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Internal History versus External History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 February 2017

Bence Nanay
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Abstract

The aim of this paper is to generalize a pair of concepts that are widely used in the history of science, in art history and in historical linguistics – the concept of internal and external history – and to replace the often very vague talk of ‘historical narratives’ with this conceptual framework of internal versus external history. I argue that this way of framing the problem allows us to see the possible alternatives more clearly – as a limited number of possible relations between internal and external history. Finally, I argue that while external history is metaphysically prior to internal history, when it comes to historical explanations, we need both.

Type
Research Article
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Philosophy , Volume 92 , Issue 2 , April 2017 , pp. 207 - 230
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Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2017 

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References

1 Musil, Robert, The Man without Qualities (New York: Random House, 1995), 390–391 Google Scholar.

2 See Mannava, S., ‘Micro-narratives compensating the omission of grand historical narratives’, Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences 158 (2014): 320–325 CrossRefGoogle Scholar for a summary.

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8 See esp. Baxandall, Michael, Giotto and the Orators. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971)Google Scholar and M. Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy, Chapter 2.

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10 I. Lakatos, ‘Falsification’, 180. Note that Lakatos would count the beliefs and motives of individual scientists as part of external history – Wölfflin probably would not (see Wölfflin: Principles, 305).

11 Lakatos had an idiosyncratic view on the relation between the internal and external history of science, which I will return to in Section 5.1. But we do not need to accept his views about the relation between internal and external history to use the concepts themselves.

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14 Latour and Woolgar's Laboratory Life is a good example.

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19 Selectionist explanations of scientific change that do not help themselves to the concept of meme are also subject to the same criticism. See especially Stephen Toulmin's evolutionary account, especially Toulmin, ‘From logical systems to conceptual populations’, 560–564.

20 I. Lakatos, ‘Falsification’, 180.

21 Not just in the quoted passage, but also in Lakatos, ‘A postscript on history of science and its rational reconstruction’, in Lakatos, Imre, The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes (eds) Worrall, John and Currie, Gregory. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 189–192 CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Lakatos, ‘History of science’, 179.

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23 Ibid.

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26 Ibid, 106.

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29 I. Hacking, Representing and Intervening, 122.

30 Toulmin insisted that evolution should be more than a mere metaphor when we describe the progress of science (Toulmin, ‘From logical systems to conceptual populations’, 560–564). It is not enough to compare the trial and error method of science to the trial and error method of natural selection. The evolutionary model is indeed explanatory (Toulmin, ‘The evolutionary development of natural science’, 470): selection among scientific theories explains some of the features of these theories, most importantly, their survival. Lakatos's main problem with Toulmin's account is that this selectionist explanation bypasses scientists and philosophers, very much like the cunning of Hegelian reason. In other words, he seems to be criticizing Toulmin for ignoring external history – something Lakatos himself is often accused of. The most detailed account of Lakatos's problems with Toulmin's evolutionary explanation is in Lakatos, ‘Toulmin's Wittgensteinian epicycles’ (manuscript in the Lakatos archive, file number 8/4). For a shorter summary, see Lakatos, ‘Understanding Toulmin’, Minerva 14 (1976): 126–43 at 137–138 Google Scholar. See also his letter to Jon Cohen, who reviewed Toulmin's book in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (which Lakatos edited) in 1972. Lakatos here explicitly agrees with Cohen's criticism of Toulmin's Darwinism, ‘Lakatos to Jon Cohen’, October 22, 1972, Lakatos archive, file number 13/166.

31 Lakatos, Imre, ‘Proofs and refutations’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 14 (1963/1964): 1–25 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 120–139, 221–243, 296–342 at 146.

32 Lakatos, ‘History of science’, 94, see also his tirades against Toulmin, who he accuses of radical internalism – of what could be rephrased as the claim that internal history fails to supervene on external history.

33 See especially Hauser, A., Philosophie der Kunstgeschichte (Munich: Beck, 1958)Google Scholar and also Summers, D., ‘Forms: 19th-Century metaphysics and the problem of art historical descriptions’, in Preziosi, D. (ed.) The Art of Art History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 127–142 Google Scholar for a summary.

34 Wölfflin, Principles, 305.

35 Ibid.

36 H. White, Metahistory; H. White, ‘The value of narrativity’.

37 See e.g. Davidson, Donald, ‘Mental events’, in Foster, L. and Swanson, J. (eds) Experience and Theory (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970), 79–101 Google Scholar.

38 I. Hacking, Representing and Intervening, 124 alludes to the same analogy briefly.

39 See e.g. K. Popper, Objective Knowledge, 179.

40 I. Lakatos, ‘Falsification’, 106.

41 Ibid.

42 See Nanay, Bence, ‘Rational reconstruction reconsidered’, The Monist 93 (2010): 595–615 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43 I. Lakatos, ‘History of science’, 107. Lakatos reiterates this idea about relegating actual history to the footnotes three times on one page in this same paper.

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48 I. Lakatos, ‘Falsification’, 138, n. 40.

49 I. Lakatos, ‘History of science’, 91 – this is not a passing remark, but the summary of the third of the three main claims he argues for in this paper.

50 Ibid, 94.

51 Ibid, 105.

52 Musgrave, Alan, ‘Facts and values in science studies’, in Home, Roderick Weir (ed.) Science under Scrutiny: The Place of History and Philosophy of Science (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983), 49–80 at 66CrossRefGoogle Scholar – see also the similarly charitable interpretation of Brown, James Robert, The Rational and the Social (London: Routledge, 1989), 109–111 Google Scholar; Ian Hacking, ‘Lakatos's philosophy of science’, 396; I. Hacking Representing and Intervening, 125.

53 See e.g. Lakatos, ‘History of science’, 92, 105.

54 Ibid, 105, see also I. Lakatos, ‘A postscript’, 191 and Lakatos, ‘History of science’, 92 for similar formulations.

55 I. Lakatos, ‘A postscript’, 191.

56 See, e.g., I. Lakatos, ‘History of science’, 118, I. Lakatos, ‘A postscript’, 191–192.

57 See I. Lakatos, ‘A postscript’, 192.

58 I. Laudan, Progress, 170.

59 I. Lakatos, ‘Falsification’, 93.

60 Ibid.

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68 See especially Mayr, Ernst, ‘Typological versus population thinking’, in Meggers, B. J. (ed.) Evolution and Anthropology (Washington: The Anthropological Society of America, 1959), 409–412 Google Scholar, see also Sober, Elliott, ‘Evolution, population thinking, and essentialism’, Philosophy of Science 47 (1980): 350–383 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Nanay, Bence, ‘Population thinking as trope nominalism’, Synthese 177 (2011): 91–109 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

69 See especially E. Mayr, Growth, 514.

70 See, e.g. Vorzimmer, Charles Darwin.

71 E. Mayr, Growth, 514, see also ibid., 681–697.

72 This work was supported by the FWO Odysseus Grant G.0200.12N and the FWO grant G0C7416N.