New Theories of Mind and their Implications for Historians

Adrian Jones (La Trobe University)

This paper suggests another epistemology for history. Theories of mind are contrasted. Implications for history research (but not history writing) are traced. New theories of mind developed by experts in robotics and artificial intelligence, by Pittsburgh School philosophers of mind, by evolutionary psychologists, and by archaeologists of cognition are explored. These new views extend the Cartesian-Spinozan-Kantian representational or “picturing” theories of mind that underpin key (Historicist / Historismus and post-Historismus?) traditions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century academic historiography. The new theories suggest how researchers of history can and should attend less to “concept-formed-&-forming (Heidegger’s historiology / die Historie)” submerged structures, tropes, discourses and representations, the better to assimilate the habitual and tacit in a past, the ubiquitous things past seldom represented. The new theories of mind suggest how historical research is also a (ethnography-like) study of past life-worlds-in-being. These insights are linked to Heidegger’s concept of the 1920s: Geschichtlichtkeit. A hermeneutic agenda of dis-closure of predicaments of being-there-&-then, while also being discernibly oblivious and aware, is in prospect. These kinds of inferences from a re-siting of past people’s predicaments are the other foundation for historical research suggested in this paper.