Theories Of Historical Explanation Research Paper

Second, there are four carefully articulated theories of how historians should explain events. These are written by philosophers rather than historians. Some think historical explanations should be scientific, employing general laws. Some declare that history is not a scientific but a hermeneutic discipline looking for the meaning of events rather than their causes. A few favor comprehensive, many-layered structural history, noting how basic geographic and social structures influence historical change. Finally, there are those who, in a postmodern vein, see history as no more than a form of literature, with historical events acquiring meaning from their place in a discourse. The philosophers who promote these theories of historical explanation would say they are describing historical practice, but in fact they are much less interested in analyzing historical practice than in promoting a form of explanation which they think very important in understanding history. For that reason these will be called ‘prescriptive theories of historical explanation.’

The third kind of theory of historical explanation is a theory which claims to be descriptive and analytic, focusing on historical practice to discover the variety of historical explanations historians actually produce, and their criteria of acceptability. The task of this theory is to provide clear analysis of typical historical explanations, pointing out the logical standards which it seems they aim to satisfy.

The paper will briefly describe each of these theories of historical explanation, and make one or two comments upon them.

1. General Interpretations Of Historical Change

In the culture of Western Europe, there have been several grand theories of historical change. Christianity, more particularly the Bible, brought with it a theory of progress in history, of God establishing his kingdom on earth, first through his prophets, then through the Israelites, then through Jesus, and finally through the Church, until Christ returns in triumph. St. Augustine presented an immensely influential version of this story in The City of God. With the progress in science achieved by the application of reason in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a secular theory of historical progress was created by Kant, Condorcet, and others, who saw reason and the methods of science driving human progress towards ever-increasing, this-worldly happiness. Hegel and Marx described the process of human progress as dialectical, contradictions being overcome by new stages of development, either in the advancement of reason, freedom, and self-consciousness in the case of Hegel, or in autonomy and prosperity, in the case of Marx. The optimism implicit in all these theories of progress was largely shattered by the experiences of the twentieth century, of hideous world wars, of vast economic depression, of rampant infectious diseases, of tyranny, greed, and madness defeating enlightenment in so many countries. As Lyotard puts it: Auschwitz invalidates the Hegelian assumption that the real is rational; Budapest 1956 invalidates the Marxist claim that what is communist is proletarian (Lyotard 1987, p. 162).

A few writers have argued that progress has indeed continued throughout the twentieth century. With the defeat of fascism and the disintegration of Soviet communism, F. Fukuyama sees the emergence of liberal-democratic capitalism as the final stage of historical development, ‘The End of History.’ He says that it best satisfies the two driving forces in history, the desire for material prosperity and the desire for personal recognition. Tyrannies had to go, as tyrants showed no respect for the common people. In democracies everyone has a say, or at least a vote. It seems obvious, however, that if the vote is not enough to ensure the recognition and respect people desire, then history has not ended after all.

Lyotard has three main objections to the grand theories of historical progress mentioned above. The first has already been stated: all are contradicted by the horrors of the twentieth century. Second, Lyotard objects that these theories have constrained historical writing in an unacceptable way. Under the influence of such theories, historians have written particular histories as instances of the theory of progress they most favored. For example, they depicted political revolutions as steps towards political freedom, and scientific revolutions as evidence of the growth of reason. In this way Lyotard finds metanarratives oppressive, and prefers that people should write their narrative stories as they like (Lyotard 1984).

Finally, Lyotard says that ‘all great historical upheavals’ such as the French Revolution ‘are formless and figureless in historical human nature’ (Lyotard 1987, p. 174). The enthusiasm such an upheaval generates is sublime, he says, and incapable of true representation, although we like to suppose that all who participated were motivated by a desire for greater freedom. All that historians can truly describe, according to Lyotard, are individual human actions and responses, ‘little narratives’ of particular events.

A few comments on Lyotard’s ideas seem called for. First, he is right to deny inevitable progress toward a more rational, free, self-conscious, prosperous, and autonomous society. Theories of progress all underestimate the desire and ability of powerful people to exploit others for their own gain. More realistic, it seems, are some cyclical theories of historical change. Aristotle and Polybius produced such theories which were revived during the Renaissance in the writing of Louis Le Roy and Jean Bodin in France, and of Machiavelli and later Vico in Italy. In Aristotle they found a doctrine of the natural succession of political structures from monarchy to aristocracy to democracy and back to monarchy again, each stage established to resolve injustices which had arisen in the previous one. From Polybius they came to see cycles in the growth, flourishing, and decay of states, some attributing decay to states overextending themselves, others seeing it as a result of moral failure among its leaders. However, as Bodin said, the causes of a state’s collapse can be varied, including military conquest by its enemies (1965, p. 59). There is no general theory of historical change which is true without exception. Cyclical theories were popularized in the twentieth century by Manuel Spengler’s (1926–8) The Decline of the West and Toynbee’s (1951–61) A Study of History.

Second, while metahistories may have been used to legitimate certain accounts of particular historical events, to the exclusion of others, some generalizations about the motivation for political revolutions and other events seem in order. The leaders of the French Revolution and the pamphlet writers who supported them did legitimate their attack on the monarchy by an appeal to reason, liberty, and human rights. Of course there were other, more self-interested motives at work as well, but that is not to deny the legitimation given to the revolutionary movement by these ideas. Rather than dismiss generalizations about the motives for revolutions and other large-scale events as all mistaken, historians should take care to qualify them so that they are fairly accurate. Generalizations are useful ways of summing up individual stories and describing social movements.

Finally, one of the chief objections to metahistorical explanations of historical change is something that Lyotard does not mention. They frequently assume that a whole series of events were all justified by the same ideals, when in fact this is false. For example, many political events and revolutions have been justified in the name of liberty and human rights, but the ideas of liberty and human rights were not always the same in every case. The rights and liberties sought in the English Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Russian Revolution, for example, differed significantly. Therefore, it is misleading to suggest that they were all legitimated by the same ideals.

This typically historicist objection to metahistory is important, but not entirely decisive. While different particular rights and liberties were sought at different times and places, all can still be called rights and liberties. Indeed, all drew upon traditions of thought about human reason and dignity found in classical and biblical writing, which were applied to the particular situations. It is wrong to suggest that these events all had precisely the same legitimation, but it is also wrong to deny that the values they appealed to were quite unrelated.

2. Prescriptive Theories Of Historical Explanation

In the last section we considered some philosophical responses to theories of historical change, that is to theories which identified certain more or less constant sources of historical developments. These theories provided substantive explanations of history. We turn now to theories of historical explanation of a quite different kind. These are theories about the logical structure of explanations of historical events. They are not theories about what produces historical change, but theories about how historians should explain what has happened in the past. These theories are prescriptive, describing how their authors think historical events should be explained. There are in fact many forms of explanation commonly used by historians, but these theories focus upon just those which their authors judge, for different reasons, to be the most important.

2.1 Theories of Scientific Explanation

In the nineteenth century both John Stuart Mill and the historian Henry Thomas Buckle argued that historians should try to explain historical events as scientists do, by discovering the laws of society which governed their occurrence. With these laws the occurrence of historical events could be deduced, given certain antecedent conditions, just as the occurrence of natural events can be deduced from the laws of nature. When K. R. Popper came to propose a theory of historical explanation, he quoted Mill’s theory with approval, but thought it could be made more precise.

‘I suggest,’ he wrote, ‘that to give a causal explanation of a certain specific event means deducing a statement describing this event from two kinds of premises: from some universal laws, and from some singular or specific statements which we may call the specific initial conditions’ (Popper 1961, p. 122). Popper went on to point out that the laws used by historians are familiar, everyday ones of no particular interest. He opposed those historicists who believe there are general laws of historical development; and he opposed those who claim that historical events are unique, and so have nothing general about them whatever. Those who present general laws of history, such as the Marxist theory that all history is of class struggle, are really offering interpretations, Popper said, describing those changes in history which interest them.

The philosopher who most clearly and forcefully presented a deductive model of historical explanation was C. G. Hempel, in his article ‘The function of general laws in history.’ Drawing upon the tradition of Mill, Popper, and others, he produced the following analysis: The explanation of an event of some specific kind E

consists of

(1) a set of statements asserting the occurrence of certain events C₁… C_n at certain times and places, (2) a set of universal hypotheses, such that

(a) the statements of both groups are reasonably well confirmed by empirical evidence,

(b) from the two groups of statements the sentence asserting the occurrence of event E can be logically deduced. (Hempel 1965, p. 232)

The letters C and E are intended to suggest cause and effect. The aim of historical explanations, he wrote, is that of ‘showing that the event in question was not ‘‘a matter of chance,’’ but was to be expected in view of certain antecedent or simultaneous conditions’ (Hempel 1965, p. 235). He admitted that the relevant laws are often difficult to formulate precisely, and that often the consequence of the initial conditions occurs only with a degree of probability (Hempel 1965, p. 237). Consequently he called the explanations offered in history incomplete ‘explanation sketches’ (Hempel 1965, p. 238).

Hempel’s formulation of the deductive theory of explanation was subject to much discussion and criticism. The main objections were as follows:

(a) The model does not state conditions sufficient to produce a good explanation,

(i) because sometimes events which enable one to predict an outcome are not the events which caused it. For instance, from a sudden fall in a barometer one can predict a storm, but that event does not explain the occurrence of the storm, because the fall in the barometer was not necessary for the storm’s occurrence.

(ii) Furthermore, for an explanation to be satisfactory, it must describe the kinds of cause which are of interest to the reader. If a man with a gastric ulcer is suffering from stomach pain after eating parsnips, a doctor would attribute the pain to his gastric ulcer, whereas his wife would attribute it to his eating parsnips. For the doctor, eating parsnips is normal, but having an ulcer is not, whereas the wife is familiar with the man’s ulcer and picks out his eating parsnips as the event which made the difference. This objection assumes that the function of causal explanations is to explain a contrast between a given event and another expected, normal event, rather than to show why an event was predictable.

(b) The model does not state conditions necessary for a good explanation,

(i) because often all that is required to explain an event is to show that the event was more probable than a contrasting state, which might not be very probable at all. Consider the question: ‘Why was the monarchy replaced by a republic in France in 1792?’ This question could be asking: why was there a change in constitution and not just a change of government, why was the republic set up in 1792 and not earlier, and why was the establishment of a republic in France more likely than any other kind of constitution, such as a limited monarchy of the sort which resulted from the English Revolution?

(ii) Furthermore, many explanations in history are not intended to show that an event was very probable, or that it was more probable than a contrasting state. For instance, historians often want to know the reasons why people behaved as they did, reasons which may or may not have made their actions very probable.

There is some merit in Hempel’s theory that historical explanations are meant to show events to have been very probable. Admittedly, some explanations have different aims. And certainly causal explanations must refer to events which were necessary for the occurrence of the event being explained. Nevertheless, some causal explanations are not contrastive, but are meant to explain what brought about a certain event by pointing out events and circumstances which made its occurrence very probable. However, this can very seldom be done by citing a single law relating cause and effect. Normally historical events are the product of several tendencies at work in a situation, and are explained as an outcome of those. Historians try to make the outcome appear as highly probable as possible, but often that is not very probable, just more probable than anything else in the circumstances.

2.2 Theories Of Hermeneutic Explanation: Explaining The Meaning Of Actions

While G. Vico and J. G. von Herder had written of the importance of understanding human cultures as complex, almost organic units, the theory of hermeneutic understanding, in opposition to scientific understanding, was first fully applied to history by W. Dilthey. The theory had its origin in the lectures on hermeneutics by F. Schleiermacher, whose biography Dilthey published early in his career (in 1871). Following Schleiermacher, Dilthey said that the way to understand human actions is by using empathy to imagine the experiences and thoughts which moved people to act as they did. We interpret what people do and say, he said, by drawing upon our own experiences of life to imagine what was going on in their minds to make them produce the expression which is being interpreted. After he had developed this psychological theory of understanding, Dilthey became interested in the meaning human actions have in furthering the aims of the social or cultural structures to which they contribute. He wrote:

To start with, the parts of a life have a meaning according to their relation to that life, its values and purposes, and according to the place they occupy in it. Furthermore, historical events become significant through being links in a system of interactions in which they co-operate with other parts to bring about values and purposes in the whole. (Dilthey 1961, p. 148)

The structures he mentions as being ‘the simplest and most homogeneous’ are ‘education, economic life, law, politics, religions, social life, art, philosophy, science’ (Dilthey 1961, p. 146). These different structures often express similar values and beliefs, and so are interconnected. These common ideas can create a common tendency in a particular culture for an age. People are constantly improving the structure and effectiveness of these organizations, and their actions can be interpreted as having such historical significance.

The main objection to Dilthey’s theory of historical understanding was clearly stated, and addressed, by Gadamer in Truth and Method (1986). Dilthey had said that we understand other people’s actions on the basis of our general knowledge of life in the world. Gadamer pointed out that often the historian’s world is remote from the world of the people being studied. Dilthey, he said, ‘took no account whatsoever of the historical nature of experience’ (Gadamer 1986, p. 212). Heidegger explained that understanding things is not something we do after we have apprehended them, but rather it is what we do in apprehending them, in reading a text or in recognizing a machine. And our interpretation of things is a function of our own historical nature (Gadamer 1986, pp. 230–2): ‘that we study history only insofar as we are ourselves ‘‘historical’’ means that the historicalness of human There-being [Dasein] in its expectancy and its forgetting is the condition of our being able to represent the past’ (Gadamer 1986, p. 232). Our understanding of what things mean is first of all provided by the traditions in which we have been raised (Gadamer 1986, p. 250).

Once the historicity of historical understanding is fully understood, the question of the objectivity of history becomes quite urgent. Is there any sense in which one’s understanding of the past could be called ‘objective’? Gadamer has a couple of things to say about this. First, he insists upon coherence as a condition of correct understanding: ‘The movement of understanding is constantly from the whole to the part and back to the whole. Our task is to extend in concentric circles the unity of the understood meaning. The harmony of all the details with the whole is the criterion of correct understanding’ (Gadamer 1986, p. 259). He remarks that when it is difficult to find a coherent interpretation, then we suspect that we are dealing with a world whose patterns of meaning we do not really understand. This leads to his second important point. Gadamer employs the concept of a ‘horizon,’ which he describes as ‘the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point’ (Gadamer 1986, p. 269). Historians occupy a particular vantage point in the history of the tradition which formed them. To understand a past event, they must do so from the point of view of those involved. They can find that historical horizon because they have learned of it from within their own tradition. Then when historians come to report their understanding of the past, they do so in terms of their present worldview. Gadamer explains: ‘In the process of understanding there takes place a real fusing of horizons, which means that as the historical horizon is projected, it is simultaneously removed’ (Gadamer 1986, p. 273). It is but a short step from Gadamer’s account of historical understanding to postmodern theories, which describe history as a cultural construct, usually in narrative form, having no particular relation to the real events of the past whatever.

At the same time as German philosophers were reacting to attempts to make historical explanations scientific by developing theories of meaning, British philosophers were pointing out that historical explanations are typically accounts of the reasons for which people acted as they did. R. G. Collingwood wrote as follows:

For science, the event is discovered by perceiving it, and the further search for its cause is conducted by assigning it to its class and determining the relation between that class and others. For history, the object to be discovered is not the mere event, but the thought expressed in it. To discover that thought is already to understand it. After the historian has ascertained the facts, there is no further process of inquiring into their causes. When he knows what happened, he already knows why it happened. (Collingwood 1961, p. 214)

Collingwood said that knowledge of past minds is arrived at by drawing inferences from observable facts, more particularly by forming and testing hypotheses about what people had in mind when acting as they did.

Collingwood’s attack on scientific models of explanation and espousal of rational explanations was given fresh expression by W. H. Dray in his first book Laws and Explanation in History (1957). He criticized the ‘covering-law models’ of Popper and Hempel, and developed an account of rational explanation which was less idealistic and more logical than Collingwood’s. He said that in deciding reasons for actions, historians relied on general knowledge of the form: ‘When in a situation of type C₁… C_n the thing to do is x’ (Dray 1957, p. 132). Such statements, he said, were ‘principles of action’ which are universally known and respected. They explain actions by showing that the action was the rational thing to have done, in the circumstances.

Today we would give more respect to Collingwood’s account of explanation than to this early statement of Dray’s, because people’s reasons for acting are not always universally appropriate. Indeed, even from the agent’s point of view, they are sometimes not very rational at all. All that matters when explaining the reasons for an action is that they were the reasons for which the agent acted.

Hempel responded to Dray by arguing that reasons only explain actions if we know that people holding such reasons were likely to act on them (Hempel 1963). According to Dray, historical explanations should show that actions were reasonable responses to a situation. Hempel said they must always show that the action was to be expected in the circumstances. I think reasons can cause actions by inclining people to perform them, but they do not always make the actions appear either very rational or predictable.

2.3 Theories Of Structural Explanation In History

There are two distinct kinds of structural explanation in history, both closely associated with the work of the French Annales school in the twentieth century.

2.3.1 Braudel’s Structural Theory. The first kind of structural explanation is most famously exemplified by F. Braudel’s large history, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1972b). In it, Braudel explains the geographic and social structures in which observable actions occurred, and how those structures limited or promoted certain possibilities. He wrote:

when I think of the individual, I am always inclined to see him imprisoned within a destiny in which he himself has little hand, fixed in a landscape in which the infinite perspectives of the long term stretch into the distance both behind him and before. In historical analysis as I see it, rightly or wrongly, the long run always wins in the end … it indubitably limits both the freedom of the individual and even the role of chance. (Braudel 1972b, p. 1244)

The constraints which Braudel had in mind were largely geographical and technological, but he included frameworks of belief as well (see Braudel 1972a, p. 18).

Braudel showed how geography and technology limited agricultural production and trade, and so the growth of wealth in the sixteenth century. The size of populations, and their vulnerability to famine and disease, also played a part. In addition to these slowly changing structures of geography and technology, Braudel also described cycles of economic and social change which occurred more frequently. These constituted processes of change within economic, social, and institutional structures which historians could model and describe in a theoretical way. He provided a careful analysis of the cycles of mercantile capitalism between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries, which formed the background for the history of Philip II in the sixteenth century. As Braudel showed, these structures limited the possibilities of human action, as well as making the effects of certain events very probable. However, Braudel gave no systematic account of the relation between these two kinds of structures and the actions of individuals, which constituted the third level of historical description he identified.

2.3.2 Structures Of Meaning. The second kind of structural explanation favored by historians of the Annales school, such as Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch, and more recently by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and many others, is one which explains the meaning of an utterance, a gesture or a symbol by referring to a structure of meanings, a language, of which it is a part. Dilthey had anticipated this theory of meaning in some of his later writings, although he is best known for relating meaning to intention. This French structuralist theory of explanation emerged from work by Saussure in linguistics and LeviStrauss in anthropology, which explained the meaning of one part of a language by referring to other parts to which it was systematically related. Historians found such patterns of meaning in social events. As Jonathan Culler has put it:

The cultural meaning of any particular act or object is determined by a whole system of constitutive rules [such as rules of a marriage ceremony or of football]—rules which do not so much regulate behaviour as create the possibility of particular forms of behaviour … make it possible to marry, to score a goal, to write a poem, to be impolite. It is in this sense that a culture is composed of a set of symbolic systems. (Culler 1973, p. 22)

People are seldom aware of the rules governing the symbols they use, any more than they are aware of the rules of language, but the rules can be discovered by historians and anthropologists studying their behavior. The rules can be implicit or explicit. Historians prefer to study the explicit rules governing behavior, usually found in the discourse by which it is described, because then the meaning given to the behavior is truly historical, and not something merely inferred by the historian.

2.4 Theories Of Narrative Explanation

Once historical explanations were thought to display the meaning of historical events, rather than just describe their causes, the way was open to view historical narratives as forms of explanation. This is precisely what Hayden White did in his seminal book Metahistory (1973). In the theoretical introduction to that book White describes ‘explanation by emplotment,’ ‘explanation by formal argument,’ and ‘explanation by ideological implication.’ A historical event which is merely listed in a chronicle, he said, has no particular meaning or significance. But once it is located in a story, it is given both meaning and significance, by being related to what preceded and followed it. Following Northrop Frye, White identified four forms of emplotment: Romance, Tragedy, Comedy, and Satire, each with its characteristic structure. Thus, for example, ‘Romance is fundamentally a drama of self-identification symbolised by the hero’s transcendence of the world of experience, his victory over it, and his final liberation from it.’ (White 1973, p. 8). As well as telling stories of different kinds, he said, historians also describe the relations between events in the past in several different ways. Following Stephen C. Pepper, he identified four kinds of ‘argument’ about the nature of historical events. The Formist depicts them as unique; the Organicist sees particular events as parts of a whole; the Mechanist presents events as instances of general laws at work in history; and the Contextualist describes events as products of tendencies at work in their environment. Finally, narratives can represent certain ideological views of historical change, and give events meaning by locating them within one of those. Following Karl Mannheim, White picks out four such ideologies: the Conservatives,’ who see history as the evolution of existing structures; the Liberals,’ who think that reason and goodwill will eventually see that certain ideals are attained; the Radicals,’ who think utopian conditions should be achieved by revolutionary means; and finally the Anarchists,’ who believe that an ideal state will be achieved by destroying existing structures and leaving people free to act on their own humanity. White found ‘affinities’ between these three groups of four. For example he said Romantic plots often employed a Formist presentation of events, and embodied an Anarchist ideology.

White correctly points out that explanations of these kinds can be viewed as interpretations. Interpretations are one of several more or less equally well justified accounts of a subject which give meaning and significance to its parts. White did not consider whether one interpretation could be better than another, but F. R. Ankersmit did in his book Narrati e Logic (1983, Chap. 8), in which he declared that narrative interpretations should aim for maximum scope, not only in the number of events they describe but in the number they illuminate. This seems to be on the right track.

3. Descriptive Theories Of Historical Explanation

Hayden White denied that his analysis of historical explanation was exhaustive, but it was far less prescriptive than previous theories, indicating a large range of ways in which historians could account for events in the past. An avowedly descriptive, analytic approach to historical explanations is that provided by McCullagh in The Truth of History (1998). McCullagh analyzes forms of explanation common in historical writing to discover both their structure and their conditions of acceptability. He contrasts explanations, which are answers to fairly specific questions guided by the preconceptions implicit in the question, and interpretations, which look for patterns among events with no particular preconception of what that pattern will be. The adequacy of explanations, on this account, is judged by how adequately they answer the questions they are addressing. The questions provide both the logical and conceptual parameters of the required explanation. The questions, he says, can ask what happened during a certain event, how a certain change took place, who a certain person was, what a text or symbol meant, what the structure of a society or institution was, as well as why a certain event occurred.

An interesting outcome of this approach is his analyses of causal explanations in history. McCullagh finds that causes are events which trigger causal powers, or tendencies, and he depicts causal explanations as setting out the active tendencies which, taken together, made probable the event being explained. A complete causal explanation, McCullagh says, will mention all the causes which directly increased the probability of the outcome, and these could include both reasons for an action and circumstances which made such an action probable. It does not include all events necessary for the outcome, however, as these go back to the beginning of time.

At present there is some uncertainty as to whether the concept of a correct explanation is intelligible, and whether explanations always provide interpretations of the past. The answer depends largely upon our concepts of explanation and interpretation, and there is no doubt that these need further refining.

Bibliography:

1. Ankersmit F R 1983 Narrative Logic. A Semantic Analysis of the Historian’s Language. Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, The Netherlands
2. Braudel F 1966 La Mediterranee et le Monde Mediterraneen a l’Epoque de Philippe II, 2nd edn. Librairie Armand Colin, Paris
3. Braudel F 1972a History and the social sciences. Annales: economies, societes, civilisations. In: Burke P (ed.) Economy and Society in Early Modern Europe. Essays from Annales. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London
4. Braudel F 1972b The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Collins, London
5. Collingwood R G 1961 The Idea of History. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK
6. Culler J 1973 The linguistic basis of structuralism. In: Robey D (ed.) Structuralism: An Introduction. Clarendon Press, Oxford, UK
7. Dilthey W 1961 Meaning in History. W. Dilthey’s Thoughts on History and Society [ed. Rickman H P]. George Allen and Unwin, London
8. Dosse F 1987 L’Histoire en miettes: Des ‘Annales’ a la ‘nourelle histoire.’ Editions La Decouverte, Paris
9. Dosse F 1994 New History in France. The Triumph of the Annales [trans. Conroy P V, Jr]. University of Illinois Press, Urbana, IL
10. Dray W 1957 Laws and Explanation in History. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK
11. Dray W 1974 The historical explanation of actions reconsidered. In: Gardiner P (ed.) The Philosophy of History. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK
12. Gadamer H-G 1960 Wahrheit und Methode. J C B Mohr, Tubingen, Germany
13. Gadamer H-G 1986 Truth and Method. Crossroad, New York
14. Hempel C G 1963 Reasons and covering laws in historical explanation. In: Hook S (ed.) The Philosophy of History: A Symposium. New York University Press, New York, pp. 143–63
15. Hempel C G 1965 The function of general laws in history. In: Hempel C G (ed.) Aspects of Scientific Explanation and Other Essays in the Philosophy of Science. Free Press, New York
16. Lyotard J-F 1979 La Condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir. Editions de Minuit, Paris
17. Lyotard J-F 1984 The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge [trans. Bennington G, Massumi B]. Manchester University Press, Manchester, UK
18. Lyotard J-F 1987 The sign of history. In: Attridge D, Bennington G, Young R (eds.) Post-structuralism and the Question of History. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
19. Manuel F E 1965 Shapes of Philosophical History. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA
20. McCullagh C B 1998 The Truth of History. Routledge, London
21. Owensby J 1994 Dilthey and the Narrative of History. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY
22. Popper K R 1961 The Poverty of Historicism. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London
23. Spengler O 1926–8 The Decline of the West [trans. Atkinson C F]. Allen and Unwin, London, 2 Vols.
24. Toynbee A J 1951–61 A Study of History. Oxford University Press, London, 10 Vols.
25. White H 1973 Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD
26. White H 1978 Interpretation in history. In: White H (ed.) Tropics of Discourse. Essays in Cultural Criticism. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD