The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation

Abstract

in the ensuing pages, his work also has been determinative of my own thinking on this topic. As I told him, for many years I had taped to my computer screen a quote from him that also ultimately served as an epigraph for my paper "The Pasts": "We choose our past in the same way that we choose our future." What I often imagine myself to be doing is offering an account of why I take this to be correct by reformulating his insights as a conclusion of a type of philosophical argument.Regarding then Danto, Mink, and White, much of this book consists in efforts to knit together insights gleaned from each within an epistemological perspective forged by my readings of W. V. O. Quine and T. S. Kuhn. This allows me to answer questions regarding historical explanation debated since the nineteenth century (see Patton 2015; Dewulf 2017b).A key portion of this book originated from an invitation to develop my views by Mary Morgan and Norton Wise. I received helpful challenges and intellectual impetus as well from conversations with and questions by John Beatty and Ken Waters. As a consequence of their questions I briefly venture to discuss in chapter 4 narratives in science. However, it remained a primary goal for me to address how narrative explanation, and so histories as a form of empirical inquiry, relate to disciplines unproblematically taken to be sciences.At the very beginning of my efforts to weld some three decades of writings into a unified line of thought, Lisa Clark provided invaluable assistance, and to her I owe an immense debt. She diligently worked through a very rough early version of my manuscript with patience, intelligence, and insight. Without her editorial help and extensive suggestions, I doubt that I would have found the project doable. I can list names of only some of the many people whose feedback on one part or another of this project over the years has been of importance to me:

What is narrative possibility?

“…As mentioned elsewhere, we should ultimately think about these approaches as poles between which positions may vary. Whereas Ereshefsky and Turner (2020) count as having an epistemological view by my reading, they are less so than, for instance Roth (2020). The former are in some sense "tied to the world's structure," but certainly less so than Beatty and others.…”

“…In the latter (human historical) context, it is at least less precisely the case that what we're dealing with is straightforwardly a part of the world's causal web. As many philosophers of history (Roth 2020;Mink 1987;Goldstein 1996) have noted, historical explanation (here in the sense of explaining events in human history) involves a great deal of cognitive projection. 15 The exact sense in which this is the case will vary from author to author, but in general, the claim is that for certain kinds of narrative explanatory tasks, the explanations are very much objects of human construction.…”

“…There's been a recent uptick in interest in the notion that some scientific explanations have the form of a "narrative" (see Currie 2019;Roth 2020;Beatty 2017 for a handful of examples). In theorizing about the applications of narrative explanations, a number of interesting questions emerge.…”

Prekonávanie relativizmu v súčasnej filozofii histórie

“…Paul Roth je americký filozof, ktorý v posledných desaťročiach analyzuje epistemologické otázky histórie a formuluje originálne návrhy na uchopenie historickej práce so zámerom, aby sa vyhol tak naivnému empirizmu, ako aj radikálnemu skepticizmu. Roth je totiž presvedčený, že historické práce prinášajú poznatky a historici predkladajú zmysluplné vysvetlenia, len jeho výklad týchto vecí je špecifický (Roth 2020).…”

“…V prospech takéhoto konštruktivistického chápania Roth argumentuje aj takto. Konkrétna udalosť sa stáva udalosťou vďaka nášmu záujmu; v určitom zmysle ju konštituujú až historici v rámci ich skúmania a historických rozprávaní (Roth 2017, 404;Roth 1988;Roth 2020). Takýto názor môže vyzerať radikálne, ale Roth tu netvrdí, že nič mimo rozprávaní neexistuje, len upozorňuje, že napríklad Slovenské povstanie nie je nejaká vopred daná a jasne ohraničená udalosť, ale udalosť, ktorá v istom zmysle slova "vznikla" až vďaka tomu, že ju začali analyzovať, opisovať, vysvetľovať historici (a zrejme aj pamätníci a i.).…”