Stuart Glennan Butler University September 2010

 Terminological Questions: What is history?  A Selective Survey of Models of Explanation – their Problems and Prospects  Ephemeral Mechanisms  Contingency in Biology and Human History

 Terminological Questions: What is history?  A Selective Survey of Models of Explanation – their Problems and Prospects  Ephemeral Mechanisms  Contingency in Biology and Human History

Natural SciencesHuman Sciences Historical QuestionsNatural History - What caused the extinction of the dinosaurs at the end of the cretaceous period? - What caused the creation of Jupiter’s moons? Human History - What role did Christianity play in the fall of the Roman Empire? - What caused hyper- inflation in Germany in the 1920s? Ahistorical QuestionsAhistorical Natural Science - How does the action potential work? - What reactions are involved in combustion? Ahistorical Human/Social Science - What are the causes of religious belief? - What explains the creation and bursting of financial bubbles?

 Naturalism - the view that social phenomena are susceptible to the same sort of (causal) explanations as natural phenomena. Social phenomena are a species of natural phenomena.  Anti-Naturalism - the view that social phenomena are of a different kind than natural phenomena, and that explanation of such phenomena require a special method of interpretation (Verstehen).

 Terminological Questions: What is history?  A Selective Survey of Models of Explanation – their Problems and Prospects  Ephemeral Mechanisms  Contingency in Biology and Human History

 Explanations are arguments: L 1, L 2,…, L n, C 1, C 2,…, C m, E  Explanations essentially involve laws (deterministic or stochastic)  In theory the explanandum E can be either a singular statement or a general law, but there are problems with the general case  Hempel (1942) argues that human-historical explanations should, in principle have this form.

 There is no good account of how to distinguish laws from non-lawful generalizations.  Many singular explanations do not appear to invoke laws  Counterexamples to the covering law model suggest that the DN model fails to capture causal/explanatory relevance.

 Explananda are singular events  An event is explained by locating it within the causal nexus –a vast network of intersecting causal processes  Explanations don’t obviously depend upon laws

 The definition of a causal interaction is problematic  The account tends towards a reductionist/physics-oriented approach to explanation.  There is no account of the explanation of general phenomena  There is not a good account of proper explanatory grain  The approach apparently fails to capture the concept of a causally relevant property

 The dominant explanatory approach among historians.  Explananda are singular events  Narratives are multi-stranded temporally organized sequences of causally related events - like the causal nexus approach

 Like the causal nexus account, the definition of a causal interaction is problematic  Like the causal nexus approach, there is no account of the explanation of general phenomena  Like the causal nexus approach, there is not a good account of causally relevant properties and proper explanatory grain

A mechanism for a behavior is a system that produces that behavior by the interaction of a number of parts, where the interactions between parts can be characterized by direct, invariant, change-relating generalizations. Glennan 2002

 Mechanisms are systems -- collections of entities (parts, components) that act and interact  Mechanisms and their parts are individuated in light of a specification of the mechanism’s behavior  Mechanisms do not behave according to strict laws, but their behavior is typically regular and robust

 Explananda are patterns of behavior (or phenomena) rather than single events.  These patterns of behavior can be characterized by robust and invariant generalizations that are akin to laws  Explanation typically involves construction of a model that applies to a type of mechanism rather than a specific token.

 Terminological Questions: What is history?  A Selective Survey of Models of Explanation – their Problems and Prospects  Ephemeral Mechanisms  Contingency in Biology and Human History

Mechanical systems are:  Aggregated entities that have a stable spatial or functional organization over time. Mechanical processes:  Sequences of events in a particular region of space-time.  The operation of mechanisms qua systems give rise to mechanisms

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An Ephemeral Mechanism is a mechanism where: 1. the configuration of parts is the product of chance or exogenous factors 2. the configuration of parts is short-lived and non-stable 3. The configuration of parts is not an instance of a multiply-realized type.

 Robust Parts (as objects) provide the characters in the narrative.  Change-relating generalizations provide causal links between elements in the causal chain.  Narratives are thus singular, but have a kind of counterfactual generality

 Terminological Questions: What is history?  A Selective Survey of Models of Explanation – their Problems and Prospects  Ephemeral Mechanisms  Contingency in Biology and Human History

Thomas Carlyle Karl Marx

 Change-relating generalizations describing interactions between elements of ephemeral mechanisms/narratives  Generalizations describing the behavior of recurrent and/or temporally stable mechanisms  Generalizations may describe constraints on the structure of ephemeral mechanisms that make outcomes insensitive to narrative details.