An updated philosophy of
history would be useful.. Any area of philosophy is driven by a few central
puzzles. In the area of the philosophy of history, the most fundamental
questions remain unresolved: What is the
nature of the reality of historical structures and entities (states, empires,
religious movements, social classes)?
Can we provide a conception of historical and social entities that
avoids the error of reification but gives some credible reality to the entities
that are postulated? What is the nature
of causal influence among historical events or structures that underwrites
historical explanations? Historical causation is not analogous to natural
necessity in the domain of physical causation, because there are no fixed laws
that govern historical events. So, we need to provide an account of the nature
of the causal powers that historical factors are postulated to have. What role does the interpretation of the
“lived experience” of past actors play in historical understanding, and how
does the historian arrive at justified statements about this lived experience?
Is it possible to arrive at justified interpretations of long-dead actors,
their mentalities and their actions? How does this phenomenological reality
play into the account of historical causation? Can we give an estimate of the overall
confidence we can have about statements about the past, about the features of
past institutions, structures, and actors, and about the explanatory relations
among them? Or does all historical knowledge remain permanently questionable?
A new philosophy of history
will shed light on these fundamental issues. It will engage with the
hermeneutic and narrativist currents that have been important in the European tradition and have arisen in recent years in
Anglo-American philosophy. It will incorporate the rigorous epistemic emphasis
that is associated with analytic philosophy of history, but will separate
itself from the restrictive assumptions of positivism. A new philosophy of
history will grapple with issues of social explanation that have been so important
for the current generation of social-science historians and will incorporate
the best current understandings of the philosophy of social science about
social ontology and explanation.
A handful of ontological
assumptions can be offered. History consists of human actions within humanly
embodied institutions and structures. There is no super-human agency in
history. There is no super-human meaning or progress in history; there is only
a series of events and processes driven by concrete causal processes and
individual actions.There is no inconsistency between reasons and causes,
understanding and explanation. Historical explanation depends on both
causal-structural reasoning and interpretation of actions and intentions; so it
is both causal and hermeneutic. There are no causal laws or universal
generalizations within human affairs. However, there is such a thing as social
causation, proceeding through the workings of human agency and the constraints
of institutions and structures. A legitimate historiographical goal is to
identify causal mechanisms within historical processes, and these mechanisms
invariably depend on the actions of historical actors situated within concrete
social relations.
Likewise, a basic epistemology
of historical knowledge can be described. Historical knowledge depends on
ordinary procedures of empirical investigation, and the justification of
historical claims depends on providing convincing demonstration of the
empirical evidence that exists to support or invalidate the claim. There is
such a thing as historical objectivity, in the sense that historians are
capable of engaging in good-faith interrogation of the evidence in constructing
their theories of the past. But this should not be understood to imply that
there is one uniquely true interpretation of historical processes and events.
Rather, there is a perfectly ordinary sense in which historical interpretations
are underdetermined by the facts, and there are multiple legitimate historical
questions to pose about the same body of evidence. Historical narratives have a
substantial interpretive component, and involve substantial construction of the
past.
Finally, a new philosophy of
history will be sensitive to the variety of forms of presentation of historical
knowledge. The discipline of history consists of many threads, including causal
explanation, material description, and narrative interpretation of human
action. Historical narrative itself has several aspects: a hermeneutic story
that makes sense of a complicated set of actions by different actors, but also
a causal story conveying a set of causal mechanisms that came together to bring
about an outcome. But even more importantly, not all historical knowledge is
expressed in narratives. Rather, there is a range of cognitive structures
through which historical knowledge is expressed, from detailed measurement of
historical standards of living, to causal arguments about population change, to
comparative historical accounts of similar processes in different historical
settings. A new philosophy of history will take the measure of synchronous
historical writing; historical writing that conveys a changing set of economic
or structural circumstances; writing that observes the changing characteristics
of a set of institutions; writing that records and analyzes a changing set of
beliefs and attitudes in a population; and many other varieties as well. These
are important features of the structure of historical knowledge, not simply
aspects of the rhetoric of historical writing.
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