Historical Explanation and Causation
The philosophical analysis of what it means to explain past events and to attribute causes to them, including the long dispute over whether history relies on general laws.
Definition
Historical explanation and causation concern the logical form and epistemic basis of accounts that say why past events happened, and the criteria by which historians single out some conditions as the causes of an outcome.
Scope
This topic covers competing accounts of explanation in history: the covering-law model that assimilates history to the natural sciences, the rival view that historical understanding is rational explanation of agents' reasons, and debates over causal selection, counterfactuals, contingency, and the role of narrative in conferring explanatory coherence.
Core questions
- Does explaining a historical event require appeal to general laws?
- How is explaining a human action different from explaining a natural event?
- How do historians decide which of many conditions to call 'the cause'?
- What role do counterfactuals and contingency play in causal claims about the past?
Key theories
- Covering-law model
- Hempel held that to explain an event is to show it was to be expected given general laws and antecedent conditions, so historical explanations implicitly rest on the same logic as scientific ones.
- Rational explanation of action
- Dray, developing Collingwood, argued that historians explain actions by reconstructing the reasoning that made them appropriate to the agent, a mode of understanding not reducible to subsumption under laws.
History
The modern debate was set off by Hempel's 1942 essay applying the deductive-nomological model to history, which provoked decades of response. Dray, Collingwood, and others defended the autonomy of historical understanding, and later philosophers reframed the issue around causal selection, narrative explanation, and the epistemology of evidence.
Debates
- Laws versus reasons
- The central dispute is whether historical explanation is fundamentally nomological, requiring general laws, or whether explaining human action by reconstructing reasons is a distinct and legitimate explanatory form.
- Causal selection and contingency
- Historians and philosophers disagree about how to choose the relevant cause among many necessary conditions and about how much weight to give contingency and counterfactual reasoning.
Key figures
- Carl Hempel
- William Dray
- R. G. Collingwood
- Michael Oakeshott
- Aviezer Tucker
Related topics
Seminal works
- hempel1942
- dray1957
- collingwood1946
Frequently asked questions
- What is the covering-law model of historical explanation?
- It is Hempel's view that a historical event is explained by showing it follows from general laws together with the relevant initial conditions, just as in the natural sciences.
- Why do some philosophers reject covering laws in history?
- Because they hold that historians mainly explain human actions by reconstructing the agents' reasons, a kind of rational understanding that does not require subsuming events under general laws.