The Nature Of Historical Explanation

Gardiner approaches the idea of a philosophy of history by first giving an outline of the regularity interpretation of explanation. How far it is possible to regard all historical explanations, or even some, as approximating this pattern, how far the objections philosophers have marshalled against such an assimilation are justified, how far the alternative interpretations suggested correspond to the historian's actual procedure in certain cases; these represent the kind of questions that will have to be considered. By keeping the actual practice of historians constantly in view, he believes that the reader will be able to see some of the disputes that have raged concerning the philosophy of historyin better perspective.

In The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation, Paul A. Roth resolves disputes persisting since the nineteenth century about the scientific status of history. He does this by showing why historical explanations must take the form of a narrative, making their logic explicit, and revealing how the rational evaluation of narrative explanation becomes possible. Roth situates narrative explanations within a naturalistic framework and develops a nonrealist (irrealist) metaphysics and epistemology of history—arguing that there exists no one fixed past, but many pasts. The book includes a novel reading of Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, showing how it offers a narrative explanation of theory change in science. This book will be of interest to researchers in historiography, philosophy of history, philosophy of science, philosophy of social science, and epistemology.

In this book the author provides a key to understanding the role of covering laws in historical explanation. He does so by distinguishing between their use at the macro - and micro- levels, a distinction that no other scholar has made. He then sets forth the logic of an explanatory narrative, explores the nature of rational explanation, and distinguishes the logic of historical interpretation from the logic of historical explanation.

"This book challenges the popular view that the logical structure of explanation in history can, in every case, be elucidated in terms of subsumption under covering law. It argues that departures from this logical model in ordinary historical writing cannot satisfactorily be explained away as incomplete or defective cases, and it endeavours to show how the attempt to do this may lead philosophers to read into explanations offered by historians more than is really intended, while, at the same time, important featues of what is intended are missed. In a series of independent but converging arguments, some problems raised by the uniqueness of historical events, the rationality of human actions and the logical grammar of casual language are discussed in this connexion, and the pragmatic dimension of explanation is also explored". -- Publisher.

Originally published in 1967, this book is aimed at the student teacher and discusses the philosophy of history and the effective learning of it. It discusses the UK secondary school history syllabus, with a particular emphasis on whether contemporary history is of more relevance to pupils than traditional history. There is a specific chapter on the problems of value-judgements in history and history teaching. From a psychological point of view, the book examines the problems of concept formation, the uses and dangers of analogy and the question of imagination and inference in child and adolescent thinking.