ABSTRACT
This would seem to be an historian’s paradise were it not for the fact that historians have become postempirical. Using a conceptual shorthand, authors could say that meaning has replaced cause as the central focus of attention. They traces this dramatic shift of interest. They begin with the emergence of causal explanations and follow the arc of science from its first exhilarating aspiration of representing the physical universe accurately to the vaulting ambition of applying the scientific understanding of cause and effect relations to the affairs of human beings. They follow the history of knowledge-production in the modern West. They begin their story with knowledge because the publication in the seventeenth century of novel findings about the universe ushered in the modern era. This, in the proverbial nutshell, has been the trajectory of knowledge and postmodernism from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries.
