theory, it cannot be

applied with any plausibility to the field of history.

The most striking thing about history is that the facts it
purports to describe are past facts; and past facts are no longer
accessible to direct inspection. We cannot, in a word, test the
accuracy of historical statements by simply seeing whether they
correspond to a reality which is independently known. How
then can we test them? The answer which any practising
historian would give to this question would be that we do so
by referring to historical evidence. Although the past is
not accessible to direct inspection it has left ample traces of
itself in the present, in the shape of documents, buildings,
coins, institutions, procedures and so forth. And it is upon
these that any self-respecting historian builds his
reconstruction of it: every assertion the historian makes, he would
say, must be supported by some sort of evidence, direct or
indirect. So-called historical statements which rest on any
other basis (for example, on the historian's unaided
imagination) should be given no credence. At their best

of theory and the constraints of evidence. There is an important difference between

theory (and, more generally, the ideas of historians in the present) influencing the
evidence and theory determining the evidence. There are still words on the pages of
documents from the past, and any description of the past, any theory proposed, must
make sense of these words, at least of most of them. In this way, the evidence constrains
the descriptive process. The description cannot be pure construction, nor is it entirely
determined by factors in the present. But the issue for philosophy of historiography
is to precisely determine how, and how much, the historical evidence constrains
the historiographic description. Theory influences evidence, but it does not completely
determine it. And evidence influences theory, but it does not completely determine it.
Somewhere in the vague reciprocal relation is the precise description of the structure
of historiographic knowledge of history.
This structural issue can be linked to a central concern in more general epistemo-
logy, a contrast between foundational and coherence models of justification. The need
to interpret evidence makes it implausible to regard it as epistemically foundational.
The evidence can only justify a theory if the evidence has been justified. But even in a
coherence model of justification there are important constraints. The lack of founda-
tions does not mean anything goes. The challenge, in epistemology as in philosophy
of historiography, is to specify the role of evidence, giving it the appropriate epistemic
and informational authority to increase the likelihood of accuracy.
When coherence is used as an epistemic virtue, broader coherence is better. This has
a social manifestation in that broad agreement on some historical description is some
reason to think it is accurate. Peer review, the academic version of public justification,
enforces a coherence within a network of generally accepted ideas. But this agreement
may have been, in some cases, built in and reinforced by uniformity in education. To
convince your peers is to convince those who were trained as you were. Broader coher-
ence, and hence more justification, would be in convincing a larger society, your close
peers, that is, your theoretical allies, and those outside your school of thought. Better
yet is to write genuinely enduring descriptions of the past that will be agreeable to future
schools of thought. This is real inter-theoretic coherence. The idea is to avoid, as best
we can, the narrow, teleological, and parochial point of view, such as the Whiggish
point of view, that leads to inaccuracy.
The underlying proposal here is that objectivity in historiography is to be found, at
least in part, in intersubjectivity. Justification of historiographic descriptions is, at least
in an important part, a matter of informed agreement.
Explanation and Understanding
There is more to historiography than simply describing the human past; it is possible
to explain it as well. In addition to knowing what happened, we can try to understand
22philosophy of historiography
what happened. This raises the question of the nature of historiographic explanation,
and again, the comparison to science is a common and informative approach. It is import-
ant to note though, that scientific explanation is not so clearly understood itself, and
there is much disagreement and debate within the philosophy of science regarding the
structure, content and epistemic status of explanation.
Carl Hempel (1942), a pioneer in the study of scientific explanation, proposed a straight-
forward application of what he took to be the basic scientific model to explanations in
historiography. This is the covering law model of explanation, so-called because an event
or recurring phenomenon is explained by showing that is an instance of a general law,
that is, it is covered by the law. For example, a helium balloon rises in air. This is explained
by citing the law of buoyancy, along with the specific conditions of the case that show
it to be covered by the law. The weight of the balloon is less than the weight of the
same volume of air, and the buoyant force is equal to the weight of the displaced fluid,
so the net force is up. This is, by Hempel’s account, a paradigm scientific example.
It requires a law of nature.
In many cases, the specific conditions are unstated. Why does the balloon rise?
Buoyancy. In some cases, the law itself is unstated. Why does the balloon rise?
Because it weighs less than the air it displaces. The law is unstated, but it is nonethe-
less at work as a premise in the argument. Sometimes the law is statistical, and not
surprisingly, these cases are trickier. Why did this atom radioactively decay? Because
of the laws of weak-nuclear forces. But this other identical atom has not decayed. The
law in this case is inherently probabilistic, but it is still a necessary component of the
explanation.
The question is whether historical events and phenomena can be, or should be,
explained this way, by citing the law that covers the instance. Examples of covering
law explanations are easy to find in science. They are much harder to find in historio-
graphy, and those that are suggested often seem forced and artificially reconstructed
to fit the form of covering law. This is because laws of human behavior are scarce,
perhaps nonexistent. Insofar as historical events are unique, there will be no laws to
cover them. But the uniqueness is itself an issue. There was only one Peloponnesean
War, but there have been many wars. Important descriptive words are used to cover
a variety of cases, otherwise we would never understand what was being said of the
past, and that invites generalization.
But not all generalizations are laws. Some generalizations are merely analytic. All
revolutions bring about wholesale change. Sure enough, but this is simply expanding
on the definition of “revolution.” It is not a law, and it cannot explain anything. Why
were there such dramatic changes in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century?
Because it was a revolution. That simply restates the question.
Some generalizations express merely contingent repetition. These are not laws
either. All Presidents of the United States have been male. True, but this generaliza-
tion doesn’t explain why Chester A. Arthur was male.
Laws, in addition to being generalizations, invoke necessity. It’s not just that all As
are B; it’s that all As must be B. So using the covering law model of explanation must
assume some important aspects of necessity in human action and some essential
aspects of human nature. It precludes the possibility and ability to explain some event
in terms of its uniqueness. It ignores any explanatory value in the idiosyncratic
23peter kosso
aspects of human behavior, and it disregards the efficacy and importance of human
agency.
As an alternative to covering law explanation, it is proposed that narrative itself is
a kind of explanation, and that narrative is the only form of explanation suitable to
history. Narrative makes no assumptions about laws of human behavior or essential
human nature. It does not rely on generalization. Rather, it highlights human indi-
viduality and allows for free will. Historical events are explained simply in virtue of fitting
into a narrative. They are explained when they are situated in their context.
Description in narrative context is explanation, and in this way, there is no difference
between description and explanation.
In this model, there is no difference between knowledge and understanding. Like putting
together a mosaic, seeing how an individual tile fits in with its surrounding tiles is to
understand both the role it plays and the correctness of the fit. We see what it means
when we see that it fits.
Narrative explanation suits the situation of historiography, but not science. This is
because of the human aspect of history. Historians have a special connection to the
thing they study, since they are humans studying humans. Biologists have no intel-
lectual rapport with amoeba, so understanding amoeba requires more than merely
describing them. Collingwood emphasized the essentially human aspect of history and
the resulting difference between historiographic and scientific methods. “All history is
the history of thought” (Collingwood 1993 [1946]: 215). The historiographic method
therefore requires attention to the mental aspect of actions. The historian must “think
himself into this action” (p. 213). This is no subjective empathy he is describing, but
a “critical thinking” (p. 215) in which one “re-enacts [the action] in the context of
[the historian’s] knowledge” (p. 215). That is, the past action, including the mental
component, is described by situating it within our description of the historical context.
It is described within the larger narrative pattern, and to describe the ideas and events
in their narrative place is, at the same time, to understand them.
Collingwood’s general method of historiography is similar to Thomas Kuhn’s
(1996) prescription for the historiography of science. Full immersion in the paradigm
of the time is the only way to understand what past scientists were doing. Past theor-
ies must be described on their own terms and evaluated by their own standards. Anything
else would be Whiggish.
There is an inherent circularity in Collingwood’s method. Individual events and actions
are understood by being situated in the larger context. But the larger context is under-
stood by being built of individual events. It is a hermeneutic circle, and perhaps the
only way to understand other people. Understanding humans may be a fundamentally
different process than understanding the mindless objects studied in natural science.
Historiography may be fundamentally distinct from science.
Summary
The important issues in analytic philosophy of historiography show up in a variety
of ways and places. The issues are epistemological: accuracy, objectivity, and the
ability to describe the human past. These concerns surface in describing the status and
24philosophy of historiography
structure of historical and historiographic facts, evidence, and justification. One quick
way to summarize most of what is at stake is to distinguish between discovering and
constructing the human past. How much of what we say about what happened in the
past is a matter of discovering what in fact happened, and how much is a matter of
imposing ourselves on the past? If you can answer that, you will make progress in
philosophy of historiography.
References
Becker, C. (1910). “Detachment and the Writing of History,” Atlantic Monthly, pp. 524–36.
Bloch, M. (1953). The Historian’s Craft (New York: Vintage Books).
Carr, E. H. (1961). What Is History? (New York: Random House).
Collingwood, R. G. (1946). The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Croce, B. (1941). History as the Story of Liberty (London: George Allen & Unwin).
Danto, A. (1965). Analytical Philosophy of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Finley, M. I. (1987). Ancient History: Evidence and Models (New York: Penguin).
Goodman, N. (1978). Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett).
Hempel, C. (1942). “The Function of General Laws in History,” Journal of Philosophy, 39, pp. 35–
48.
Hodder, I. (1991). Reading the Past, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Hume, D. (1975) [1740]. A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge; 2nd edn., revd. P. H.
Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press).
Kuhn, T. (1996). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd edn. (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press).
Further Reading
Appleby, J., Hunt, L., and Jacob, M. (1994). Telling the Truth about History (New York: W.W.
Norton).
Atkinson, R. (1978). Knowledge and Explanation in History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press).
Bunzl, M. (1997). Real History (New York: Routledge).
D’Amico, R. (1989). Historicism and Knowledge (New York: Routledge).
Dray, W. (1993). Philosophy of History, 2nd edn. (Upper Saddle River NJ: Prentice-Hall).
Goldstein, L. (1976). Historical Knowing (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press).
Gorman, J. L. (1982). The Expression of Historical Knowledge (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press).
Kosso, P. (2001). Knowing the Past (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books).
McCullagh, C. (1984). Justifying Historical Descriptions (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press).
Murphey, M. (1973). Our Knowledge of the Historical Past (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill).
Murphey, M. (1994). Philosophical Foundations of Historical Knowledge (Albany, NY: SUNY
Press).
Tucker, A. (2004). Our Knowled

geral, quatro escolas são mais relevantes nesse período: a academia, o liceu, o estoicismo e
o epicurismo. São chamadas de escolas, pois, além de compartilharem a filosofia como um maneira
de viver, eram organizadas em aluno-professor, cultivavam certa metodologia de pesquisa e certos
dogmas. Sobre a academia, ela retornou a bases socráticas e se tornou um centro de debate de temas
diversos por intermédio da dialética. Sobre o Liceu, especializou-se em uma escola que reunia e
interpretava diversos dados e pesquisas desde a área física até a social. Sobre as outras duas, foram
a produção filosófica mais autêntica da época e muito se discute se por isso sofreram influências das
religiões orientais.