Vindicatory Genealogy
An Outline of the Topic
Abstract
Over the past thirty years or so, a new understanding of the genealogical method has emerged in anglophone philosophy. A growing group of authors, referring to the pioneering book Knowledge and The State of Nature. An Essay in Conceptual Synthesis by Edward Craig (1990), proposes, creatively uses and subjects to methodological reflection the so-called vindicatory genealogy (VG). VG consists in the construction of a quasi-historical, naturalistic and functionalist narrative on the origins and evolution of a social conceptual practice, for example, the use of a certain idea in social life. VG is intended to explain and at the same time recommend („vindicate”) this practice. The purpose of this article is to present the VG method and its preliminary critical analysis. It is structured as follows: in the introduction, I present the basic differences between VG and the existing, default, subversive understanding of the genealogical method; in the first part, I analyze the most important assumptions of VG, namely historicism, methodological naturalism and functionalism; in the second part, I reconstruct – for illustration – the application of VG to explain and justify the positive evaluation and recognition as virtues of various forms of truthfulness (M. Fricker, B. Williams); in the third part, I discuss three basic objections to VG: the charge of fiction, the charge of genetic fallacy and the charge of instrumentalism. As far as I know, this issue has not yet received a study in the Polish academic literature.
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