Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dk4vv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T10:59:21.777Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Why Study History? On Its Epistemic Benefits and Its Relation to the Sciences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 February 2017

Stephen R. Grimm
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

I try to return the focus of the philosophy of history to the nature of understanding, with a particular emphasis on Louis Mink's project of exploring how historical understanding compares to the understanding we find in the natural sciences. On the whole, I come to a conclusion that Mink almost certainly would not have liked: that the understanding offered by history has a very similar epistemic profile to the understanding offered by the sciences, a similarity that stems from the fact that both are concerned with grasping how the objects of their study are structured, or how the various elements of the things they study depend upon and relate to one another. At the same time, however, I claim that historical inquiry naturally puts us in a position to acquire further epistemic goods, including the old-fashioned epistemic good of wisdom, which is plausibly constituted by knowledge of how to live well. This is something the natural sciences cannot offer, and it is part of the reason why history is such an important form of inquiry.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 92 , Issue 3 , July 2017 , pp. 399 - 420
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Mink, Louis, ‘The Autonomy of Historical Understanding’, History and Theory 5 (1966), 24–47 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 For more on the history of this view, see Bevir, Mark, ‘Introduction: Historical Understanding and the Human Sciences’, Journal of the Philosophy of History 1 (2007), 259–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Feest, Uljana, ‘Historical Perspectives on Erklären and Verstehen: Introduction’, in Historical Perspectives on Erklären and Verstehen (ed.) Feest, Uljana (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 See especially Hempel, Carl, ‘The Function of General Laws in History’, Journal of Philosophy 39 (1942), 35–48 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hempel, Carl, ‘Reasons and Covering Laws in Historical Explanation’, in Philosophy and History: A Symposium (ed.) Hook, Sidney (New York: New York University Press, 1963)Google Scholar.

4 For an overview, see Macdonald, Graham and Macdonald, Cynthia. ‘Explanation in Historiography’, in A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography (ed.) Tucker, Aviezer (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)Google Scholar.

5 Kim writes: ‘The actual theories of explanation that we have accumulated to date, such as Hempel's covering-law theory, the causal theories of Salmon, Lewis, and Humphreys, the pragmatic theories of Bromberger, Achinstein, and van Fraassen – don't look much like theories of understanding or accounts of a type of knowledge. Although explanatory understanding is sometimes mentioned… it seems quickly to be lost sight of when serious theory construction begins, and terms like “understanding”, “intelligibility”, and “explanatory knowledge” seldom make an appearance once the initial stage-setting is over’. Kim, Jaegwon, ‘Explanatory Knowledge and Metaphysical Dependence’, in his Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 A subtle issue here is that there were other thinkers around Mink's time, such as William Dray, who advocated a verstehen approach to the human sciences, i.e. one that focused on the idea of ‘empathetic understanding’ as a distinctive method of the human sciences. See, e.g. Dray, William, Laws and Explanations in History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957)Google Scholar; Dray, William, ‘The Historical Explanation of Actions Reconsidered’, in Philosophy and History: A Symposium (ed.) Hook, Sidney (New York: New York University Press, 1963)Google Scholar. This is in keeping with the earlier methodenstreit (debate over method) involving Dilthey, Weber, and others. Mink, however, was careful to distinguish the idea of empathetic understanding as a method from the idea of understanding as an epistemic goal of inquiry. Op. cit. note 1, 38. Getting clearer about the goal might well have consequences for methodology, but Mink thought it more important to focus on the goal first – a point about which I believe he was exactly right.

7 For a defense, see Grimm, Stephen R. ‘Wisdom’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 93 (2015), 139–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Stephen R. Grimm, ‘Wisdom in Theology’, in The Oxford Handbook for the Epistemology of Theology (eds) William Abraham and Fred Aquino (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

8 Berlin, Isaiah, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (London: The Hogarth Press, 1976), 28 Google Scholar.

9 Leaving the poor death-watch beetle out of things for the moment, although I believe this case is worth thinking carefully about in its own right.

10 For other contemporary philosophers who tie understanding to structure, see Zagzebski, Linda, ‘Recovering Understanding’, in Knowledge, Truth, and Duty: Essays on Epistemic Justification, Responsibility, and Virtue (ed.) Steup, Matthias (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Grimm, Stephen R., ‘Understanding’, in The Routledge Companion to Epistemology, eds. Pritchard, Duncan and Berneker, Sven (New York: Routledge, 2011)Google Scholar; Grimm, Stephen R., ‘Understanding and Transparency’, in Explaining Understanding: New Perspectives from Epistemology and Philosophy of Science (eds) Grimm, Stephen R., Baumberger, Christoph, and Ammon, Sabine (New York: Routledge, 2017)Google Scholar; and Greco, John, ‘Episteme: Knowledge and Understanding’, in Virtues and Their Vices (eds) Timpe, Kevin and Boyd, Craig (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)Google Scholar. According to Julius Moravcsik, this was also the view of the ancient Greeks, especially Plato. See Moravcsik, Julius, ‘Understanding and Knowledge in Plato's Philosophy’, Neue Hefte für Philosophe 15 (1979), 53–69 Google Scholar.

11 Alternatively, if you were to push back and claim that there is such structure in a stone, as some audiences have done, then I submit it would then become a good candidate for understanding.

12 Kitcher, Philip, ‘Explanatory Unification and the Causal Structure of the World’, in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 13 (eds) Kitcher, Philip and Salmon, Wesley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

13 Lewens, Tim, The Meaning of Science (London: Penguin, 2015), 255–256 Google Scholar.

14 A further advantage of adopting the language of dependence is that it allows us to sidestep controversial talk of someone's reasons causing his or her actions – which might make it seem like the reasons coerce or determine the actions, and hence drive out free will. Regardless of how one thinks reasons are related to actions – whether it is by coercion or not – there can be little doubt that the actions depend upon the beliefs and desires, and that the historian gains in understanding to the extent that he or she can identify an agent's genuine reasons (i.e. motivating beliefs and desires) as distinct from the spurious ones. For more detail on Alexander's thinking in this example. For more on Alexander, see Philip Freeman, Alexander the Great (New York: Simon & Schuster), ch. 3.

15 I state this only as a plausible necessary condition, leaving Gettier examples aside.

16 This accords too from the Platonic and Aristotelian dictum that differences in forms of knowledge are taken from differences in their object.

17 Elsewhere I have argued that we can model these ideas on the notion of a ‘dependence map’, of the sort described by Alison Gopnik in various works. See, for instance, Grimm, op. cit. note 10; Gopnik, Alison et al. ‘A Theory of Causal Learning in Children: Causal Maps and Bayes Nets’, Psychological Review 111 (2004), 3–32 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; and Gopnik, Alison, ‘Scientific Thinking in Young Children: Theoretical Advances, Empirical Research, and Policy Implications’, Science 337 (2012), 1623–1627 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. Other philosophers who importantly appeal to dependence in their accounts of understanding include Strevens, Michael, Depth: An Account of Scientific Explanation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011)Google Scholar, and John Greco, op. cit. note 10.

18 It will require knowing, for example, that in chopping the onions a gas called Propanethiol S-oxide is released, and that when this gas reaches the eye it reacts with the water to form a diluted solution of sulphric acid, which irritates the nerve endings of the eye, causing them to water.

19 I will, however, raise doubts about this claim in the following section.

20 For more on the distinction between histories and chronicles, see e.g., Danto, Arthur, Analytical Philosophy of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968)Google Scholar, ch. 7.

21 White., Morton ‘Comments on Historical Explanation’, in Philosophy and History: A Symposium (ed.) Hook, Sidney. (New York: New York University Press), 3 Google Scholar.

22 Ibid., 6.

23 Think for instance of Jared Diamond's Pulitzer-Prize-Winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel, where he argues the real drivers of historical events are not particular agents and their decisions but rather large-scale forces relating to disease rates, improvements in technology (especially weaponry), and diet (especially access to protein rich foods). See Diamond, Jared, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999)Google Scholar. And of course there are the grand theories of philosophers such as Hegel and Marx – where the real variables moving history, the things that determine why one alternative transpires rather than another, are much deeper than the naked eye suggest, and thus where ‘real understanding’ is genuinely located.

24 For more on this point, see Cleland, Carol, ‘Philosophical Issues in Natural History and Its Historiography’, in A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography (ed.) Tucker, Aviezer (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)Google Scholar, and Stueber, Karsten, ‘Understanding Versus Explanation? How to Think about the Distinction between the Human and the Natural Sciences’, Inquiry 55 (2012), 17–32 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In geology, for instance, the slogan that ‘the past is the key to the present’ – usually attributed to one of the founders of the discipline, the 19th-Century Scottish scientist Charles Lyell – seems to be as central to the geologist's self-understanding as Socrates's dictum that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’ is to philosophers.

25 Op. cit. note 1, 38–41.

26 For more on the importance of modality for understanding, see Nozick, Robert, Philosophical Explanations. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 8–13 Google Scholar; Geoffrey Hawthorn. Plausible Worlds: Possibility and Understanding in History and the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); Lipton, Peter, ‘Understanding Without Explanation’, in Scientific Understanding: Philosophical Perspectives (eds) De Regt, H., Leonelli, S., and Eigner, K. (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2009), 49–52 Google Scholar; le Bihan, Soazig, ‘Enlightening Falsehoods: A Modal View of Scientific Understanding’, in Explaining Understanding: New Perspectives from Epistemology and Philosophy of Sciences (eds) Grimm, Stephen R., Baumberger, Christoph, and Ammon, Sabine (New York: Routledge, 2017)Google Scholar; and Stephen R. Grimm, ‘Understanding as an Intellectual Virtue’, in The Routledge Handbook of Virtue Epistemology (ed.) Heather Battaly (New York: Routledge, forthcoming).

27 See e.g. Elton, Geoffrey, The Reformation, 1520–1559, from The New Cambridge Modern History, Volume 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

28 This is a point emphasized by the historian Leonard Krieger in his discussion of Dray: ‘[William Dray] grasps, in the first place, an essential feature of what satisfies the historian in way of explanation – that when a historian seeks to explain a particular action what he wants explained is precisely the particularity of the action: why it was produced by this man at this place in time. If an historian understands that the relationship between his condition and his action as a case of a generic relationship between classes of such conditions and such actions, then he sees in this not an explanation but something to be explained – how this relationship differs from others in the class’ Leonard Krieger, ‘Comments on Historical Explanation’, in Philosophy and History: A Symposium (ed.) Sidney Hook (New York: New York University Press), 137.

29 Op. cit. note 27.

30 I have not argued, here, that this holds for all cases of understanding, though I believe that it does. For an argument see Grimm, Stephen R., ‘Explanatory Inquiry and the Need for Explanation’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 59 (2008), 481–497 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 For other ways in which the study of human beings seems to make a difference, see Grimm, Stephen R., ‘How Understanding People Differs From Understanding the Natural World’, Philosophical Issues (Noûs supplement) 26 (2016), 209–225 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 In the case of the College, for instance, two reasons seemed to be particularly important. First, putting the final vote in the hands of the College's well-educated electors was supposed to be a guard against a tyrant winning the popular vote by duping or somehow or coercing the general public, which was thought to be more easily manipulable. It was therefore a check against ‘the tyranny of the majority’. Second, it was supposed to ensure that small states had a substantial say in the presidential election, and that their voices were not simply swamped by the stronger voices of larger states.

33 Note that there are often not simple ‘carry overs’, however. An unjust source does not necessarily mean a currently unjust practice, and bad reasons for the practice at a time might not necessarily amount to bad reasons for the practice now.

34 Of course, it might also help us to appreciate the merit of our own arrangement of goods, insofar as we come to think that a prior society was lacking in various ways.

35 Naturally, I do not want to claim that history offers the only way of expanding our sense of the human. Sociology, anthropology, and other disciplines besides (especially those that study great literature) also offer this benefit.

36 Many thanks to Anna Alexandrova, Gabriel Byng, Paul Christesen, Christopher Cowie, Rachael Grimm, Matt Dougherty, David Ibbetson, Daniel Jütte, and Michael Strevens for helpful discussion concerning the issues surrounding this paper.