Contingency, Meaning and History

Abstract

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