History and Explanation

Models are the coin of the realm in current philosophy of
science, as they are in science itself, having replaced laws and theories
as the primary strategy. Logical Positivism tried to erase the older
neo-Kantian distinction between ideal constructions and reality. It
returns in the case of models. Nowak's concept of idealization provided
an alternative account of this issue. It construed model application
as concretizations of hypotheses which improve by accounting
for exceptions. This appears to account for physical law. But it raises
the problem of uniqueness: is the result unique, as physical law should
be? Neo-Kantianism failed this test. Its solutions were circular justifications
for claims of uniqueness. Nowak inherited the problem without
resolving it.

reductionism: historiography and psychology on sociological, economic, or psychological explanations, and so dependent on terms borrowed from those disciplines. If the answer is "yes," then reducibility implies the absence of sui generis historiographic explanations. Historiographic explanations are reducible, on this way of understanding that term, if they are simply a species of, or are essentially dependent on, some other type of theoretical explanation, in this case sociological, economic, or psychological. This way, we avoid begging questions concerning the relation between explanation and the presence of laws and so remain noncommittal as to the nomological concept of explanation (cf. Hempel 1965). Another preliminary point that needs to be made concerns the modality used in couching our question. The issue is not whether historiographic explanations can borrow from the social sciences (to be understood hereafter as including psychology); clearly they can and do so while retaining a robust sense of sui generis historiographic explanation. There is an obvious sense in which social scientific explanations may well be useful for historiographic inquiry: they may sometimes be required as supplementary to the otherwise incomplete historiographic explanations. Even so, there could still be room for a unique, historiographic, type of explanation, even if this were necessarily only part of the full explanation of historical events. The principal concern is with whether there can be such a unique type of historiographic explanation, one that does not depend for its explanatory force on explanations from other disciplines. Our discussion will inevitably yield conclusions about the extent to which historians should consult the human sciences in their search for adequate explanations.

The aim of this paper is two-fold: to engage the contemporary discussion about the nature of relations between different scientific disciplines, as well as to disentangle the concept of integration of sciences from superstructures of rival proposals. The authors start with a critical analysis of the Polish contribution to the discussion about the nature of integration of sciences from the second half of the XXth century. Such a step is followed by elaborating a refined account of integration and by disentangling the concept of integration from superstructures of rival proposals – unification and interdisciplinarity. On the grounds of such a refined account the authors deliver a reconstruction of a successful scientific integration. In doing this they introduce the idea of connective knowledge as generated by the methodology of humanities. After reconstructing the successful integration trial, in the concluding remarks their account of integration is specified and summarized

The article is of methodological nature and aims to evaluate the content validity of Carl Joachim Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski’s totalitarian syndrome, that is, the extent to which this theoretical framework accurately represents the social phenomena to which it refers. It introduces the critical analysis of the individual concepts extracted from the totalitarian syndrome as the indicators of totalitarianism and the model as a whole as a research tool for measuring political regimes. The paper begins with the discussion on an alternative concept of totalitarianism formulated by Nicholas Timasheff to illustrate the context in which the authors of the theoretical categories of totalitarianism created them. Then, the article goes on to analyze the nature and major characteristics of Friedrich and Brzezinski’s totalitarian syndrome as well as these reviews of Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, which addressed the validity of the model. Social scientists have widely critici...

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This paper was written as a chapter for a book prepared as a background for training and education at the Catholic University of Campinas in Brazil in 1988. Some ideas have been included in the original version, particularly those related to the uncertainty principle in
social sciences. The main objective is to discuss the model for the natural sciences and a comparison with social sciences structure. The analysis of the deductive-nomological model of natural sciences shows that the social sciences cannot have the same structure for logical reasons. It was used in the text the same image used in quantum mechanics, it means, the Uncertainty Principle to show the special status of socials sciences. Finally, I decided to keep the text as it was published in 1998, even though new ideas have been developed in other publications on the same issue.

Accepting with Roth, as a starting-point, the notion of a "narrative sentence" (from Danto's Analytical Philosophy of History), accepting also his view that a narrative explanation explains that which it constructs, I analyze the "relating of events" within a temporal frame as does Roth, coming to different conclusions: I deny any necessary connection between a narrative explanation and a narrative sentence, and object to Roth's insistence on "nonstandardization" as a necessary feature of a narrative explanation. I argue that a "passage of time" is characteristic of all our descriptions, whether scientific, historical or anything else. Drawing on Quine as does Roth, and as I have argued elsewhere, it is a pragmatic question how large a "unit of empirical significance" is to be taken to be, and different practical situations may require different practical decisions about what sizes of unit are required, with whole narratives being units of significance in themselves. Problems of the epistemic structure of narratives remain, and I argue that, to relate a passage of time, we need a theory that enables us to preclude any temporal gaps. A theory of conceptual linkage of any stripe seems incapable of doing that.

The aim of the paper is to propose an understanding of idealization in terms of Nowak's unitarian metaphysics. Two natural interpretations of the procedure are critically discussed and rejected as inadequate. The first account of idealization is unable to explain why idealized factors cease to exert influence on the investigated magnitude. The second account of idealization solves this problem but does so at the cost of blurring the distinction between idealization and abstraction. Moreover, it faces the consequence that the process of idealization instead of leading to a sharper understanding of phenomena will normally result in making the picture more and more probabilistic. I propose a third account of idealization in unitarian terms that solves all three problems.

Karl Popper's critique of theoretical history remains formidable but contains serious flaws. Popper held erroneous views about the practice of the natural sciences and created overly severe strictures for theoretical statements in the social sciences. General theory and general theoretical statements play a legitimate role in the social sciences. Merton has promoted middle-range theories and models and Lakatos multiple ontologies. Оne can answer Popper's criticisms of either the impossibility or triviality of longterm historical laws by searching for stable constellations of local or middle-range laws rather than a universal law. Moreover, the successful use in the social sciences of various types of scales of measurement rather than an absolute scale shows that quantitative analysis is possible in history. Investigators need to find the boundaries, the frameworks of feasibility, in which historical trends and laws operate. Popper's maximalism plays into the irrationalist trends that he himself deplored. If historical investigators and theoreticians set appropriate goals for theoretical history, they can practice their discipline responsibly and find meanings, if not a single meaning, in history.

East European and Soviet Marxism have on the whole remained little concerned with the cluster of problems traditionally associated with non-Marxist theories of action. To be sure that neglect is due in large measure to the concommitant rejection by orthodox Marxist-Leninists of the foundations of much Western action theory and its philosophy, variously vilified as positivist, subjectivist, idealist, etc. What the Marxists themselves have had to say about such matters as the relation between intentions and actions, the difference between behavior and action, the connection between basic actions and the results or effects of actions, on one hand; or what they have had to say about such classical methodological problems as act-identification and description, the choice of a cognitive perspective in the construction of analyses of actions (explanation vs understanding), on the other hand -on these and other matters what they have said most often comes down to exceedingly general observations about the nature of 'practice' set out in the context of the doctrine about socio-economic relations.

East European and Soviet Marxism have on the whole remained little concerned with the cluster of problems traditionally associated with non-Marxist theories of action. To be sure that neglect is due in large measure to the concommitant rejection by orthodox Marxist-Leninists of the foundations of much Western action theory and its philosophy, variously vilified as positivist, subjectivist, idealist, etc. What the Marxists themselves have had to say about such matters as the relation between intentions and actions, the difference between behavior and action, the connection between basic actions and the results or effects of actions, on one hand; or what they have had to say about such classical methodological problems as act-identification and description, the choice of a cognitive perspective in the construction of analyses of actions (explanation vs understanding), on the other hand -on these and other matters what they have said most often comes down to exceedingly general observations about the nature of 'practice' set out in the context of the doctrine about socio-economic relations.

The aim of this paper is to consider the influence of the methodological status of the concept of the totalitarian syndrome on the strategy of its development. It is argued that the totalitarian syndrome as put forward by Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski represented a kind of social modelling. However, there are different approaches to modelling in the social sciences. Modelling, when perceived from a neo-Hegelian perspectives, leads to the elaboration of dependencies between social phenomenon and their main factors. Modelling, when seen from a neo-Weberian perspective, relies on the construction of notions which systematize and order social phenomena. This hypothesis is illustrated by a methodological analysis of the extension of the totalitarian syndrome authored by Achim Siegel and Mark Thompson.

The author in terms of idealizational theory of science explicates two approaches to history represented by positivism (Carl G. Hempel) and narrativism (Hayden White). According to positivism, history is branch of science, according to narrativism, history is closer to literature. In the second part of this paper, the author paraphrases some paradoxes of historical narrative elaborated by mentioned-above representatives of these standpoints what is argument for unity of scientific methods presupposed by idealizational theory of science.

The book reveals different dimensions of modeling in the historical sciences. Papers collected in the first part (Ontology of the Historical Process) consider different models of historical reality and discuss their status. The second part (Modeling in the Methodology of History) presents various forms of idealization in historiographic research. The papers in the third part (Modeling in the Research Practice) present various models of past reality (e.g. of Poland, Central Europe and the general history of the feudal system) put forward by historians. Other papers consider the status of scientific laws and historical generalizations. The volume will be of interest to those who study analytical philosophy of history, methodology of history and social sciences, social philosophy as well as theory and history of historiography.

The paper presents an extension of L. Nowak's idealization theory of science in order to explicate intuitions about unpredictability and contingency of history shared by professional historians and methodologists of history. In the first part of the paper, a critical analysis of some explications (G. Reisch, M. Shermer) of such intuitions, based on the conceptual apparatus of the chaos theory, is presented. In the second part of the paper, an original model of cascade process is elaborated that conceptualizes the contingency of history. This model is subsequently compared with M. Shermer's chaotic model of historical sequences. In third part of this paper, an application of the model of cascade process is shown in the construction of a scientific theory, historical narrative and in historical research.

The aim of this paper is to consider the standard objections put against the construction of metanarratives in the philosophy of history. The author distinguishes following intellectual sources questioning the grasp of Entirety in the philosophy of history: anti-naturalistic German philosophy of science, dogmatic Marxism, liberalism and postmodernism. Analysis of the content of these stances allows for disclose of hidden methodological and theoretical premises which are responsible for misunderstanding and critique of the historiosophical discourse.

The aim of the paper is an extension of the idealizational theory of science in order to explicate intuitions of historians and philosophers of history about unpredictability and contingency of history. The author identifies two types of essential structures: the first kind dominated by the main factor and the second kind which is dominated by a class of secondary factors. In an essential structure dominated by the main factor, the power of influence it exerts is greater than the sum of the power of influence of secondary factors. In an essential structure dominated by secondary factors, their total influence is greater than the influence exerted by the main factor, although the power of the latter influence is greater than the power of influence of each secondary factor taken separately. In the latter kind of essential structure the so-called cascade effect can occur which means that at certain moment the power of influence of secondary factors can be greater than influence of main factor. In the further part of this paper, the author examines consequences of cascade effect for construction of scientific theory and historical narrative

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that Griinbaum's purported defense of Hempers thesis of the symmetry of explanation and prediction is fundamentally inadequate by virtue of the fact that Griinbaum adopts an extended and revised version of the thesis pertaining to scientific understanding in general in lieu of the original and restricted version advanced by Hempel pertaining to scientific explanation in particular. When Hempel's thesis rather than G riinbaum's revision is recognized as the relevant object of criticism, it becomes clear that Griinbaum has not demonstrated that Hempel ab omni naevo vindicatus. Indeed, when correctly understood, it becomes clear that Bromberger's criticisms, especially, support the sound conclusion that the relationship between explanations and predictions is sometimes symmetrical yet sometimes asymmetrical, i.e., the relationship that obtains is non-symmetrical. Philosophical Studiea 25 (1974) 173-187. All Right~ Reserved Copyright 9 1974 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht-Itolland

Karl Popper's critique of theoretical history remains formidable but contains serious flaws. Popper held erroneous views about the practice of the natural sciences and created overly severe strictures for theoretical statements in the social sciences. General theory and general theoretical statements play a legitimate role in the social sciences. Merton has promoted middle-range theories and models and Lakatos multiple ontologies. Оne can answer Popper's criticisms of either the impossibility or triviality of longterm historical laws by searching for stable constellations of local or middle-range laws rather than a universal law. Moreover, the successful use in the social sciences of various types of scales of measurement rather than an absolute scale shows that quantitative analysis is possible in history. Investigators need to find the boundaries, the frameworks of feasibility, in which historical trends and laws operate. Popper's maximalism plays into the irrationalist trends that he himself deplored. If historical investigators and theoreticians set appropriate goals for theoretical history, they can practice their discipline responsibly and find meanings, if not a single meaning, in history.