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Narratives, mechanisms and progress in historical science

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Abstract

Geologists, Paleontologists and other historical scientists are frequently concerned with narrative explanations targeting single cases. I show that two distinct explanatory strategies are employed in narratives, simple and complex. A simple narrative has minimal causal detail and is embedded in a regularity, whereas a complex narrative is more detailed and not embedded. The distinction is illustrated through two case studies: the ‘snowball earth’ explanation of Neoproterozoic glaciation and recent attempts to explain gigantism in Sauropods. This distinction is revelatory of historical science. I argue that at least sometimes which strategy is appropriate is not a pragmatic issue, but turns on the nature of the target. Moreover, the distinction reveals a counterintuitive pattern of progress in some historical explanation: shifting from simple to complex. Sometimes, historical scientists rightly abandon simple, unified explanations in favour of disunified, complex narratives. Finally I compare narrative and mechanistic explanation, arguing that mechanistic approaches are inappropriate for complex narrative explanations.

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Notes

  1. For example, Kitcher (1993); Hempel (1965) and Hull (1975) appear to agree that historical enquiry is primarily narrative.

  2. Glennan (2010) employs ‘realism’ as contrasting from explanatory pluralism. This term is not ideal, as explanatory pluralists are certainly realists about explanations when compared to, say, van Fraassen’s (1980) pragmatic view.

  3. I speak in terms of past events, but historical enquiry also covers historical processes, entities and states of affairs. The claims made about events carry over to these other targets. I am happy for a large variety of causal explanations to count as narrative. The contrast is between those which target particular events or patterns, and those which target regularities. A geologist might explain particular snowball events, or explain why the dynamics of atmosphere, icepack, and so on, operate as they do. The former is narrative, the latter is not.

  4. Turner’s (2005, 2007) I skepticism regarding the epistemic potential of historical science is in part due to underestimating the role explanation can play in confirmation—but such discussion is for a different paper.

  5. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for stressing the importance of this kind of distinction.

  6. One way of thinking about simplicity is in terms of the informativeness of the explanans. Low detail explanations have explanans which contain a lot of information qua the explanandum—and so few are required. High detail explanations have explanans which are not as informative, and so more are required for sufficiency (thanks to Arnon Levy for suggesting this).

  7. Some anti-reductionsts, following Putnam (1988), claim that we ought to prefer the geometric explanation of a square peg not fitting into a round hole (which refers to the squareness of the peg and the roundness of the hole) at least as much, if not more, than the physical explanation (which refers to their constitutive properties). Although these philosophers agree with pluralists that high-level explanations are suitable, they part with them in their monism. The pluralist claims that either the geometric or physical explanation is suitable, while the anti-reductionist claims that the geometric explanation is the best.

  8. One way of precisifying this arugment involves putting forward a view on explanatory relevance (see Craver 2007, chap. 4 and Strevens 2008, chap. 7 for examples). An account of explanatory relevance tells us information which, of all the information pertaining to the expanandum, ought to be included in an explanation. If the diffuse explanans of the explanation of sauropod gigantism I have presented turn out to be explanatorily relevant, then decreasing detail by omitting those aspects would make for a worse explanation.

  9. Thanks to an anonymous referee for pushing me on this.

  10. One way of making this suggestion more formal would be to draw on Strevens’ (2003, also see Colyvan (2005) for a succinct summary) discussion of the emergence of simple macro-level systems out of complex micro-level systems. It may be that (qua size increase) Fossa populations expressed the right kind of consistency on the micro-level to be capturable by a simple theory on the macro level, while sauropod populations did not.

  11. There is much more discussion to be had about the role of idealizations in mechanistic explanation, and in the relationship between the systems tradition and so-called ‘model-based’ explanations (Weisberg 2007; Godfrey-Smith 2009) in ecology, economics and (by my lights) historical science (see Matthewson and Calcott 2011; Levy (in prep); Levy & Bechtel (2013) for a good start).

  12. The importance of regularities to mechanistic explanation, which backdrops this discussion, is not an issue I have space to delve into here. Anderson (2012) presents and defends a much broader conception of ‘regularity’ which allows for increased contingency within mechanisms. However, she still denies that unique causal chains (which complex narratives paradigmatically target) could count as the target of mechanistic explanation.

  13. I’m grateful to an anonymous referee for helping me bring this point out.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Zoe Drayson, Daniel Nolan, Brett Calcott, Kim Sterelny, Arnon Levy, Gladys Kostyrka and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. This paper has been presented in various forms to the philosophy departments of ANU and Sydney University, as well as at the 2012 PSA conference—I am grateful for the feedback received there.

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Correspondence to Adrian Mitchell Currie.

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Currie, A.M. Narratives, mechanisms and progress in historical science. Synthese 191, 1163–1183 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-013-0317-x

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