ABSTRACT
Contemporary epistemology has recently seen a revival of relativist and sceptical accounts precisely because of the wholistic arguments characteristic of the conceptual scheme approach, as discussed in Chapter 3. Doubts about reference (or what Quine calls the “inscrutability of reference”) and traditional realist or empiricist theories of knowledge have, as Popper feared, encouraged subjectivist or relativist philosophical tendencies. Historicism is a version of these sentiments since it views the various conceptual schemes as so many “expressions” of the world and rejects, on relativist grounds, any “representational” account of knowledge. But in place of the confident realism of past historicists, such as Leopold Von Ranke who held that all ages are unmittelbar zu Gott (immediate before God), modern historicism suggests no ultimate reference or “court of appeals” by which the diverse objective worlds can be reconciled or judged. Are such doubts – about whether different theories refer to the same world or whether there is radical historical change in concepts – intelligible?
