In The Uncertain Sciences Bruce Mazlish has written a learned and comprehensive history of the traditional humanities and several social sciences. The outstanding feature of his work is that he ties the history of the human sciences to a summary history of humankind on the one hand, and to the history of the natural sciences on the other. Thus, the age of discovery from 1492, in Mazlish's account, affected the human sciences through the discovery of "the other," which launched the complex process of understanding other cultures and reflecting upon our own. More specifically, anthropology originated in the Age of Imperialism, beginning with the collection of physical evidence and moving on to ethnographic studies. Meantime, the Copernican Revolution in the natural sciences posed the challenge of knowledge that is "objective" in making a deliberate break with human beings' native sense of their central place in creation.
Much of Mazlish's philosophical history of the uncertain sciences is grouped around the tension between "positivism" and "hermeneutics." Mazlish's summary history of "positivism" begins with Francis Bacon, whose radical empiricism has been unfairly portrayed as passive. Mazlish's discussion of Robert Boyle allows him to explain that both the natural and the human sciences are socially constructed and dependent upon the existence of something like a "scientific community" capable of "virtual witnessing." From Boyle, Mazlish moves briefly to Auguste Comte, who named "positivism" as well as "sociology," and then to the members of the Vienna Circle, from Ernst Mach to Otto Neurath. Oddly enough, he does not give attention to Carl Hempel, whose two variants of the "covering law model" of historical explanation is certainly the outstanding exemplar of the positivist position in our own time. Mazlish's overall assessment of positivism is mixed, mainly because he recognizes the need to interpret texts and human behaviors. "Hermeneutics," therefore, figures in his account as the major alternative to positivism, even though he insists on something like the spirit of positivism: "The best features of positivism must be preserved even in those sciences that are mainly hermeneutic" (p. 27).
In his summary history of hermeneutics, Mazlish begins with the origins of interpretive practices in theology, law, and philology, but he quickly moves on to Friedrich Schleiermacher and to Wilhelm Dilthey, both of whom he views through the eyes of Hans-Georg Gadamer, whose viewpoint is not beyond criticism. Finally, Mazlish surprisingly associates postmodernist strategies with hermeneutics, although Max Weber's careful account of interpretation and of the relationship of interpretation to causal explanation would scarcely convince the members of the postmodernist camp.
It is impossible to do justice to all of the themes that are interwoven in this complex work, but I should at least touch upon two additional theses that affect its thrust. First, Mazlish strongly emphasizes Darwin and human evolution, both as a general model for the human sciences, and as a source of change in their subject matter. Humankind evolves and changes. Above all, their capacity for symbolization leads to ever new forms of culture. To elucidate the consequences, Mazlish introduces the key concepts of "unintended consequences" and