Do Historians Study the Mechanisms of History? A Sketch
In this exploratory sketch, I move across the boundaries of philosophy of historiography to social science and its philosophy. If we want to answer the central question of this chapter, we need to know what types of scientific problems historians are inte
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Do Historians Study the Mechanisms of History? A Sketch Daniel Plenge
Abstract In this exploratory sketch, I move across the boundaries of philosophy of historiography to social science and its philosophy. If we want to answer the central question of this chapter, we need to know what types of scientific problems historians are interested in, what history is, and what mechanisms are. I sketch the most prominent theories of social mechanisms in the context of wider ontological approaches. I investigate Mario Bunge’s “Emergentist Systemism,” “Critical Realism” in the tradition of Roy Bhaskar’s influential philosophy, and Daniel Little’s “Methodological Localism.” Since it turns out that mechanisms are taken to be rather different entities, the question is only answered trivially, but some problems are suggested that need to be separated if the debate shall not end up in “mechanism talk.” It is also suggested that philosophers of historiography can find in these debates what they are normally not interested in, that is, science-oriented philosophy of history. Keywords History • Social mechanism • Social system • Social structure • Social causation
10.1 The Question: Historians, Mechanisms, and Histories If we want to approach an answer to the central question raised in the title of this chapter we need to deliver a lot that we are currently incapable of providing. Our question presupposes answers to some of the little but pertinent and notoriously unsolved problems of philosophy of so-called history.
D. Plenge () Philosophisches Seminar, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Domplatz 23, 48143 Münster, Germany e-mail: [email protected] M.I. Kaiser et al. (eds.), Explanation in the Special Sciences: The Case of Biology and History, Synthese Library 367, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-7563-3__10, © Springer ScienceCBusiness Media Dordrecht 2014
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First, we need to know what so-called historians do, that is, what types of problems they claim to solve, try to solve, or even solve in their research before they produce reports on former research, the products of scientific “history” (Topolski 1976). Second, it would be of interest to answer the strange or in these days even seemingly ridiculous question “What is history?” before it perhaps finally makes sense to have a look at whether at least some of the people that are called historians study the mechanisms of history. At this point, some account of what (social) mechanisms are would be of interest. Unfortunately, the bigger part of philosophy of historiography can help us neither in solving the puzzle of what historians do nor of what it is that they perhaps study beyond the so-called historical sources, if we still dare to commit ourselves to realist assumptions at all. Fortunately, there is much and growing literature on social mechanisms in historico-social science discourses and the realist part of its philosophy that might help us in advancing towards an answer.1 What I will try to do in the following is to present some of the indep
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