A collection of papers dealing with history as a way of knowing, not a mode of discourse.

Leon J. Goldstein critically examines the philosophical role of concepts and concept formation in the social sciences. The book undertakes a study of concept formation and change by looking at four critical terms in anthropology , politics , and sociology.

The first part of the paper distinguishes between a real past which has nothing to do with historical events and an historical past made up of hypothetical events introduced for the purpose of explaining historical evidence. Attention is next paid to those so-called ancillary historical disciplines which study historical evidence, and it is noted that the historical event is brought in to explain the particular constellation of different kinds of historical evidence which are judged to belong together. The problem of (...) explaining events is then taken up, and an attempt is made to defend the view that such explanation must presuppose general laws. And this is followed by a discussion, partly speculative, of social-historical laws. The final section of the paper tries to argue that the subjective intentions of individuals are irrelevant to historical explanation. (shrink)

Collingwood's well-known dicta about history and its practice are not expressions of a perverse idealism but are rooted in reflection on his own work as historian. The problem which informs his writings on history was to make sense of the discipline of history without opening the way to historical skepticism. The early view of his Speculum Mentis, rooted in an external philosophical stance and not in the actual practice of history, was actually skeptical. In his middle years he regarded history (...) as the science of historical evidence, but this view left obscure the interest of history in the historical past. In his most mature view, as expressed in The Idea of History, Collingwood comes to see how the discipline of history, judged in terms of its own procedures and not by external norms imposed upon it from other sources, is able to make responsible knowledge claims and avoid the threat of skepticism. His well-known views about the historian's re-thinking past thought, the autonomy of history and the historical imagination all play roles to that end, and are entirely reasonable when it is understood what Collingwood intends by them. They are part of his theory of historical knowing, not of historical explanation. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Present-day interest in history among philosophers seems largely limited to a debate over the nature of historical explanation among those who for Humean reasons insist that all explanations must rest upon general laws and history cannot be an exception to this, and those who say the historians do explain and since they do not use general laws the Humean claim is obviously mistaken. Like the latter, the present paper takes the explanations of historians seriously, but unlike the latter it is (...) not willing to limit the role of philosophy of history merely to the elucidation of the language in which historians give final expression of their work. Rather it recognizes that those explanations themselves set the stage for further inquiry in that they are required to be justified. It is here that the theories or general laws demanded by Humean analysis come in. After examining examples of general laws offered by way of example of what the "Humean" philosophers are supposed to have in mind, each of which is an immediate generalization of the explanation it is called upon to explain and is, hence, an instance of what has been called "the dogma of universality," some examples of more promising prospects of theory in history are examined. (shrink)

"An adequate theory of culture," says David Bidney in Theoretical Anthropology, "must explain the origin of culture and its intrinsic relations to the psychobiological nature of man. To insist upon the self-sufficiency and autonomy of culture, as if culture were a closed system requiring only historical explanations in terms of other cultural phenomena, is not to explain culture, but to leave its origin a mystery or an accident of time". Earlier, on the same page, he writes, "Culture is not an (...) 'objective construct' whose existence is independent of man; it depends, rather, upon man's innate equipment and biological inheritance." These formulations reflect both his own interests and his misconstrual of the intentions of other anthropologists. One would suspect from the way he puts it that it was quite common for anthropologists to talk about a self-subsistent entity, culture, really existing independent of human beings. This is simply not the case, but the reasons for his view must be made apparent. (shrink)

Knowledge, including historical knowledge, is dependent upon the procedure by which it is acquired. Nowell-Smith attempts to drive a logical wedge between the assertion of historical statements and the objects to which they refer. This distinction between assertion and referent, however, does not exist in the practice of history. In historical study there is no way to acquire knowledge except through the construction of theory. The brute sensory data which form an essential part of an understanding of the present are (...) not available to historians. As far as the epistemology of history is concerned, the real past has no influence on historical knowledge. Though truth may be the object of the historical enterprise, it cannot be obtained except through theory, and is, therefore, inseparable from the infrastructure of that enterprise. (shrink)

Is it possible not to have a sense of the historical? I remember how surprised I was when I first saw the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and how I had no doubt that the people who lived and worked around it surely must not have such a sense. I now suppose that I could be mistaken about that, and that perhaps what I saw was owing to their not drawing the distinction between the holy and the profane (...) the way we do. Nevertheless, I shall proceed in the direction of my original thought in order to move my discussion along the lines I wish it to take. What I saw when I first saw that church was that it was not set off from the everyday life and work of the people who lived and worked in its vicinity. Shopping stalls were virtually up against its walls, and while it was a place of great importance—both with respect to its holiness and its history—it was in no way separated from the mundane existence which was all around it. Surely, I thought, if the accounts recorded in the Gospels took place not in the Middle East but in what is now the western world—Paris, London or New York—the almost complete interaction of historical site and everyday life would not be what would be witnessed by someone coming upon the Church in its western location. One supposes that it would be separated from the world of everyday—no doubt by a fence of some sort—and rather than be open to anyone who wishes to enter, it is hard to doubt that there would be a booth at the entrance and a charge for admission. That the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built on the reported site of Jesus’ burial, could be so much a part of the everyday world can only be, I thought to myself, because the people who live and work around it simply lack a sense of history. (shrink)

Though many would prefer to have nothing to do with teleological explanations, it is evident that the writings of biologists and social scientists abound with them, and it is worth paying attention to the conditions under which they may be made responsibly. It emerges that responsible teleological statements would have to be made about instances of recurrent structures having specifiable characteristics, a situation which is patently the case for biology but still unsettled in, say, anthropology. In the final part of (...) the paper it is shown that satisfying this condition provides a basis for formulating general laws of the more orthodox kind. (shrink)