The traditions of empiricism and Anglo-American philosophy have also
devoted occasional attention to history. Philosophers in this tradition have
avoided the questions of speculative philosophy of history and have instead
raised questions about the logic and epistemology of historical knowledge. Here
the guiding question is, “What are the logical and epistemological
characteristics of historical knowledge and historical explanation?”
David Hume's empiricism cast a dominant key for almost all subsequent
Anglo-American philosophy, and this influence extends to the interpretation of
human behaviour and the human sciences. Hume wrote a widely read history of
England . His interpretation of history was based on the assumption of ordinary
actions, motives, and causes, with no sympathy for theological interpretations
of the past. His philosophical view of history was premised on the idea that
explanations of the past can be based on the assumption of a fixed human
nature.
Anglo-American interest in the philosophy of history was renewed at
mid-twentieth century with the emergence of “analytical philosophy of history.”
Representative contributors include Dray, Danto , and Gardiner. This approach
involves the application of the methods and tools of analytic philosophy to the
special problems that arise in the pursuit of historical explanations and
historical knowledge. Here the interest is in the characteristics of historical
knowledge: how we know facts about the past, what constitutes a good historical
explanation, whether explanations in history require general laws, and whether
historical knowledge is underdetermined by available historical evidence.
Analytic philosophers emphasized the empirical and scientific status of historical
knowledge, and attempted to understand this claim along the lines of the
scientific standing of the natural sciences.
Philosophers in the analytic tradition are deeply skeptical about the
power of non-empirical reason to arrive at substantive conclusions about the
structure of the world—including human history. Philosophical reasoning by
itself cannot be a source of substantive knowledge about the natural world, or
about the sequence of events, actions, states, classes, empires, plagues, and
conquests that we call “history.” Rather, substantive knowledge about the world
can only derive from empirical investigation and logical analysis of the
consequences of these findings. So analytic philosophers of history have had
little interest in the large questions about the meaning and structure of
history already considered. The practitioners of speculative philosophy of
history, on the other hand, are convinced of the power of philosophical thought
to reason through to a foundational understanding of history, and would be
impatient with a call for a purely empirical and conceptual approach to the
subject.
W. H. Walsh’s Philosophy of History, is an open-minded and well grounded
effort to provide an in-depth presentation of the field that crosses the
separation between continental and analytical philosophy. The book attempts to
treat both major questions driving much of the philosophy of history: the
nature of historical knowledge and the possibility of gaining “metaphysical”
knowledge about history. An Oxford philosopher trained in modern philosophy,
Walsh was strongly influenced by Collingwood and was well aware of the European
idealist tradition of philosophical thinking about history, including Rickert,
Dilthey, and Croce, and he treats this tradition in a serious way. He draws the
distinction between these traditions along the lines of “critical” and
“speculative” philosophy of history. Walsh’s goal for the book is ambitious; he
hopes to propose a framework within which the main questions about history can
be addressed, including both major traditions. He advances the view that the
historian is presented with a number of events, actions, and developments
during a period. How do they hang together? The process of cognition through
which the historian makes sense of a set of separate historical events, Walsh
refers to as “colligation” — “to locate a historical event in a larger
historical process in terms of which it makes sense” .
Walsh fundamentally accepts Collingwood's most basic premise: that
history concerns conscious human action. Collingwood's slogan was that “history
is the science of the mind,” and Walsh appears to accept much of this
perspective. So, the key intellectual task for the historian, on this approach,
is to reconstruct the reasons or motives that actors had at various points in
history (and perhaps the conditions that led them to have these reasons and
motives). This means that the tools of interpretation of meanings and reasons
are crucial for the historian—much as the hermeneutic philosophers in the
German tradition had argued.
Walsh suggests that the philosophical content of the philosophy of
history falls naturally into two different sorts of inquiry, parallel to the
distinction between philosophy of nature and philosophy of science. The first
has to do with metaphysical questions about the reality of history as a whole;
the latter has to do with the epistemic issues that arise in the pursuit and
formulation of knowledge of history. He refers to these approaches as
“speculative” and “critical” aspects of the philosophy of history. And he
attempts to formulate a view of what the key questions are for each approach.
Speculative philosophy of history asks about the meaning and purpose of the
historical process. Critical philosophy of history is what we now refer to as
“analytic” philosophy; it is the equivalent for history of what the philosophy
of science is for nature.
General laws in history?
The philosopher of science Carl Hempel stimulated analytic philosophers'
interest in historical knowledge in his essay, “The Function of General Laws in
History” (1942). Hempel's general theory of scientific explanation held that
all scientific explanations require subsumption under general laws. Hempel
considered historical explanation as an apparent exception to the covering-law
model and attempted to show the suitability of the covering-law model even to
this special case. He argued that valid historical explanations too must invoke
general laws. The covering-law approach to historical explanation was supported
by other analytical philosophers of science, including Ernest Nagel. Hempel's
essay provoked a prolonged controversy between supporters who cited
generalizations about human behaviour as the relevant general laws, and critics
who argued that historical explanations are more akin to explanations of
individual behaviour, based on interpretation that makes the outcome
comprehensible. Especially important discussions were offered by William Dray ,
Michael Scriven and Alan Donagan. Donagan and others pointed out the difficulty
that many social explanations depend on probabilistic regularities rather than
universal laws. Others, including Scriven, pointed out the pragmatic features
of explanation, suggesting that arguments that fall far short of deductive
validity are nonetheless sufficient to “explain” a given historical event in a
given context of belief. The most fundamental objections, however, are these:
first, that there are virtually no good examples of universal laws in history,
whether of human behaviour or of historical event succession; and second, that
there are other compelling schemata through which we can understand historical
actions and outcomes that do not involve subsumption under general laws. These
include the processes of reasoning through which we understand individual
actions—analogous to the methods of verstehen and the interpretation of
rational behavior mentioned above ; and the processes through which we can
trace out chains of causation and specific causal mechanisms without invoking
universal laws.
A careful re-reading of these debates over the covering-law model in
history suggests that the debate took place largely because of the erroneous
assumption of the unity of science and the postulation of the regulative
logical similarity of all areas of scientific reasoning to a few clear examples
of explanation in a few natural sciences. This approach was a deeply
impoverished one, and handicapped from the start in its ability to pose
genuinely important questions about the nature of history and historical
knowledge. Explanation of human actions and outcomes should not be understood
along the lines of an explanation of why radiators burst when the temperature
falls below zero degrees centigrade. As Donagan concludes, “It is harmful to
overlook the fundamental identity of the social sciences with history, and to
mutilate research into human affairs by remodeling the social sciences into
deformed likenesses of physics.” The insistence on naturalistic models for
social and historical research leads easily to a presumption in favour of the
covering-law model of explanation, but this presumption is misleading.
Historical objectivity
Another issue that provoked significant attention among analytic
philosophers of history is the issue of “objectivity.” Is it possible for
historical knowledge to objectively represent the past? Or are forms of bias,
omission, selection, and interpretation such as to make all historical
representations dependent on the perspective of the individual historian? Does
the fact that human actions are value-laden make it impossible for the
historian to provide a non-value-laden account of those actions?
This topic divides into several different problems, as noted by John
Passmore. The most studied of these within the analytic tradition is that of
the value-ladenness of social action. Second is the possibility that the
historian's interpretations are themselves value-laden—raising the question of
the capacity for objectivity or neutrality of the historian herself. Does the
intellectual have the ability to investigate the world without regard to the
biases that are built into her political or ethical beliefs, her ideology, or
her commitments to a class or a social group? And third is the question of the
objectivity of the historical circumstances themselves. Is there a fixed
historical reality, independent from later representations of the facts? Or is
history intrinsically “constructed,” with no objective reality independent from
the ways in which it is constructed? Is there a reality corresponding to the
phrase, “the French Revolution,” or is there simply an accumulation of written
versions of the French Revolution?
There are solutions to each of these problems that are highly consonant
with the philosophical assumptions of the analytic tradition. First, concerning
values: There is no fundamental difficulty in reconciling the idea of a
researcher with one set of religious values, who nonetheless carefully traces
out the religious values of a historical actor possessing radically different
values. This research can be done badly, of course; but there is no inherent
epistemic barrier that makes it impossible for the researcher to examine the
body of statements, behaviours, and contemporary cultural institutions
corresponding to the other, and to come to a justified representation of the
other. One need not share the values or worldview of a sans-culotte, in order
to arrive at a justified appraisal of those values and worldview. This leads us
to a resolution of the second issue as well—the possibility of neutrality on
the part of the researcher. The set of epistemic values that we impart to
scientists and historians include the value of intellectual discipline and a
willingness to subject their hypotheses to the test of uncomfortable facts.
Once again, review of the history of science and historical writing makes it
apparent that this intellectual value has effect. There are plentiful examples
of scientists and historians whose conclusions are guided by their
interrogation of the evidence rather than their ideological presuppositions.
Objectivity in pursuit of truth is itself a value, and one that can be
followed.
Finally, on the question of the objectivity of the past: Is there a
basis for saying that events or circumstances in the past have objective, fixed
characteristics that are independent from our representation of those events?
Is there a representation-independent reality underlying the large historical
structures to which historians commonly refer (the Roman Empire, the Great Wall
of China, the imperial administration of the Qianlong Emperor)? We can work our
way carefully through this issue, by recognizing a distinction between the
objectivity of past events, actions and circumstances, the objectivity of the
contemporary facts that resulted from these past events, and the objectivity
and fixity of large historical entities. The past occurred in precisely the way
that it did—agents acted, droughts occurred, armies were defeated, new
technologies were invented. These occurrences left traces of varying degrees of
information richness; and these traces give us a rational basis for arriving at
beliefs about the occurrences of the past. So we can offer a non-controversial
interpretation of the “objectivity of the past.” However, this objectivity of
events and occurrences does not extend very far upward as we consider more
abstract historical events: the creation of the Greek city-state, the invention
of Enlightenment rationality, the Taiping Rebellion. In each of these instances
the noun's referent is an interpretive construction by historical actors and
historians, and one that may be undone by future historians. To refer to the
“Taiping Rebellion” requires an act of synthesis of a large number of
historical facts, along with an interpretive story that draws these facts
together in this way rather than that way. The underlying facts of behaviour,
and their historical traces, remain; but the knitting-together of these facts
into a large historical event does not constitute an objective historical
entity. Consider research in the past twenty years that questions the existence
of the “Industrial Revolution.” In this debate, the same set of historical
facts were first constructed into an abrupt episode of qualitative change in
technology and output in Western Europe; under the more recent interpretation,
these changes were more gradual and less correctly characterized as a “revolution”
. Or consider Arthur Waldron's sustained and detailed argument to the effect
that there was no “Great Wall of China,” as that structure is usually
conceptualized.
Causation in history
A third important set of issues that received attention from analytic
philosophers concerned the role of causal ascriptions in historical
explanations. What is involved in saying that “The American Civil War was
caused by economic conflict between the North and the South”? Does causal
ascription require identifying an underlying causal regularity—for example,
“periods of rapid inflation cause political instability”? Is causation
established by discovering a set of necessary and sufficient conditions? Can we
identify causal connections among historical events by tracing a series of
causal mechanisms linking one to the next? This topic raises the related
problem of determinism in history: are certain events inevitable in the
circumstances? Was the fall of the Roman Empire inevitable, given the
configuration of military and material circumstances prior to the crucial
events?
Analytic philosophers of history most commonly approached these issues
on the basis of a theory of causation drawn from positivist philosophy of
science. This theory is ultimately grounded in Humean assumptions about
causation: that causation is nothing but constant conjunction. So analytic
philosophers were drawn to the covering-law model of explanation, because it
appeared to provide a basis for asserting historical causation. As noted above,
this approach to causal explanation is fatally flawed in the social sciences,
because universal causal regularities among social phenomena are unavailable.
So it is necessary either to arrive at other interpretations of causality or to
abandon the language of causality. A second approach was to define causes in
terms of a set of causally relevant conditions for the occurrence of the
event—for example, necessary and/or sufficient conditions, or a set of
conditions that enhance or reduce the likelihood of the event. This approach
found support in “ordinary language” philosophy and in analysis of the use of
causal language in such contexts as the courtroom . Counterfactual reasoning is
an important element of discovery of a set of necessary and/or sufficient
conditions; to say that C was necessary for the occurrence of E requires that
we provide evidence that E would not have occurred if C were not present . And
it is evident that there are causal circumstances in which no single factor is
necessary for the occurrence of the effect; the outcome may be overdetermined
by multiple independent factors.
The convergence of reasons and causes in historical processes is helpful
in this context, because historical causes are frequently the effect of
deliberate human action . So specifying the reason for the action is
simultaneously identifying a part of the cause of the consequences of the
action. It is often justifiable to identify a concrete action as the cause of a
particular event (a circumstance that was sufficient in the existing
circumstances to bring about the outcome), and it is feasible to provide a
convincing interpretation of the reasons that led the actor to carry out the
action.
What analytic philosophers of the 1960s did not come to, but what is
crucial for current understanding of historical causality, is the feasibility
of tracing causal mechanisms through a complex series of events (causal
realism). Historical narratives often take the form of an account of a series
of events, each of which was a causal condition or trigger for later events.
Subsequent research in the philosophy of the social sciences has provided
substantial support for historical explanations that depend on tracing a series
of causal mechanisms.
Recent topics in the philosophy of history
English-speaking philosophy of history shifted significantly in the
1970s, beginning with the publication of Hayden White's Metahistory (1973) and
Louis Mink's writings of the same period (1966; Mink et al. 1987). The
so-called “linguistic turn” that marked many areas of philosophy and literature
also influenced the philosophy of history. Whereas analytic philosophy of
history had emphasized scientific analogies for historical knowledge and
advanced the goals of verifiability and generalizability in historical knowledge,
English-speaking philosophers in the 1970s and 1980s were increasingly
influenced by hermeneutic philosophy, post-modernism, and French literary
theory. These philosophers emphasized the rhetoric of historical writing, the
non-reducibility of historical narrative to a sequence of “facts”, and the
degree of construction that is involved in historical representation.
Affinities with literature and anthropology came to eclipse examples from the
natural sciences as guides for representing historical knowledge and historical
understanding. The richness and texture of the historical narrative came in for
greater attention than the attempt to provide causal explanations of historical
outcomes. Frank Ankersmit captured many of these themes in his treatment of
historical narrative (1995; Ankersmit and Kellner 1995).
This “new” philosophy of history is distinguished from analytic
philosophy of history in several important respects. It emphasizes historical
narrative rather than historical causation. It is intellectually closer to the
hermeneutic tradition than to the positivism that underlay the analytic
philosophy of history of the 1960s. It highlights features of subjectivity and
multiple interpretation over those of objectivity, truth, and correspondence to
the facts. Another important strand in this approach to the philosophy of
history is a clear theoretical preference for the historicist rather than the
universalist position on the status of human nature—Herder rather than Vico.
The prevalent perspective holds that human consciousness is itself a historical
product, and that it is an important part of the historian's work to piece
together the mentality and assumptions of actors in the past. Significantly,
contemporary historians have turned to
the tools of ethnography to permit this sort of discovery.
Another important strand of thinking within analytic philosophy has
focused attention on historical ontology . The topic of historical ontology is
important, both for philosophers and for practicing historians. Ontology has to
do with the question, what kinds of things do we need to postulate in a given
realm? Historical ontology poses this question with regard to the realities of
the past. Should large constructs like ‘revolution’, ‘market society’, ‘fascism’,
or ‘Protestant religious identity’ be included in our ontology as real things?
Or should we treat these ideas in a purely nominalistic way, treating them as
convenient ways of aggregating complex patterns of social action and knowledge
by large numbers of social actors in a time and place? Further, how should we
think about the relationship between instances and categories in the realm of
history, for example, the relation between the French, Chinese, or Russian
Revolutions and the general category of ‘revolution’? Are there social kinds
that recur in history, or is each historical formation unique in important
ways? These are all questions of ontology, and the answers we give to them will
have important consequences for how we conceptualize and explain the past.
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