 Daston then asks, “What good is historical epistemology?” Her opening (but later qualified) suggestion is that it goes part way toward “releasing us from our bondage to the past by hauling that past into conscious view”, although we must recognize that calling attention to the contingent origins of something is not sufficient to debunk it, upon pain of committing a genetic fallacy. Nor can we simply reject something without having an alternative to put in its place. “That is, historicizing is not identical to relativizing, much less to debunking”.