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Takashi SHOGIMEN
Titolo/Title
The duality of contextualization in the history of political thought: a comparison with Hans Reichenbach’s distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification, 107-119 (PDF)
Abstract
My 2016 essay on “On the elusiveness of context” argued that contextualization in the Cambridge school’s history of political thought was logically twofold: heuristic and verificatory. This dual concept of contextualization derived from my logical analysis of the Cambridge school’s methodology in light of Charles Sanders Peirce’s logic. Meanwhile, the history and philosophy of science has known Hans Reichenbach’s classic distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification, which ostensibly resembles my dual concept of contextualization. The present essay argues that Reichenbach’s distinction and my concept have little in common. Reichenbach’s distinction has been widely understood to mean the rejection of any possible logical analysis of discovery, while my Peircean account reveals the logical structure of contextualization for the purpose of discovering a puzzling fact and a substantiated explanation in historical enquiries.
Keywords
Context – Context of Discovery – Context of Justification – Abduction – the Cambridge school
BIO
Takashi SHOGIMEN FRHistS MAE is Professor of History at the University of Otago, New Zealand. He has published widely on medieval European, modern Japanese, and comparative political thought in English and Japanese, including, most recently, Rethinking Medieval and Renaissance Political Thought, co-edited with Chris Jones (Routledge, 2023).
Politics. Rivista di Studi Politics 