyan University

4. I’m reminded here of Donald Davidson’s conclusion to “The Idea of a Conceptual Scheme”: “Ingiving up the dualism of scheme and world, we do not give up the world, but re-establish unmediat-ed touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false” (inInquiries into Truth and Interpretation[Oxford, 1984], 198).

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