Abstract
The apparent power of the covering-law model of scientific explanation inspired efforts to make historical explanation fit within it. After the demise of that model, many philosophers of history have proposed more liberal approaches to historical explanation, and some reflective historians have questioned the thesis that offering explanations is the business of good history. We attempt to sort through a number of conflicting ideas about historical explanation and about the historian’s commitment (or duty?) to offer the truth about the past. We suggest that histories are diverse, that historians sometimes provide explanations, that the types of explanations they offer are highly various, and that delivering the truth is often important. The picture that emerges illuminates the sciences, by reminding philosophers of the range of questions to which scientific research is directed. It also brings out affinities, not only between history and the natural sciences but also between history and anthropology and history and literature. None of these enterprises should be seen in light of a simple model of successful inquiry. None should be viewed as committed to a single monolithic aim.
We are delighted to dedicate this chapter to Arthur Danto.
From Herwitz D, Kelly M (eds) (2007) Action, Art, History: Engagements with Arthur Danto. New York, Columbia University Press, p 198–226. Reprinted by permission of Columbia.
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Notes
- 1.
Originally published in The Journal of Philosophy in 1942. We’ll refer to the reprinting in Hempel (1965).
- 2.
Danto (1964) from Action, Art, History: Engagements with Arthur C. Danto, by Daniel Herwitz, Michael Kelly. Copyright © 2007 Columbia University Press. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.
- 3.
Wilhelm Dilthey and Benedetto Croce are the most prominent advocates of the difference between history (as a Geisteswissenschaft) and the natural sciences, and Hempel’s article is naturally read as responding to them – despite the fact that he doesn’t mention them and takes, as his official target, a related view advanced by Maurice Mandelbaum. We think that the controversy about the scientific status of history goes back at least to the Enlightenment.
- 4.
Essentially, the view that has become known as “logical empiricism,” articulated by Hempel, Rudolf Carnap, Hans Reichenbach, Ernest Nagel, and Karl Popper; although there were important differences among these philosophers, all shared the following views: (1) Scientific theories are deductive systems. (2) Scientific laws are universal generalizations. (3) Laws and theories are tested by deriving from them statements that can be tested by empirical observation. (4) Scientific explanation consists in producing arguments that use general laws to derive a description of the phenomenon to be explained. It is worth noting explicitly that, despite the prominence of Hempel’s work in discussions of historical explanation, much more detailed (and more nuanced) proposals about historical explanation and the role of general laws were offered by Nagel and Morton White.
- 5.
Danto (1985, p. xi); Danto refers to the impact of the work of N.R. Hanson and, particularly, of Thomas Kuhn. We agree that Hanson, and especially Kuhn, forced a rethinking of many points that logical empiricism had taken for granted.
- 6.
- 7.
Of course, claims about aims typically constrain theses about achievements and about methods, so one shouldn’t assume that all these elements can vary independently.
- 8.
It’s no accident that we talk of the “fossil record” and the “rock record.” And, of course, one of Darwin’s most extensive defenses of his views draws an extended analogy between the sequence of organisms whose remains have been preserved and an incomplete, tattered, and defaced library (Origin of Species, Chap. IX [closing paragraph]).
- 9.
- 10.
Morgan (1988, p. 55).
- 11.
Seward (1999, p. 213).
- 12.
- 13.
Partly because of Danto’s important book and partly because of historians’ concerns about styles of history (“narrative” versus “analytic”), this has shaded into a discussion of the character of historical narratives (See, e.g., Roberts (2001), which collects many of the classic contributions). As we’ll try to make clear, we think that these disputes have been stymied because of failure to probe the broader questions about the aims of the sciences and of history.
- 14.
This thesis is named for Claude Bernard, whose study of experimental physiology and medicine is one of the classic sources of the view that the sciences aim at explanation, prediction, and control.
- 15.
As Isaac Levi pointed out to us, this list would be rejected by many philosophers in the pragmatist tradition, who would set up the issues very differently. We take the point and regard our list as emblematic of a version of logical empiricism that is antithetical to pragmatist themes and modes of formulation – a version more evident in Carnap and Hempel than in Nagel. We also believe that the view of the sciences and of history’s relations to the sciences that we elaborate below is far more akin to the pragmatist approach to scientific inquiry.
- 16.
Perhaps this is too quick, in that there are instances in which history might be credited as the ultimate source of claims, advanced by economists or political scientists who make predictions – as, for example, when they suggest that economies planned by powerful authoritarian governments have a high probability of leading to disastrous consequences for the citizenry. Moreover, as with the lines between history and other disciplines, the distinction between history and economics (or that between history and political science) may be blurred. Even if these caveats about the Impracticality thesis are correct, they will not affect the main conclusion we draw from it, for it would be hard to dispute the idea that any social scientific predictions drawn from history are obtained through the historical explanations that have been given, and this would leave intact the primacy of explanation as a goal.
- 17.
- 18.
- 19.
Thus, one of the differences among historians who try to explain the origins of the First World War consists in their specification of the congeries of events that are to count as the beginning of that war; this difference in explananda doesn’t occur when the task is to explain something like Constantine’s declaration that Christianity was to be the official religion of the Empire.
- 20.
A cabane is a mountain hut, typically occupied by several shepherds and constituting a social unit; the reference to sponsoring indicates Pierre’s involvement in Cathar religious practices; the parenthetical numerical reference is to the published version of Fournier’s inquisitorial register.
- 21.
Davis (1983, p. 5).
- 22.
As witnessed by the fact that it became a moderately successful film.
- 23.
The real Martin had apparently been impotent (Davis 1983, p. 19); things went better after Martin’s return – see ibid., p. 124.
- 24.
Davis (1983, pp. 44–46). See also ibid., p. 55, p. 61, pp. 79–80, and p. 92.
- 25.
Another famous microhistory, Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms (1980), underscores the point we make here. Ginzburg takes us into the world of peasants in the Friuli region of Italy, by focusing on a miller, Menocchio, who was tortured and executed for his heretical beliefs. Ginzburg isn’t trying to persuade us that a person previously deemed unimportant has great significance. The aim is to show us how the world appeared to people who normally get left out of histories. The same purpose could have been achieved by concentrating on a different peasant, perhaps Marcato, who came from the same town and was also executed. What distinguishes Menocchio is that we happen to know something about him. But, as the last sentence of The Cheese and the Worms tells us (Ginzburg 1980, p. 128), “About this Marcato, or Marco – and so many others like him who lived and died without a trace – we know nothing.”
- 26.
See Berkhofer (1995, pp. 31–33).
- 27.
There are other distinctive psychological changes that histories might endeavor to induce. Sometimes historians attempt to provoke a moral reaction by explaining how some contemporary institution has been deliberately designed to exclude a particular class of individuals or to detract from their welfare; a prime example is Mike Davis City of Quartz (1990), which shows how various aspects of Los Angeles were set up to make life hard for the indigent. Of course, there’s a long tradition of histories “to a moral purpose,” as well as an extensive critique of their propriety – perhaps most famously encapsulated in Ranke’s dictum; we won’t attempt to resolve the thorny issues here.
- 28.
Keegan (1978, p. 16); it’s entertaining to think that, had he read Thomas Nagel’s famous essay, Keegan might have entitled his book What Is it Like to be in Battle? Other military historians have approached the same question, particularly in the case of the First World War; see, for example, MacDonald (1978, 1980, 1983) and Ellis (1976).
- 29.
- 30.
The two problems we won’t consider are the intractability of the problem of specifying the notion of scientific law and the counterintuitive consequences of Hempel’s model of probabilistic explanation. Both troubles are presented very clearly in Salmon (1989).
- 31.
The example was originally devised by Sylvain Bromberger in the early 1960s.
- 32.
This example was introduced by Salmon in “Statistical Explanation and Statistical Relevance”; Salmon notes that an earlier example of the same type was formulated by Henry Kyburg.
- 33.
See Hexter (1971, p. 30). Hexter formulates the point a bit more carefully than we’ve done here.
- 34.
Here’s a recipe for doing so: One can give a Hempelian argument for a conclusion asserting that the Giants won any specific victory (say their 37th) by using physical laws to derive the trajectory of the winning hit; now, add the true conditional statement that if the Giants won that game, they would win the pennant.
- 35.
Hexter (1971, p. 29); see also 71, where Hexter adopts what we’ve called the Liberal Interpretation.
- 36.
- 37.
Logical empiricism was mindful of Humean strictures about causation. Some of those who have identified the need for a causal constraint – Salmon, for example – have accepted the thought that invocation of an unexplicated notion of causation is illegitimate. Interestingly, the approach that Salmon has adopted, which sees causation in terms of the transmission of conserved quantities, seems very hard to apply in the context of historical explanation.
- 38.
It should be noted that causal-historical explanation is prominent in some areas of the sciences (like the ones we’ve listed); that a different type of causal explanation (causal-mechanical explanation) is widespread in others, as, for example, in biochemistry and solid-state physics; and that there are some parts of theoretical science in which it’s something of a strain to think in causal terms (the theory of the chemical bond, sex ratio theory). See Salmon (1998).
- 39.
See Hanson (1958, p. 54). We should note that the context dependency of explanation has been thoroughly analyzed by Bas van Fraassen (1980, Chap. 5) who offers a pragmatic theory of explanation. One of us has criticized van Fraassen’s theory on the grounds that it trivializes the notion of explanation (Kitcher and Salmon 1987), but the objection would now be modified; as we’ll argue below, what counts as the right sort of causal relation to invoke in answering an explanation-seeking why-question is contextually determined, and van Fraassen was insightful in pointing this out.
- 40.
Hexter (1971, p. 35), Fig. 1. We are grateful to David Sidorsky for pointing out to us that Hexter’s account does not mention the controversy about whether the Giants were stealing the Dodgers’ signs.
- 41.
Hexter (1971, p. 30) rightly appreciates the greater naturalness of “How did it come about that …?” rather than “Why …?” in historical studies.
- 42.
The modesty comes in two ways. First, we don’t suppose that there are special entities – facts – to which true sentences correspond. Second, we don’t assume that the core notion of reference can be specified in a physicalist vocabulary (as, e.g., Field (1972) proposes). For further exploration of the position, see Kitcher (2002).
- 43.
See “On the Concept of Truth for Formalized Languages” (Tarski 1956) or any presentation of the semantics for first-order logic in a logic text. Effectively, our proposal adds to Tarski’s well-known account only the idea that the reference relation connects linguistic items with mind-independent entities.
- 44.
- 45.
- 46.
For Gibbon’s description of Theodora, see Chap. XL, part 1, of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The quoted sentence is from p.56 of volume 5 of the Oxford English Classics edition (1827).
- 47.
Famously, Oscar Wilde replied to the prosecutor who asked if his works constituted blasphemy, “That is not one of my words.”
- 48.
For detailed defense of the claim about Priestley, see Kitcher (1978).
- 49.
Seward (1999, pp. 221–262).
- 50.
See the Introduction to Ferguson (2001, especially 87) and also Hawthorn (1991).
- 51.
The most prominent philosophical account is that of David Lewis (1974), which deploys a notion of similarity across possible worlds. An obvious worry is that similarity depends on a choice of respects and degrees and that such judgments are irremediably subjective.
- 52.
For a similar assessment, see Niall Ferguson’s Introduction to his Virtual History.
- 53.
The philosopher of history who is clearest on this point is Ankersmit (1983).
- 54.
The most fully developed version of this argument appears in Laudan (1981); this essay is essentially reprinted as Chap. 5 of his Science and Values (1984).
- 55.
Some challenges have developed the “semantic conception of theories,” according to which theories are families of models; for an accessible presentation, see Giere (1988, Chaps. 3 and 4). Others have emphasized the apparently non-axiomatic structure of evolutionary biology, molecular biology, the geological sciences, and so forth; see Kitcher (1993a, Chaps. 2 and 3). Another source of trouble emerges from the powerful account of “normal science” offered in the early chapters of Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
- 56.
Kitcher (2001b, Chap. 6).
- 57.
Here, it seems to me that Rorty’s skepticism about nature’s agenda is insightful; see the introduction to Rorty (1982).
- 58.
One might worry that the issue of the natural host for the Ebola virus is a practical question. Indeed, knowing the answer might enable us to prevent future outbreaks of Ebola. Nevertheless, even if we had a surefire vaccine for this disease – and were thus unconcerned about passage of the virus to human populations – we’d still be interested in knowing where the virus originally came from.
- 59.
In some instances, of course, we might achieve an answer by developing a general theory; but even in such cases, we’d be interested in the answer whether it came as a consequence of theory or not.
- 60.
Hughes (1986).
- 61.
- 62.
- 63.
Plainly, the sciences often generate new questions that have practical significance for us. The difference we’re trying to characterize here is that, because of our background curiosity about the possible forms of human life, history has a particular way of generating new issues for us.
- 64.
- 65.
The general point can be appreciated by comparing the major works of great scientists with the books in which they summarize their views for a general audience. But there are important exceptions: the famous laconic last sentence of the Watson-Crick paper announcing the structure of DNA, some of Stephen Jay Gould’s professional articles in paleontology, and, reverting to an earlier time, Darwin’s Origin.
- 66.
See White (1973). White is quite explicit in claiming that all historical texts are structured by narratives, so the position we are recommending requires some adjustment of his views.
- 67.
Foucault (1965). Although we allude here to a common criticism of Foucault, to the effect that he’s wrong about the facts of the history of attitudes to insanity, we don’t want to take a stand in this controversy.
- 68.
See Schama (1991).
- 69.
Schama himself is quite scrupulous in this regard.
- 70.
Hobsbawm (1997, p. 272); the passage is from the essay “Identity History Is not enough.”
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Kitcher, P., Immerwahr, D. (2014). History and the Sciences. In: Kaiser, M.I., Scholz, O.R., Plenge, D., Hüttemann, A. (eds) Explanation in the Special Sciences. Synthese Library, vol 367. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7563-3_14
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