A Comment on the Possible Worlds of Climo and Howells

Hurst, Beth

doi:10.2307/2504672

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“…(Climo and Howells 1976). Critics pointed out that it is impossible to assess historical counterfactuals (Hurst 1979). 12 Much of contemporary hostility to the very idea of "reduction" is actually directed against positivist ontological and epistemic interlevel reduction.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Scientific Historiography Revisited: An Essay on the Metaphysics and Epistemology of History

Tucker¹

1998

Dialogue

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RESUME: Lapragmatique et la semantique de I'historiographie revelent une fragmentation croissante qui s'etendpar-dela les ecoles jusqu aux historiens individuels. Alors que les scientifiques normalisent les donneespour qu'elles s'ajustent aux theories, les historiens interpretent lews theories, de manieres incompatibles entre elles, pour qu'elles s'ajustent aux differents cas historiques. Les difficultes qui en decoulent dans la communication historiographique remettent en cause les philosophies hermeneutiques de I'historiographie et redonnent un nouvel interet a la question d'une historiographie scientifique. Mais les reponses existantes sont philosophiquement obsoletes. Une facon de reformuler le probleme est de partir de la complexite du chaos et de I'unicite de I'histoire. Seule la science peut evaluer si les proprietes d'un domaine donne en interdisent une approche scientifique. Or la science s'etend par reductions methodologiques explicatives, en ramenant des proprietes d'evenements complexes, chaotiques et uniques, qui sont familieres, mais d'un niveau plus eleve, a des proprietes ou interrelations non familieres et d'un niveau moins eleve. La culture disciplinaire de I'historiographie, cependant, empeche le developpement par essais et erreurs de telles tentatives de reductions scientifiques, qui seules permettraient d'evaluer lespossibilites d'une historiographie scientifique, laquelle, dans la situation presente, releve de la science-fiction.

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Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Scientific Historiography Revisited: An Essay on the Metaphysics and Epistemology of History

Tucker¹

1998

Dialogue

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Contingency, Meaning and History

Blom¹,

Nijhuis²

1989

Philosophica

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What is historical explanation? Grossly simplifying, we can distinguish two types of answers to this question. One is associated with the analytical tradition, rooted in the Anglo-Saxon world. The other is related to the 'historicist' or 'narrativist' tradition, stemming mainly from the Continent.Post-war, analytical philosophy of history has been under the spell -for better or worse -of Hempel's deductive-nomological model of explanation. According to Hempel, an ideal explanation consists in the correct deduction of the explanandum from one or more general empirical laws and certain antecedent con-ditions. From the outset, historians were agreed that this model, relabeled the 'Covering Law Model' (eLM) by Dray, was inaccurate for historiography. Time and again they objected that CLM's requirements for scientific explanation were too strict for the science of history. The alternative models of explanation advocated by Mackie, Dray, Von Wright, Danto, and others, can be considered as so many attempts to loosen the requirements of Hempel's criteria for scientific explanation. By formulating an 'inductive-statistical' model of explanation', Hempel himself had already given an idea of what a less strict explanation scheme could look like. l Mackie's INUS model took some additional steps to Illeet historiographical" practice by abandoning the requirement that an explanation must be 'sufficient': for an historical explanation, indicating the necessary conditions of the explanandum event will do. In Dray's 'rational explanation', the required empirical law was replaced by a normative principle of action. Finally, Von Wright's 'teleological' model of explanation focused on the actor's motives, which return in his 'practical syllogism' as premises of an explanatory argument.\-vhatever the differences between these models, they are all alike in at least one essential aspect: They view explanations as

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A Comment on the Possible Worlds of Climo and Howells

Cited by 2 publications

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Scientific Historiography Revisited: An Essay on the Metaphysics and Epistemology of History

Scientific Historiography Revisited: An Essay on the Metaphysics and Epistemology of History

Contingency, Meaning and History

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