Beiheft 25
Knowing and Telling History: The Anglo-Saxon Debate
Cover image: detail from Cotton Vitellius C. III, folio 40 (circa 1050), from British Library
+ F. R. ANKERSMIT, The Dilemma of Contemporary Anglo-Saxon Philosophy of History, History and Theory 25 (December 1986), Bei. 25, 1-27.
The narrativist philosophy of history and the epistemological philosophy of history are opposed to each other and have remarkably little in common. Within the epistemological philosophy, the debate between the coveringlaw model advocates and the analytical hermeneutists has always been moving towards synthesis more than towards perpetuation of the disagreement. But the revolution from epistemological to narrativist philosophy of history enacted in Hayden White's work made the philosophy of history finally catch up with the developments in philosophy since the works of Quine, Kuhn, and Rorty. White stresses the "making" or "poetic" function of narrative at the expense of the "matching" function so dear to the mimetic epistemology of positivism. Philosophers of history should shake off this positivistic past and make history narrativist.
+ FREDERICK A. OLAFSON, Hermeneutics: "Analytical" and "Dialectical," History and Theory 25 (December 1986), Bei. 25, 28-42.
A new hermeneutical theory is needed that will avoid both the "analytical" fixation on the epistemic functions of the historian and the "dialectical" tendency to "ontologize" interpretation to the point where questions of truth in the sense of fidelity to the past become increasingly marginal. The prospects for such a theory are not particularly good. We do not have what would be required to reconcile these ways of thinking about interpretation. That would be a new and more powerful way of conceiving the unity of theoretical and practical reason based on a much deeper understanding of what it is to be hurnan. But the antihumanistic temper of much contemporary thought makes a revival of constructive philosophical inin that question unlikely.
+ MURRAY G. MURPHEY, Explanation, Causes, and Covering Laws, History and Theory 25 (December 1986), Bei. 25, 43-57.
The real issues in the debate over whether historical explanations conform to the covering-law model concern not only history but human nature, human action, and human freedom. Modifications of the coveringlaw model are possible which may remove some of the objections to it. Human behavior is rule-governed. Rules are made by human agents and learned by human actors. Cultural rules alone do not explain behavior and cannot be used as "covering" generalizations. But when they are combined with appropriate deviance data to yield conformity statements, these statements can be used as explanatory generalizations - with a certain amount of leeway and the understanding that such rules can be changed or eliminated. These generalizations, such as those found in anthropology, perform the function of general laws in history.
+ L. B. CEBIK, Understanding Narrative Theory, History and Theory 25 (December 1986), Bei. 25, 58-81.
Any comprehensive theory of narrative must accommodate both the justificational and the creative elements of narrative, the activities leading to narrative, and reflections upon the finished product. This examination of four levels of theory reveals the incompleteness of most extant theories, including those of Hayden White and Ricoeur. The four levels are: 1. narrative discourse and temporal language; 2. narrative and historical constructions; 3. narrative objects or stories; and 4. narrative functions and purposes. We remain far from our goal of achieving a comprehensive theory. However, by placing theories and partial theories within a metatheoretical framework, we can see more clearly their nature, ramifications, and limits, thereby differentiating between the contributions and the philosophical fads.
+ LEON J. GOLDSTEIN, Impediments to Epistemology in the Philosophy of History, History and Theory 25 (December 1986), Bei. 25, 82-100.
If history is to be taken seriously as a cognitive - not merely literary - discipline to which considerations of truth or falsity are relevant, it is because of the progress made over the course of centuries in the sharpening of the methodology of the infrastructure of history. By not attending to the way in which the historical past actually emerged in the course of work at the level of the infrastructure, philosophical writers, such as Mandelbaum, Pompa, McCullagh, and Gorman, have tended to perpetuate a myth of historians' selection. This has been the basic impediment to epistemology in philosophy of history. There is no selection from an antecedently established stock of fact-containing statements. The facts and the account are constructed in the course of the same intellectual endeavor, within the framework of an historians' tradition that is shaped by their work.