The discussion so far has restated, analyzed, and criticized the current three main approaches to 9/11. It shows we do not presently possess anything resembling an acceptable or even a widely shared view of this series of events. It remains to for-mulate an alternative framework (or concep tual matrix), in short a general theory to comprehend, understand, or interpret—three terms I w ill be using interchangeabl y here—the events comprising 9/11.
Greek philosophy takes an ahistorical approach to knowledge as the grasp of what is as it is. This view, which is already clear in Parmenides, is reinforced by Aristotle’s famous claim that poetry is, as he says, “more philosophic and of graver import than history.”1 The reason is that poetry deals with general statements, or universals, but historical events only take place once. From Aristotle until modern philosophy, history was main ly thought to be irrelevant to t heories of knowledg e.
History, which is lurking in the conceptual w ings as it were, emerges with increas-ing force in a series of modern thinkers, who understand it in often very different ways. The philosophy of history is replete with religiously inspired attempts to find meaning and structure in history by relating it to some specific, divinely ordered plan. Theologians and religious thinkers have attempted to find meaning in historical events as expressions of divine will. 2 One reason for theological interest in this question is the problem of evil. Thus Leibniz’s Theodicy (1709)3 attempts to provide a logical interpretation o f history t hat makes the tragedies of history compatible with the will of a benevolent God. In the twentieth century theologians such as Jacques Maritain4 offered systematic effort s to provide Christia n interpretations of history.
The theological approa ch to history gradually gave way in the modern period to efforts to u nderstand historical phenom ena in terms of the f inite human being. Vico and Herder provide two of the more influential approaches. Giambattista Vico’s New Science (1725)5 interprets history through the idea of a universal human nature and a universal history. His interpretation of the history of civilization offers the view that there is an underlying uniformity in human nature, across historical settings, that permits ex planation of historical act ions and processes.
Kant’s former student, Johann Gottfried Herder, whom Kant severely criticizes, takes a very different approach from Kant to human nature and human ideas and motivations. Herder argues for the historical contextuality of human nature in his work in a series of writings, including This Too A Philosophy of History For the Formation of Humanity (1774).6 He advances a historicized u nderstanding of human
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nature, advocating the idea that human nature is itself a historical product and that human beings act differently in different periods of historical development.
These views, opposed by Kant, were later influential on Hegel and, through him, on Marx.
Since 9/11 is composed of historical events, the task of formulating a theory of 9/11 belongs to the domain of the epistemology of history. There is a difference between writing about historical events or history in general, and the epistemology of history. “Rules” of how to go about writing history are not permanent, but are constantly being “negotiated” between working historians who arrive, through public debate, at views that are shared for a time and then later revised about the appropriate ways to approach historical phenomena. At any given moment, working historians presuppose more or less widely shared views about the discipline in gathering information in a wide variety of ways, which they narrate and interpret.
The “construction” of a historical narrative may, but need not, touch on epistemo-logical questions.
7
The writing of history centers on an effort to “know” the past. The claim to
“know” history is more frequently made than justified. Hegel, who affirms knowledge of historical events, never clearly says, but merely suggests, how “know-ing history” is possible. The numerous views of historical knowledge that arose after Hegel include, in no particular order, the Marxist idea that history should be understood against the background of the development of political economy;
Ranke’s claim to know history as it really happened, which claim Sartre applied in his study of Flaubert; the well known religious approach to the eschatological explanation of historical phenom ena by such thin kers as August ine,Ernst Troeltsch, and Karl Löwith; Croce’s idea that there is no difference between philosophy and history; R. G. Collingwood’s view that to understand history requires one to be able to reenact it on the level of mind; Heidegger’s claim that we must understand history against the background of the history of being, and so on.
The epistemology of histor y is simi lar to other forms of epistemology in requiring a theory of knowledge about a particular epistemological region. Observers distinguish between explanations based i. A. For insta nce, on common sense, science, social sci-ence, and history.8 A central question is whether the form of historical knowledge is typically the same as that of the natural sciences. I will answer this question negatively, turning from a natural-scientific to an action-theoretical approach to historical knowledge. I will stress a n approach to history which asser ts it is the result of human actions, which can be understood ( verstehen ) but which cannot be explained (erklären ).
Hempel’s
Hempel’sPositivist Positivist Approach to History Approach to History
In tur ning to the epistemology of history , it wil l be useful to st art w ith Carl Hempel’s theory, for several reasons. First, it is a widely influential effort to describe the epistemology of history. Second, even if it now seems dated, at the time it appeared,
MODELS OF HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE 43
during the heyday of Vienna Circle positivism, it att racted much attention. Third, it illustrates the strong commitment to science, as a main—even, as the only impor-tant—source of knowledge. Under the heading of scientism, this approach is still often featured in t he current debate.9
Hempel’s approach is motivated by two assumptions. On the one hand, science and only science serves as a reliable source of knowledge, since other cognitive strategies are insufficiently rigorous. On the other hand, the main elements of the scientific approach can, under the proper circumstances, be successfully applied to history. The suspicion that any acceptable cognitive approach needs to rely on a recognizable form of the scientific method is familiar in recent debate. An extreme form of this view is physicalism, or the claim that, once more under appropriate conditions, all other sciences can be “reduced” to, hence replaced by, physics, which incarnates t he only acceptable mode l of knowledge. This v iew was i mportant among thinkers active in or influenced by Vienna Circle positivism. Karl Popper applied a version of this model to Marxism
10
and Adolf Grunbaum applied it to psycho-analysis.11 Each argues along similar lines that neither Marxism nor psychoanalysis meets proper scientific criteria, which they identify with physicalism; hence, from this perspective, neither Marxism nor psychoanalysis is an acceptable source of knowledge. Carl Hempel developed a very similar approach for the epistemology of history.12
Popper and Grunbaum were both interested in disqualifying rival theories.
Hempel is not interested in disqualifying other claims to knowledge. He is rather concerned with identifying the conditions under which we can understand history as a reliable cognitive source. For Hempel as for Kant, we need to determine the conditions of the possibility of various forms of cognition Yet, unlike Kant, Hempel, who is influenced by later positivism, believes science is not an a priori but rather an a posteriori discipline, hence inevitably dependent on experience in all its many forms.
Hempel’s theory of history is counterintuitive. At least intuitively, there is a difference in kind between natural occurrences, such as the rotation of a planet on its axi s while revolving in its orbit aro und the sun, and historical events, such as the Peloponnesian War. Hempel’s basic insight is that history can be taken as a source of rigorous knowledge if, and only if, it can be considered as if it were a natural science, hence can be evaluated according to natural scientific e pistemological sta ndards.
At least since Ar istotle, it has often been t hought that the approa ch to knowledge depends on, hence needs to be adjusted to, the part icular domain. According to th is view, there is one approach for chemistry, and another for physics. A weaker version of this idea is Wilhelm Dilthey’s familiar distinction between interpretation and explanation as cognitive approaches respectively appropriate for the soft, or social sciences, and for the ha rd, or natural sciences. René Descar tes denies any correlation between particular cognitive domains and appropriate methods through his insistence on a single universal met hod, a method applicabl e without exception in a ll the many domains. Positivists, who favor at least in principle the reduction of all forms of
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knowledge to physics, are neo-Cartesians, who tend for this reason to deny there is more than one approach to knowledge in a rigorous sense of the term.
For Hempel, who is closer to Descartes t han to Dilt hey or even Aristotle, t here is finally only a single form of scientific knowledge, hence only a single scientific approach that holds across the board in a ll scientif ic domains. Hempel dev elops this view in an srcinal conception of scientific law known as the covering-law model.
This model is based on a distinction between so-called deductive-nomological and inductive-statistical types of explanation. Both types depend on a similar structure, composed of initial conditions and law-like generalizations to explain one or more events. According to Hempel, scientific explanation consists in deducing a statement to explain a fact in term s of scientific laws.13
The insight behind this covering law model is that no cognitive claim is acceptable in any cognitive domain that is not the consequence of “unbroken” laws. For Hempel, who detects symmetry between explanation and prediction, the former concerns what has already occurred, whereas prediction, for instance scientific prediction, explains what wi ll occur. On this model, the occurrence of an future event is deduced from general laws and statements of antecedent conditions. A general law—a universal statement capable of being confirmed or disconfirmed empirically—functions in the same way in history and in the natural sciences. 14 On Hempel’s model, a general law is “explained” when it is “deduced” from more compreh ensive laws.15
This approach more closely resembles an unredeemed promissory note than a description of anything historians actually do in writing about historical phenomena.
It is problematic both as philosophy of science and as an approach to the epistemology of history. An approach to science, which is defined by adherence to general laws, is not obviously adequate. In proposing this way of defining science, Hempel casts his net too narrowly. Cognitive domains such as archeology and paleontology—
routinely accepted as forms of science, and which do not feature general laws in any obvious sense—would fall outside Hempel’ s view of t he wider scientif ic domain.
Hempel’s normative vision of history fails in practice. He points to, but never identifies, any general historical laws. He neglects the actual practice of writing history i n favor of an a priori deductive model of historical knowledge. Professional historians, who believe they are offering genuine explanations, do not conform to Hempel’s model. Hempel could counter that we should reject current approaches by working historians, since there are better ways to write history. Yet, if there are in fact no general hi storical laws, t hen the covering-law mode l cannot hold, even as an ideal of what historians ought to be doing. To the further objections that he simply assimi lates people to thi ngs and history to natural science, Hempel could rep ly that this is how objective cognition should be understood in all the cogn itive disciplines.
Yet what if “objectivit y” had a dif ferent meaning in d ifferent cognitive disciplines?
In part, the defense of Hempel’s effort to apply natural scientific standards to history turns on finding an appropriate form of the claim that historical laws are similar to scientific laws. Clayton Roberts looks for middle ground between simply insisting on theoretical necessity or, on the contrary, denying that a covering-law
MODELS OF HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE 45
model applies to human h istory. The distinct ion between the world in which we live and act, which def ies mathematical description, and t he subatomic world of part icle physics, which can be mathematically described in terms of physical processes, is familiar. Roberts draws attention to an analogous distinction between so-called macro-events, such as wars and revolutions, where the covering law model is admit-tedly invalid, and so-called micro-events, where it supposedly holds. 16 Yet this defense simply concedes the point to working historians, who deny the covering law model applies to w ritings about human history.
Murray Murphey defends Hempel’s conception of historical law in a different way. He suggests that universal laws in natural science take the form of law-like generalizations in the historical domain. According to Murphey, history chiefly consists in generalizations true of members of a given society at a given time. 17 He claims historians are in fact concerned with discovering laws, hence are required to provide statements relevantly similar to Hempel’s conception of a covering law.18 Yet, this argument conflates law-like regularities, which being regular are law-like, but are not laws, with laws i n Hempel’s sense of the ter m.
Murphey cites a series of authorities, who believe natural science deals with gen-eral statements, bu t history, as Aristotle thin ks, deals only with sing ular statements.19 This point undercuts any effort to understand science as resting on universal laws that apply across the board without restrictions. Murphey, who contends that historical interpretations are not different from scien tif ic theories,20 concedes only that histo-rians are working with generalizations that apply within a limited spatio-temporal frame and not in general.21 In other words, if we understand the circumstances in which events occur, and if we understand the intentions motivating the historical actors, we may be abl e to understand t hese events as a product of these circum stances from which, however, they cannot be said to follow in any necessary way. Obviously historians, anthropologists, psychologists and others can, and on occasion success-fully do, generalize about a particular society, as do, e.g., Perry Miller in The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century ,22 and Edmund Morgan in The Puritan Family .23 But generalizations abou t society are not the same as natura l scientific laws, hence such generaliz ations are incompa tible with, a nd cannot be compared to, these laws. Murphey is right that we can successfully understand events in terms of circumstances f rom which they cannot be d educed. He is fur ther correct that we can successfully generalize about a particular society. But he is incorrect to believe that historical laws are the sa me as, or similar in a relevant way, to scientific laws.
Realism and the Epistemology of History Realism and the Epistemology of History
Hempel’s stra ightforward adaptation of a version of the modern scientif ic method to the epistemology of history fails because of the obvious disanalogy between knowl-edge of nature, which concerns natural objects, and knowlknowl-edge of history, which concerns historical events. This failure is not unexpec ted, but expected. It is implau-sible to think historical events can be known in the same way as natural objects.
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Hempel, a Cartesian with respect to history, presupposes that a single scientific method is applicable to all kinds of epistemological objects. His failure suggests the utilit y of a revised form of the Aristotelian view t hat the ty pe of knowledge in a given domain depends on the specific type of object. This implies that any theory of historical k nowledge needs to adapt to the historical events it seeks to cognize.
In part, t he problem of historical knowledge turns on the question of realism. Al l theories of knowledge make at least an i mplicit commitment to realism, but there are many different ways of understanding reality as the object of knowledge. Ordinary realism is i mplicit in the conviction of the individual—one wit hout a special philo-sophical background—who be lieves that in ordinary ci rcumstances we in fact k now the way the world is. Metaphysi cal real ism, sometimes also ca lled Platonic realism, is the more sophisticated, p hilosophical reformulation of o rdinar y realism as a variant of the general claim that under proper conditions we can reliably know the mind-independent external world as it is beyond mere appearance. Empirical realism is a popular form of the weaker counterclaim that at best we can only reliably know what is given to us in conscious experience, but which is nothing as grand as the way the world is in itself. Scientific realism is frequently associated with meta-physical realism as well as with scientism , or the idea that science and only science succeeds in uncovering, or exposing, the structure of the mind-independent reality as it is. Marxist aesthet ics prefers socialist realism, a particu lar art istic style, as a source of knowledge about the world in which we live.
For the epistemology of history it is useful to focus on metaphysical realism.
This view of realism is incompatible with any form of the epistemology of history.
Metaphysical realism is characterized by stability, absence of change—hence, sameness from moment to moment. History is composed of a changing sequence of events, which are not stable but unstable, hence constantly subject to change, and different from moment to moment. If the epistemology of history concerns knowledge of a series of events, then it is incompatible with metaphysical realism.
In cognizing historical events, one cannot reliably claim to cognize the mind-independent reality, as it is beyond appearance, and hence one cannot reliably claim to cognize the metaphysical reality of historical events. At most, in the epistemology of history, knowledge turns on making out claims to know the ever-changing sequence of historical events, which, since they change, cannot be said to be in one way rather than another, hence cannot be said to be known as they are in themselves.
Epistemological Strategy and the Epistemology of History Epistemological Strategy and the Epistemology of History
A similar problem arises about appropriate epistemological strategy. For present purposes, the various strategies for knowledge can be grouped around three main approaches, which one can callintuitionism, foundationalism, and representationalism.
Intuitionism is the view that, at least some of the time, we can reliably claim to grasp the world as it is in finding a way to go beyond mere appearance to
Intuitionism is the view that, at least some of the time, we can reliably claim to grasp the world as it is in finding a way to go beyond mere appearance to