historical theory of reference See PHILOSOPHY OF. LANGUAG. historicism, the doctrine that knowledge of human affairs has an irreducibly historical character and that there can be no ahistorical perspective for an understanding of human nature and society. What is needed instead is a philosophical explication of historical knowledge that will yield the rationale for all sound knowledge of human activities.
So construed, historicism is a philosophical doctrine originating in the methodological and epistemological presuppositions of critical historiography. In the mid-nineteenth century certain German thinkers (Dilthey most centrally), reacting against positivist ideals of science and knowledge, rejected scientistic models of knowledge, replacing them with historical ones. They applied this not only to the discipline of history but to economics, law, political theory, and large areas of philosophy. Initially concerned with methodological issues in particular disciplines, historicism, as it developed, sought to work out a common philosophical doctrine that would inform all these disciplines. What is essential to achieve knowledge in the human sciences is to employ the ways of understanding used in historical studies. There should in the human sciences be no search for natural laws; knowledge there will be interpretive and rooted in concrete historical occurrences. As such it will be inescapably perspectival and contextual (contextualism). This raises the issue of whether historicism is a form of historical relativism. Historicism appears to be committed to the thesis that what for a given people is warrantedly assertible is determined by the distinctive historical perspective in which they view life and society. The stress on uniqueness and concrete specificity and the rejection of any appeal to universal laws of human development reinforce that. But the emphasis on cumulative development into larger contexts of our historical knowledge puts in doubt an identification of historicism and historical relativism. The above account of historicism is that of its main proponents: Meinecke, Croce, Collingwood, Ortega y Gasset, and Mannheim. But in the twentieth century, with Popper and Hayek, a very different conception of historicism gained some currency. For them, to be a historicist is to believe that there are ‘historical laws,’ indeed even a ‘law of historical development,’ such that history has a pattern and even an end, that it is the central task of social science to discover it, and that these laws should determine the direction of political action and social policy. They attributed (incorrectly) this doctrine to Marx but rightly denounced it as pseudo-science. However, some later Marxists (Lukács, Korsch, and Gramsci) were historicists in the original non- Popperian sense as was the critical theorist Adorno and hermeneuticists such as Gadamer. See also COLLINGWOOD , CROCE, DILTHEY, ENGELS , PHILOSOPHY OF HISTOR. K.N.