Abstract
It is obvious enough to those who read what philosophers writing in English have to say about problems of history that the main focus of interest and point of contention is the nature of historical explanation. And even within that general theme, interest is confined more narrowly to the question of whether or not explanations in history rest upon general laws or theories, “covering laws” in the increasingly used term of William Dray. On the one hand, we have the view, often associated with the names of Hempel and Popper, yet including among its supporters such writers as Brodbeck and Gardiner, and actually rooted in writings earlier than those of any of these, according to which explanation must always presuppose general laws for only these can warrant an inference from one particular state of affairs to another particular state of affairs. And on the other, we have writers such as Donagan, Dray, Gallie, and Scriven offering a variety of arguments to the opposite effect, and in particular, making much of the claim that historians do indeed explain or offer explanations which are complete and reasonable, yet make no use of general laws. Some may think that the debate has grown stale and tedious, and that essentially the same arguments—though occasionally with greater subtlety—are repeated time after time. And some may deem it a matter of regret that neither side seems able to reach the other, or if you like, that neither side seems amenable to persuasion.
This paper was also published in Philosophy of Science 34 (1967) 23–40.
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References
William Dray, Laws and Explanation in History, Oxford 1957.
See the papers of Alan Donagan, W. B. Gallie and Michael Scriven in Patrick Gardiner (ed.), Theories of History, Glencoe, III., 1959.
All the italics in this paragraph are Dray’s.
Cf. May Brodbeck’s distinction between ‘language as communication’ and ‘language as description’ in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. III (1962), pp. 236ff. For a rather extreme consequence of the pre-occupation with modes of discourse, see Kai Nielsen’s assertion that the issue is about, not how historians explain, but how they use the word ‘explanation’ (in Sidney Hock (ed.), Philosophy and History, New York 1963, p. 319 ).
C. G. Hempel, ‘The Function of General Laws in History’, in Gardiner (ed.), op. cit., p. 349f.
Gardiner, The Nature of Historical Explanation, London 1952, p. 65.
Ibid., p. 87.
Ibid., p. 89; Gardiner’s italics.
Frederic William Maitland, Historian, selections from his writings (edited, with an introduction, by Robert Livingston Schuyler), Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1960, ch. 12. The editor, in his introduction to the essay, informs us that Maitland was mistaken in thinking Elizabeth was the first to use the ‘et caetera’ in this way, but this has no bearing on our point.
Ernest Nagel, ‘Determinism in History’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 20 (1960), 291–317; 303.
Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Princeton 1950, p. 448.
Michael Scriven, ‘Truisms as the Grounds for Historical Explanations’, in Gardiner (ed.), op. cit., p. 454.
Samuel H. Beer, ‘Causal Explanation and Imaginative Re-enactment’, History and Theory 3 (1963) 6–29.
Ibid., 1. The quotation of Popper is from The Poverty of Historicism, Boston 1957, p. 122; that of Hempel from op. cit., p. 345.
Morton White, ‘Historical Explanation’, in Gardiner (ed.), op. cit., pp. 356–73.
It is interesting to note that those who would elucidate the historian’s mode of discourse would also have an isolating effect upon historical work. Each narrative is treated as a totality in itself, the elucidator being concerned with what the narrator says, and why, in the particular story. This is quite explicitly affirmed by W. B. Gallie, who says: “The fact is that the kind of explanation that I claim to be characteristic of histories cannot be confirmed, or even be preferred against other possible explanations, except via the acceptability of the narrative which it enables the historian to reconstruct or resume. If the narrative has now been made consistent, plausible, and in accordance with all the evidence, if it is the best narrative that we can get, then the explanation that helped us to get it is the best explanation as yet available” (Philosophy and the Historical Understanding, London 1964, p. 124 ).
For the distinction between explaining events and justifying explanations, see the first part of the ‘Postscript’ to this paper.
N. R. Hanson, Patterns of Discovery, Cambridge 1958, p. 72; his italics.
Ibid., p. 84.
Though I do not wish to deal with it here, another important function of theory is to aid us in choosing between seemingly plausible, but not always mutually consistent, explanations of the same historical happening. Harry Eckstein - in ‘On the Etiology of Internal Wars’, History and Theory 4 (1965) 133–63–gives a striking list of explanations of the outbreak of the French Revolution (p. 137f.), and argues that only theory can enable to decide among them (pp. 139 and 163). cf. my ‘Evidence and Events in History’, Philosophy of Science 29 (1962) 175–94; 190f.
Hanson, op. cit., p. 1.
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (transí. Talcott Parsons), New York and London 1930; references will be to the third British impression, 1950.
Henri Pirenne, Mohammed and Charlemagne, London 1939 and 1954.
Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Reason Why, New York 1953. (Time Reading Program edition, 1962.)
Weber, op. cit., p. 27; italics added.
Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, Chicago 1959.
Ibid., p. 84.
Ibid., p. 89ff.
Ibid., p. 98ff.
Charles Tilly, ‘The Analysis of a Counter-Revolution’, History and Theory 3 (1963) 30–58.
Beer, op. cit., p. 10ff.
Ibid., p. 11.
Ibid.
Tilly, op. cit., p. 55.
Beer, op. cit., p. 12.
Ibid., p. 12f.
See note 24.
It is, of course, possible that the author was mainly interested in describing some aspect of 19th-century English social history, a subject she has been concerned with in other writings, and that the tragedy of the Light Brigade was only a device toward that end. But even if Mrs. Woodham-Smith was not primarily motivated to explain the tragedy, her account does in fact do so, and that is all that concerns us here.
This, of course, is only an assumption of my using it as an example.
See note 16.
Frederick J. Teggart, Theory and Processes of History, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1949, paperback ed. 1961; pp. 18–29, 51–66.
In the sense of ‘historical’ as that which pertains to the discipline of history, not the course of human events. Only the former sense of ‘history’ is of concern in this paper. Even if there is every reason to believe that a certain proposition about a past event is true because its character as divine revelation is beyond doubt, that proposition would not be historical in the former sense. Similarly, statements I make about my own past because I remember this or that - say, what I had for breakfast this morning - are not historical in the given sense either. Neither of these kinds of statement is established in the historical way.
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© 1969 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Goldstein, L.J. (1969). Theory in History. In: Cohen, R.S., Wartofsky, M.W. (eds) Proceedings of the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science 1966/1968. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-3378-7_11
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