On Tradition.

• Author: Bevir, Mark

Tradition can be a highly evaluative concept. Conservatives often evoke the idea of tradition to express reverence for continuity and the past. Tradition can act as an anti-theoretical concept deployed to question the role of doctrine and reason within social life. [1] Traditions allegedly validate social practices by providing an immanent guide to how one should behave. Any abstract doctrine or reason informing such a guide is best--or perhaps of necessity--left unarticulated since such abstractions are inherently destructive in their effects on social order. The ability of traditions to confer legitimacy on social practices helps to explain why cultural nationalists, states, and even radical movements have tried to invigorate their political projects by inventing appropriate traditions, symbols, and rituals. [2]

Tradition integral to understanding of human condition.

Yet whilst tradition can be an evaluative moral and political concept, it also plays a vital role as an ontological and explanatory one. Historians often explain features of works, actions, and practices by locating them in the context of a particular tradition. Even when scholars explicitly reject the concept of tradition, they typically adopt a related concept to indicate the importance of social and historical contexts for a proper understanding of particular works, actions, and practices. It appears that a concept such as tradition, structure, heritage, or paradigm is integral to our understanding of the human condition. One argument for believing this to be so--the one I will adopt--derives from meaning holism. What is more, this argument encourages us to unpack the relationship of individuals to their social and historical contexts in a way that suggests the concept of a tradition is preferable to that of a structure or paradigm. Finally, because the ontological and explanatory notions of tradition cle arly overlap with one another, we can use the ontological concept thus derived from semantic holism to say something about, first, the idealization procedures by which historians should construct traditions to explain a particular object, and, second, the nature and limits of such explanations.

The Necessity of Tradition

Analyses of the forms of explanation that historians should adopt with respect to works, actions, and practices typically revolve around two sets of concepts. The first set includes concepts such as tradition, structure, and paradigm. These concepts embody attempts both to specify how we should analyse the social context in which individuals reason and act, and to indicate how much weight we should give to the social context as a factor in their reasoning and acting. The second set includes concepts such as anomaly, reason, and agency. These concepts embody attempts to specify how we should analyse the processes by which beliefs and practices change, and, more especially, the role played by particular individuals in these processes. Within both sets of concepts, there are, of course, numerous further debates over how we should unpack the relevant concepts. Scholars debate, for example, the respective weights we should ascribe to economic and political factors within the social context, or the extent to which the unconscious, desire, and reason affect the individual performance. Nonetheless, these two sets of concepts are clearly vital ones for a study of tradition since they concern the relationship of the individual to his social inheritance.

There are philosophers who appear to believe that the individual is wholly autonomous, that is, able to transcend totally the influence of tradition. [3] A faith in such autonomy often draws support, explicitly or implicitly, from a strong empiricism.

Meaning holism renders strong empiricism implausible.

Empiricists generally argue that people arrive at webs of belief as a result of pure experiences. This would suggest that the historian can explain why people held the beliefs they did by reference to their experiences alone: the historian needs to consider only the circumstances in which people find themselves, not the ways in which they construct or interpret their circumstances through the traditions they inherit. Yet such a strong empiricism seems highly implausible nowadays, largely because of the powerful arguments in favour of various types of meaning holism. Here is not the place to follow the detour required for a full defence of holism. Instead it must suffice to note that the vast majority of philosophers now accept some form of holism, and, moreover, that holism informs many of the major developments in modern philosophy, including the rejection of pure observation by philosophers of science such as Thomas Kuhn, the analysis of meaning and interpretation by philosophers of knowledge such as W. V. O. Quine and Donald Davidson, and, to a lesser extent, the analysis of intentions and beliefs by philosophers of mind such as David Lewis. [4]

Experience can generate beliefs only in context of previous beliefs.

Meaning holism shows a faith in autonomy to be mistaken. Certainly people come to believe the things they do only in the context of their own life-histories: my beliefs are my beliefs precisely because I have come to accept them as mine. What interests us, however, is why certain beliefs should become part of a particular life-history: why do I hold the particular beliefs I do? Because we cannot have pure experiences, we must necessarily construe our personal experiences in terms of a prior bundle of theories. We cannot arrive at beliefs through experiences unless we already have a prior set of beliefs. Experiences can generate beliefs only where there already is a set of beliefs in terms of which to make sense of the experiences. Thus, strong empiricism is wrong: we cannot explain a belief by reference to the pure experiences of the relevant individual. Our experiences can lead us to beliefs only because we already have access to sets of belief in the form of the traditions of our community. Individuals nec essarily arrive at their beliefs by way of their participation in traditions. [5]

Our social inheritance constitutes the necessary background to the beliefs we adopt and the actions we perform. Some philosophers adopt a very strong version of this conclusion. They argue that some sort of social structure--a paradigm or episteme, for example--fixes, or at least limits, not only the actions we can perform successfully but also our very beliefs and desires. [6] Strong structuralists typically argue that meanings, beliefs, and the like are the products of the internal relations of self-sufficient languages or paradigms. They leave little, if any, room for human agency. Surely, however, such a strong structuralism is in error.

Certainly people adopt their beliefs against a background of traditions that already exist as a common heritage: I come to formulate my beliefs in a world where other people already have expressed their beliefs. What interests us, however, is how the beliefs of particular individuals relate to the traditions that they inherit: how do I develop my beliefs in relation to the beliefs other people already hold? Here strong structuralists suggest that traditions, structures, paradigms, and the like determine, or at the very least set definite limits to, the beliefs people might adopt and so the actions they might attempt. [7] Imagine that we could indeed identify necessary limits imposed by social contexts on the beliefs individuals can adopt. Because the social contexts would impose these limits, they could not be natural limits transcending all contexts, as is the natural limit to how fast I can run. What is more, because we could identify these limits, we could describe them to individuals within the relevant s ocial context, so, assuming that they could understand us, they could come to recognise these limits, and so understand the sorts of beliefs they could not adopt. But because they could recognise these limits, and because these limits could not be natural limits, they therefore could transcend these limits, which thus could not really be limits at all. Because they could understand the sorts of beliefs these limits preclude, and because there could not be any natural restriction preventing them from holding these beliefs, they could adopt these beliefs, hence these beliefs could not be beliefs they could not come to hold. For example, if we could recognise that such and such a community of monarchists could not possibly form a republic because of the social context, we could explain the nature of a republic to them, so they could become republicans, and, if enough of them in sufficiently powerful positions did become republicans, they could found a republic.

There are two features of this argument against strong structuralism that seem to need defending. The first is the apparent proviso that we can describe a limit to the people it affects only if we are their contemporaries. This appears to leave open the possibility of social contexts imposing limits that we cannot recognise at the time. We recognise them only historically after they cease to operate. However, this apparent proviso does not actually apply because the argument concerns the conceptual, not the empirical, pre-conditions of limits. Thus, the argument can be rewritten as a thought-experiment. If we imagine an outsider who is aware of the limit entering into the relevant context, this person could describe the limit to the relevant individuals, at which point it would cease to be a limit for the reasons already given. The fact that we envisage the limit being transcended in this thought-experiment shows that it is a contingent, not a necessary, limit; after all, if it was a necessary limit imposed by the social context, we would be able to envisage people transcending it only after the social context had changed so as to prevent it from operating. It is possible that...