The Future of Philosophy of Historiography Reviving or Reinventing

Towards a Revival of Analytical
Philosophy of History
Around Paul A. Roth’s Vision of Historical Sciences
Edited by
Krzysztof Brzechczyn
LEIDEN | BOSTON
For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV

Contents
Notes on Contributors vii
Introduction 1
1 Reviving Philosophy of History 9

Paul A. Roth
2 Why Did Analytical Philosophy of History Disappear? Three Narratives

of Decline 28
Herman Paul
3 The Mysterious Case of Analytic Philosophy of History: Paradigm Turn

in Historiography Revisited 42
Piotr Kowalewski
4 Philosophy of History and Analytical Philosophy in Germany: A Special

Relationship? 55
Chris Lorenz
5 The Future of Philosophy of Historiography: Reviving or

Reinventing? 73
Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen
6 A Pragmatist Critique of Dogmatic Philosophy of History 95

Serge Grigoriev
7 Non-representationalism in Philosophy of History: A Case Study 116

Eugen Zeleňák
8 What Do Narratives Explain? Roth, Mink and Weber 130

Stephen Turner
9 How Do Narratives Explain? A Comment from the Point of View

of Poznań School of Methodology 148

vi Contents
10 Antinomies, Multiple Realities and the Pasts 166

Rafał Paweł Wierzchosławski
11 Is a Dramatic Theory of History Possible? Shakespeare’s Richard ii

and ‘Historical Truth’ 204
Géza Kállay
12 Making up ‘Vulnerable’ People: Human Subjects and the Subjective

Experience of Medical Experiment 225
Nancy D. Campbell and Laura Stark
13 “Spring and Autumn Annals” as Narrative Explanation 254

Dawid Rogacz
14 Comments and Replies 273

Paul A. Roth
Name Index 287

Subject Index 294

chapter 5
The Future of Philosophy of Historiography:

Reviving or Reinventing?
Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen
i Introduction
Paul Roth has called for a revival of philosophy of history.1 As he notes, this call
is bound to raise at least two questions: What should be revived? And why this
revival would be worthwhile? Roth has also answered these questions, and I
will return to them later in this essay. While I think that this call is excellent and
timely, it triggers even more complex questions than these two. First, Roth’s “phi-
losophy of history” refers to scholars like Arthur Danto and Louis Mink and more
generally to the intellectual orientation that was known as “analytic philosophy
of history” (as opposed to “speculative philosophy of history”). He could be thus
equally calling for a revival of analytic philosophy of history. But what is analytic
philosophy of history? And what is analytic philosophy itself? More generally,
should any specific style of philosophizing characterize this revived philosophy?
A related concern is whether the philosophy of history should be framed
and defined via some specific philosophical topic or area. It may be argued
that analytic philosophy of history was concerned with explanation, above all,
and that this topic should be also in the center of the philosophy of history re-
vived. Indeed, this is what Roth seems to be saying. Yet another open question
is the relationship to other closely related research fields, such as the theory of
history. It is the theory of history in its various modes that has been growing
and booming in recent years rather than the philosophy of history. But should
the theory of history be part of philosophical investigations? If not, why not?
It is necessary to emphasize that I am not claiming that the “theory of history”
is never philosophical. It often is although it is difficult to spell out in what way
exactly. This distinction is based on an observation that in recent decades an
increasing number of papers have been written on trauma, memory, experi-
ence, new forms of history-writing, use of history, etc., which have not been tra-
ditional topics in explicit philosophical studies. And it is fair to say that these
1 Main sources of inspiration for this commentary are following papers of Roth: 2002, 2008a,b,
2013a,b, 2017a,b, 2018. I regret that I have not been able to peruse more papers for this
occasion.
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��8 | doi 10.1163/9789004356900_007

74 Kuukkanen
investigations are not either the kinds of explicit conceptual explorations that
many associate with philosophy. In brief, while much of the discussion in the
“theory of history” may be philosophically relevant, the theory of history is not
self-evidently philosophy of history.
It would also seem necessary to say something on the aims of the philoso-
phy of history. What is it that we are trying to achieve? Should this field have
some target object, such as historiography and its practice? Should the primary
goal be conceptual clarity like in analytic philosophy? Or something else? And
how about the relation to contemporary philosophy? Would the revived phi-
losophy of history be more or less an autonomous field of philosophical study
perhaps with its own field-specific problems or possibly subsumable under
mainstream philosophical discussions?
Roth makes it clear that he is primarily interested in the nature of historical
explanation and that he regards explanation as the central and most worth-
while issue in analytic philosophy of history. According to Roth, it is “narra-
tive explanation” that is characteristic to history. Roth refers to a rather spe-
cific notion of narrative explanation as understood by Danto and Mink. Quite
clearly, Roth’s idea is that the philosophy of history analyses, should analyze,
narratives as forms of explanation, which in effect means that it is narrativity
that characterises scholarly history-writing. Or as Roth himself expresses this:
“The thought is that a primary philosophical concern is to evaluate the puta-
tive ‘goodness’ of explanations offered in narrative form” (Roth, 2018, p.12). The
main reason that Roth takes an interest in “narrative explanation” is that narra-
tives as explanations have epistemic significance. That is, Roth is interested in
how narratives become “part of a justification of a claim to know” (Roth 2018,
p. 13). There is thus an implication that philosophy of history is normative and
distinguishes the kinds of claims that are justifying from the ones that are
not—but more of this later.
The first part of this essay deals with the question of what philosophy of
history and historiography are and the question, whether analytic philosophy
of history should be revived. And if it should, in what form?
After that, as a more specific commentary on Roth I will attend to the fol-
lowing points:
(1) The idea that historians produce narratives;

(2) The idea that narratives constitute events;
(3) Narratives as explanations;
(4) Justification and the problem of naturalism.
It is necessary to highlight that this essay is primarily a comment on Roth’s

philosophy and thinking. This means that I won’t explore the origins of Roth’s

The Future of Philosophy of Historiography 75
ideas and their relations to other thinkers in the field except when it seems
necessary for their understanding. I have learnt a lot from Roth’s philosophical
thinking and I am looking forward to finding out what he has to say about the
suggestions and analyses made in this short commentary.
ii Philosophy of What?
I think it is best to begin with a terminological clarification. Naturally, there

is no right way to use terms. Yet a terminological confusion and unclarity
causes problems in communication. My problem is that the meaning of the
term ‘history’ is ambiguous, meaning most commonly either the historical
events themselves or scholarly and also non-scholarly attempts to study these
events. Further, I recently visited a school (in the uk) and browsed a text book
that promised to answer the question “What is history?” in its first chapter. It
didn’t, but it did provide an answer to what is studied under the school subject
‘history’.
Most discussants nowadays are interested in the intellectual activity that
tries to make sense of the past, history-writing, in other words, but keep using
the term ‘history’. However, it would be odd to assume that ‘history’ means only
history-writing. Sometimes it means the actual events, sometimes the writing
of those events. And there is, of course, a much older predecessor to a phi-
losophy of history-writing, i.e. the philosophy of history proper covering such
figures as Kant, Vico, Herder, Hegel, Marx and many others. Following Tucker,
my solution is to separate terminologically these two fields (Tucker 2009). “Phi-
losophy of history” means philosophizing about the nature and meaning of
history itself including the past, present and future. The studies in the philoso-
phy of history have often focused on the questions of laws, meaning, and di-
rectionality of historical processes and events themselves, and even on history
itself as a totality. “Philosophy of historiography” means then the philosophical
study of history-writing and research, and of conceptual commitments that
these practices entail.
Associating philosophy of historiography with a scholarly subject has
important consequences. This makes the philosophy of historiography com-
parable to other philosophies of science, such as the philosophies of econom-
ics, biology, physics, etc. Field-specificity in this sense follows an international
trend in the philosophy of science. General philosophy of science that was
born by logical positivism and flourished at least until the rationality debates
by Kuhn, Popper, Feyerabend and others has been waning in comparison.
Field-specificity means that the problems emerging from the dynamics and
pragmatics of the target discipline takes precedence.

76 Kuukkanen
iii Re-birth of Analytic Philosophy of History?
Now when terminological issues have been set aside I am faced with much
more difficult considerations. That is, Roth’s suggestion that analytic philoso-
phy of history would need reviving. It is clear that I am able to scratch the
surface only but I think it is important to highlight some options with regard
to this. My strategy is to proceed step by step and say something within the
limits of space on both conceptual possibilities below. This discussion con-
cludes with a specific suggestion of what philosophy of historiography should
become.
The first question is whether analytic philosophy of history, literally taken,
deserves reviving. This question can be subdivided into further queries:
(a) Should this philosophy be literally somehow ‘analytic’ by style, perhaps

in opposition to ‘continental’ or some other ‘synthetical’ variant?
(b) Would this rebirth of analytic philosophy of history rather revive the
themes or a selection of themes discussed in the 1960s and 1970s by ana-
lytic philosophers of history?
The answer to the first question does not come by easily because it is far from
clear what “analytic philosophy” itself is. Even more pointedly, it is very diffi-
cult to pin down what ‘analytic’ in the context of philosophical practice means.
One of the leading philosophers of the analytic tradition Timothy Williamson
(forthcoming) has tried to provide an answer from his perspective as a student
and a scholar over many years at the University of Oxford, which has been a
bastion of “analytic philosophy” for decades. Although his view is idiosyncratic,
it nevertheless comes from an authoritative figure in this tradition.
There are two observations that I found particularly interesting. The first has
to do with the attitude of so-called analytic philosophers towards metaphysics.
There is no denying that genealogically the origin of analytic philosophy lies
in logical positivism, which was fiercely anti-metaphysical. But now the situ-
ation has radically changed and much of philosophy done under the label of
“analytic philosophy” can be called speculative metaphysics, according to Wil-
liamson. As he notes, analytic epistemologists, for example, “regard the object
of their study as knowing (or justified believing) itself as opposed to the corre-
sponding words or concepts … the epistemologists’ underlying object of study
is knowing itself, not the verb ‘to know’ or the concept of knowing” (William-
son, p. 14). The other interesting remark is Williamson’s own observation how
difficult it has been for eminent scholars of older traditions even to understand
what the younger generation is doing. According to Williamson, this applies to

such scholars as Ayer, Strawson and Dummett. What comes through William-
son’s take on analytic philosophy is that the academically legitimate object of
study and the central questions of philosophizing have changed significantly
over the years. There are no smooth transitions, and not a core subject that has
stayed invariant and unchallenged.
The distinction between ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ philosophy is equally
challenging to define. It is so riddled with peculiar and contingent issues that
it is very hard to understand what these labels are meant to stand for. It is, as
Bernard Williams noted, that the contrast between ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’
is like trying to divide cars to front-wheels and Japanese (Williams 2002). One
refers to a style and the other to a geographical region. Some of the most cel-
ebrated “analytic philosophers” were in fact continental Europeans (e.g. Frege
and Carnap). If it is true that the distinction can be traced back to the 1950s
to an attempt to distinguish the types of logical, linguistic analyses practiced
by philosophers in the English-speaking world (many of whom were refugees
from the Continent) from phenomenological and existential variants of Hus-
serl (who greatly respected ‘analytical’ clarity) and Heidegger, the point of
this distinction has evaporated a long time ago. An “analytic philosopher”
Quine questioned the very idea of specific conceptual analysis and his legacy
is long and lasting in the analytic tradition. In addition to phenomenology
and existentialism, so-called “continental philosophy” covers now so many
other traditions that don’t seem to agree on almost anything: Hegelian ideal-
ism, Marxism, poststructuralism and deconstruction. Equally “analytic phi-
losophy” has radically widened its scope of interest to cover metaphysics,
ethics, the mind-body problem, the existence of God, for example, and it
deals with the topics of many special sciences too. It is far from mere analysis
of language and concepts. Subject does thus not demarcate ‘analytic’ from
‘continental’ either, although the latter may be more inclined to attempt to
transcend our everyday experience through phenomenological studies, seen
also in the writings of David Carr and Paul Ricoeur in the philosophy of
historiography.
One option is that the distinction is kept alive because of sociological rea-
sons, as Gutting suggests by reference to Leitner’s view of the matter (Gutting
2012; Leitner.). That is, specific thinkers are revered and read in certain groups,
while other in the other. Familiarity with one set of thinkers is taken as a
distinctive mark of ‘continental’ and familiarity with an alternative set as a dis-
tinctive mark of ‘analytic’. Many graduate schools appear to reflect and main-
tain this distinction in their reading lists and education. However, it would be
peculiar to uphold any strict borders and reject input from unfamiliar sources
in philosophical studies because of social and institutional reasons.

78 Kuukkanen
The question what demarcates ‘analytic’ from ‘continental’ is naturally too

big an issue to be settled here, and it may be impossible to settle in the first
place. Attempts to define analytic philosophy via a characteristic ‘analytic’
style have been disappointing (e.g. Raatikainen 2001; Glock 2008). Neverthe-
less, maybe the only thing one can offer is the aim of “analytic philosophers”
for clarity, explicitness and straightforward argumentation, something that is
not sought quite so fervently by those who primarily identify with the con-
tinental tradition. Gutting writes that “because of its commitment to clarity,
analytic philosophy functions as an effective lingua franca for any philosophi-
cal ideas”. I think this is correct, or could be at least. Although there are many
worthwhile philosophical traditions besides, the analytic literary tradition
provides the closest to what might be called the default and clearest under-
standings of such concepts as truth, justification, ethics, morality, justice, etc.
Because theories of truth (e.g. correspondence, coherent, deflationary, prag-
matist) are so easily accessible, for example, it makes communication easier,
when this kind of shared vocabulary is used and understood. I don’t mean that
one should somehow be tied to them, but even an alternative view is more
easily communicated if the language is shared. Naturally, it may sometimes
be impossible to communicate a new original philosophical theory in the old
language. For example, Latour’s thinking is philosophically loaded, but it is still
difficult to state where he stands (cf. Kuukkanen 2011a). Yet even in this kind of
case my recommendation is to express the difference as clearly as possible, and
try to indicate, when and why the existing concepts and distinctions are not
enough. Perhaps the minimum requirement is to establish a dialogue between
two languages trying to express, and re-express, how the views differ.
Perhaps the philosophy of historiography should emulate the topics and ob-
jects of study of the historical analytic philosophy of history, that is, revive its
discussion of the 1960s and 1970s? It is well-known that much of that discourse
focused on explanation and was debated between the defenders of the Hemp-
elian covering-law model and the followers of the Gadamer-Collingwoodian
tradition, who emphasised the role of understanding in the historian’s practice.
The idea that historians use narratives or narrative sentences was discussed as
was the question whether a narrative provides an explanation in some sense,
as also Roth has shown. There were a few other topics, such as Walsh’s idea
(borrowed from William Whewell) of colligatory concepts as units that create
and explain historical phenomena, but not many others besides these.
Should the revived philosophy of historiography focus on explanation then?
Why not! However, the focus and the scope of the 1960s and 1970s analytic phi-
losophy of history in this sense would be too narrow in the 21st century. There
is too much going on currently and too many alternative avenues of investiga-
tion available.

First, we should not be constrained by the problems and solutions of the

past and past philosophy. Any philosophy always transforms and enters new
areas of investigation, as noted in connection with the history of analytic phi-
losophy. To take another example, general philosophy of science (in so far as
there is still such as a field) has experienced a turn towards the metaphysics of
science with an interest in natural kinds, universals, laws of nature, etc. While I
am NOT suggesting this kind of turn, and no doubt Roth is neither suggesting
it, the point is that the philosophy of historiography should be both attentive
and open to new problems, turns and discussions. The philosophy of histori-
ography should not tie itself to any specific philosophical school or tradition.
That is, it is not possible to define the scope of an entire field of investigation
from a perspective of any one specific tradition, no matter whether it is Ga-
damerian, positivistic, Quinean, Whitean, postmodernist, narrativist or some-
thing else.
Another important question is the relation to so-called theory of history.
I know it’s not entirely clear what “theory of history” is, as it is not obvious
what “philosophy of history and of historiography” are, or indeed the rela-
tion between ‘theory’ and ‘philosophy’. Nevertheless, it seems to me that it is
the theory of history that is booming rather than the philosophy of it. That is,
there is an avalanche of studies dealing with the issues of trauma, experience,
memory, visual culture, new forms of history-writing, such as even Twitter, etc.
The theory of history understands historiography more clearly as a cultural
practice that changes over time, and occasionally it seems that some of the
research under the theory of history is closer to cultural studies than philo-
sophical analysis. Of course, there might also be a difference with regard to
traditions that have shaped the horizons of investigation in that the theory of
history employs more often philosophers like Heidegger, Derrida and Benja-
min in their analyses than those philosophers who primarily work in English-
speaking philosophy. And it is true that there are differences with regard to
some traditional topics. Philosophers write more about epistemic issues and
epistemology and theorists of history about ethics, politics and morality. This
doesn’t naturally have to be, and it should not be, any principled line of demar-
cation between these two orientations.
In brief, it seems to me that the theory of history is more focused on social
phenomena and changes in it, such as new modes of presenting history, and
on coming to terms with the consequences of these changes. The philosophy
of historiography in turn appears more interested in the studies of concepts
directly (although, as noted above, it is not any more confined to narrow “con-
ceptual analysis” as in the past). All in all, if the theory of history is more sen-
sitive to changes in the social, the line of communication must be open from
philosophy to theory, and vice versa. The theory of history brings new topics

80 Kuukkanen
to the table for consideration trying to characterize their significance. It is not

often very precise conceptually and not aware enough of (‘analytic’) philo-
sophical uses of concepts and terminology. The philosophy of historiography
must be in conversation with the theory of history and maybe bring mate-
rial from its discussion under a closer philosophical analysis. Finally, the focus
on conceptual studies and conceptual conditions of historiography does not
need to be limited to scholarly historiography. It is equally important to study
the conceptual limitations, entailments and possibilities of non-academic
history-writing.
iv Historiography, Narratives and the Constitution of Events
It is time to move to a more detailed analysis and commentary on Roth’s phi-

losophy. There are two key claims in Roth. One is that narrative is essential for
historiography and the other is that narratives are explanations or explanatory.
Given this, it is important first to ask how Roth understands ‘narrative’.
Roth adopts a minimalist definition, according to which ‘narrative’ refers
to “a relating of the passage of time that conceptually links a later event and
an earlier one” (Roth 2018, p.14). By reference to Danto and Mink Roth intro-
duces the idea of a “narrative sentence”, the key insight of this is that there
are true descriptions of a particular time T that could not possibly have been
known at time T. The prototypical example is the statement “The Thirty Years
War began in 1618” by Danto. The other central idea is that these kinds of de-
scriptions belong to stories that only historians can tell. The upshot is, as Roth
says, again following Danto, that “historical events exist only as events under
a [narrative] description” (Roth 2018, p.15; 2017b, p. 6) and that they could
not be known at the time because their historical significance emerged only
later.2
Now I think that the idea that historical events, and in any case, signifi-
cant historical events, such as the Holocaust exist only under a description,
is reasonable. Some others, such as Walsh and Ankersmit, have talked about
colligatory concepts and narrative substances in this same fashion. It could be
said that a new historical event or phenomenon is constructed in this process.
What is unclear to me is why this process should be described as linking two
temporally separate events conceptually. The problem can already be seen by
2 The most relevant paper where Danto introduces these definitions is “Narrative Sentences”
(1962).

considering Roth’s claims that a historical event exists only under a narrative
description but that providing a narrative description is to link together two
temporally distinct events (Roth 2018, pp. 14–15, 2017b, p. 6; see: Danto 1962).
Namely, if a narrative description is linking events together, then the events
must precede narrativization, and the constitution of historical events cannot
thus ultimately depend on their narrativization. It is thus the case that
(1) Narrativization is indeed linking events but it does not constitute events
ultimately. Instead there is a set of events that precede all narrativization
attempts, which are
(i) foundational, or non-historical, in some sense or;
(ii) constituted by some other process than narrativization
OR
(2) Narrativization is not linking events but it ultimately constitutes events;
OR
(3) Narrativization simultaneously creates events and links them together.
I regard it as implausible without some further explication that there was a

set of foundational events or ontology. Further, it would be odd and contrary
to Roth’s thinking to maintain that narrativization creates events but does not
link them together. The third option makes narrativization an all powerful tool
for the historian and seems to go beyond what Roth states in his papers. How
could one narrativize if there are no events with which to start? A more gen-
eral question is: Is Roth’s philosophy necessarily committed to event ontology
of history, i.e. to the idea that historical reality is fundamentally composed of
‘events’? Is historical reality devoid of events and history-writing without rely-
ing on event ontology possible at all?
My suggestion is that it is the very act of constitution, not constitution of
temporal events, that matters. Constitution may now be understood as creat-
ing a phenomenon that has not existed prior to this construction and that si-
multaneously provides some significance to this phenomenon so constituted.
In fact, I don’t think that there are events, at least in a historiographical sense,
before their constitution. It seems that Roth and I agree on the basic point of
constitution itself.
Roth writes aptly about “indeterminacy regarding [how] present kinds ap-
ply to past schemata” (Roth 2002, p. 126) and about indeterminacy of “what
constitutes … ways of classifying and constituting physical behaviors as ac-
tions of particular sorts” (although I would talk about the past as unstructured
rather than changing when our descriptions of it alter) (Roth 2002, p. 136). If

82 Kuukkanen
we consider this meeting here today (in Poznan, 13 October 2015), it is not trivi-
ally clear that this is an ‘event’. What does make it an event? What must be
included? Location (how precisely?), temporality (when does it begin and end
exactly?), speakers (how many?), theme and topic (?), what kind of event it is,
etc. Without these kinds of specifications this ‘event’ is just a series of practices
without a unity and boundaries.
The example that I have used in my book Postnarrativist Philosophy of Histo-
riography is the colligatory concept ‘Thaw’. It gives a sense to a certain period
in the history of the Soviet Union by colligating historiographical data (release
of prisoners from the Gulag, relaxation of censorship, new styles in literature,
“peaceful co-existence” with foreign nations manifested as mutual visits for
example) but it is certainly not given by the past itself prior to the constitu-
tive act of a historian. It is true that often events, or colligations, like the Thaw
extend temporally. But even if this is so, this kind of case is not linking nar-
ratively two events together but rather creating an event or a phenomenon
with a historiographical temporal extension. I say ‘historiographical’ because
what is constructed is not an event in the past itself, but in the writing of
history.
v Narratives as Metaframes vs Narratives as Modes of Presentation
Roth repeatedly refers to narration as the central structuring mode of histori-

ography. I have a bit of a trouble with this. Having branded myself as a postnar-
rativist this may not be very surprising! The first problem has to do with Roth’s
idea that philosophical preconceptions have placed unreasonable demands
on historical practice (Roth 2018, p. 13; see also Roth 2008b). This point is well-
taken. But if it is the historians’ practice that functions as an arbiter between
various philosophical preconceptions, why assume a priori that the distinctive
feature of historiography is that it produces narratives?
Perhaps Roth, together with many other contemporary commentators, think
that it is simply obvious because books of history imply some kind of time di-
mension. As I argued immediately above, the inclusion of a time-dimension
does not necessarily mean that one is narrativising in the sense of relating
two temporal events together; it may mean merely creating historical events
that are assumed to extend over time. Even if historians deal with temporal-
ity almost without an exception, it does not follow that they necessarily nar-
rativize. Further, even if their books contain narratives, as I believe they do,
it does not mean that their practice should be described as production of
narratives.

Even if all types of narrativists emphasise story-telling in some form, nar-

ratives in most understandings resemble a descriptive practice.3 That is, nar-
rativising implies creating links between events in time, and the order of these
events in historiography is typically given by the calendar time.4 Although this
linking may be assumed to create meanings and connotations that go beyond
this linking, it would nevertheless seem to impose an iron-cage descriptivist
model of historical phenomena in succession. I am not sure at all that this is
what historians fundamentally do.
Narrativization in historiography suggests that the historian carries the
reader from a temporal event A to another later event B as if he was really
travelling in time. In actuality, nothing of the sort happens. Instead, it’s a case
of a temporal simulation. We should recognize that neither the historian nor
the reader is actually moving in time, but is firmly moored in the presence,
although in a shifting presence. Furthermore, it is not necessary to regard the
historian’s research object as a temporally moving ground but as a discourse
and as a set of historiographical material as if it were in a spatially framed box
(and often in archives it also is). If the historian’s topic of research is, for ex-
ample, the foreign policy relations between Finland and Poland between the
Wars, material, archival and other literary sources do not move anywhere from
the historian’s point of view, but are at his disposal spatially. Arguably the his-
torian must respect some principles of causality, such as that a later event can-
not normally be thought to have caused an earlier event. But if he has some-
thing specific to say about the foreign policy between Finland and Poland, he
can navigate and move back and forth through historiographical data without
the iron-cage of temporality. He can connect and synthesize this material as
he wishes; in principle, and as seems reasonable to him. These features of his
practices are here to remind him of the constructive and synthetical nature of
the historian’s practice.
3 But see Roth 2017a. I comment on the idea of narratives as explanations below.
4 It is surprisingly difficult to find an explicit definition of ‘narrative’. Although often it is
equated with ‘story’, Ankersmit, for example, thinks that narrative is something like a logical
structure (e.g. Ankersmit 1983, p. 16). According to White, while narrativity itself does not re-
quire chronological ordering, a chronological sequence appears to be a condition for the nar-
rativization of a set of events in historiography. That is, because in “history proper” “events
must … be registered with the chronological framework of their original occurrence” (White
1980, p. 9). More importantly, both Ankersmit and White assume that narrative possesses and
imposes a structure and is not a mere sequence. The early narrativists, such as Danto (e.g.
1962) and Mandelbaum (1967, reprinted 2001), linked chronological-ordering directly with
narrativity. Some have also suggested that a narrative (or “plot”) must include causal links
between events, (e.g. Morton White 1965, p. 223; Foster 1927, p. 60; Carroll 2001, p. 126).

84 Kuukkanen
It is my fear that that narratives have become culturally embedded meta-

frames with which to make sense of a certain practice without considering
alternatives. I don’t think that imposing such metaframes can be avoided but
it is necessary to realise that the framework of narrativization is not the only
possible one and that it operates on a metalevel in any case. Choices between
metaframes should be somehow motivated on the basis of their comprehen-
sibility with regard to the practice they are supposed to explain. I don’t think
that this grounding in the case of narratives has been done sufficiently.
Another problem is then that portraying historiography as narrative produc-
tion resembles internalism of an anachronist kind, to use the old vocabulary
of the philosophy of science, IF narrativization refers only to the logical form
and structure of writing. It would be tantamount to saying that science is about
creating axiomatic theories, as logical positivists thought. It may also be that,
but science is certainly something much beyond this. It is a practice and this re-
alization affects how its cognitive products should be characterized. I think we
should locate the historians’ role and practice explicitly in their social contexts.
Perhaps one difference is that Roth is interested in the mode of descrip-
tion in historiography, and he has a particular view of that, while I emphasize
more the kind of practice that historiography is. I agree with Roth when he
says that we need to consider more of what historians use a narrative to do
(Roth 2018, p. 23). And I have a suggestion to this query too. Historians use
narratives as part of their reasoning practice for their historiographical theses.
In other words, there is no need to deny that historians employ narratives, but
there is neither reason to insist that narrativization is the only thing that they
do. I have called the narrativist insight the view that books of history are not
mere collections of unintegrated atomistic statements but that they entail a
comprehensive thesis on the past. My further proposition is that these books/
theses can be regarded as performative acts in their argumentative contexts
(see Kuukkanen 2015). And this is what historiography as a field is: production
of theses on the past in and by books, and through participation in historio-
graphical discourses on the past. Narratives play undoubtedly a role but also
other techniques of persuasion are used. One should investigate them in an
open spirit asking what techniques actually are used in historiography.
In his most recent paper, Roth claims that certain knowledge claims in
historiography can be produced only by and through narrativization. Roth
writes that “I show why only a narrative can explain some events formulated as
narrative sentences” (Roth 2017a, p. 2). Roth uses Kuhn’s argument for the oc-
currence of revolutions as a case in point. He says that Kuhn’s Structure of Sci-
entific Revolutions creates in effect a narrative sentence and its point(s) about
revolution can be expressed only as a narrative and only retrospectively, by

showing the “unfolding of events”. If we then assume that the point of a book
(Kuhn’s or someone else’s) is that a revolution took place, could it be expressed
in any other way as a narrative? I think there is more freedom to choose the
mode of presentation. The expression of this point could take the form of
reasoning from premises towards a conclusion. For example, (a) a set of ba-
sic assumptions was accepted unanimously in science S at time T; (b) many
anomalies appeared and eroded the confidence in these fundamental assump-
tions; (c) a new theory/set of assumptions were produced; and (d) eventually a
new theory was accepted and it replaced the old governing paradigm.
Naturally, there is a time dimension behind this development. However,
the first thing to notice is that these premises do not form ‘events’ in any con-
ventional sense and neither can there be seen any proper causal relationship
between these. For example, the fact that a set of basic assumptions was ac-
cepted at a time T does in no way cause the emergence of anomalies, and nei-
ther of these two (premises) is an ‘event’. And yet both being an event and the
causal relationship between events are the two central features of narratives
for Roth, if I understand him correctly.
Further, I claim that my example above is presented in the spirit of Kuhnian
philosophy. All the premises represent a historian’s assessment of the situa-
tion in the history of this particular science, i.e. that there was a stable period,
a period of uncertainty, of creation and of revolution. They themselves could
be understood as colligations. If they are seen as “events under description” in
Dantonian-Rothian language, they are events in a very liberal sense that any
meaningful historiographical description produces an event. What is left im-
plicit and unarticulated reveals the patterns of reasoning nevertheless opera-
tive in the argument for the occurrence of revolution. For example, there is
an assumption that (normal) science forms a more or less uniform body of
knowledge, that anomalies and contradictions (low coherence) weaken the
epistemic authority of that body of knowledge, that an incoherent and poorly
explaining scientific theory may prompt scientists to look for alternatives, that
scientific revolution means a rejection of old theories, etc.
There is thus MUCH more going on than just recounting an unfolding of
events; there is an entire discursive field behind within which the historian
places her argument. Some of the assumptions may naturally be explicated in
text but not necessarily all. This only emphasises the key difference between
Roth’s and my approach. I think that historiography is fundamentally a critical-
discursive practice while Roth seems to assume that it is narrative-descriptive
(even if it is accepted that narratives are explanatory at the same time). For
Roth, historiography has to take the form of narrative while for me it is a pos-
sible mode in historiography. Naturally, if reasoning with a time dimension is

86 Kuukkanen
enough to call the historian’s presentation a ‘narrative’, then that’s fine with
me, although I wonder whether this term captures what truly is characteris-
tic for historiography. In this sense, it could be said that historiography needs
narratives but even then it would be only as part of more general reasoning
practices.
vi On Explanation, Justification, Naturalism and Truth in Roth
Two other central features in Roth’s revived philosophy of history are expla-
nation and justification. It is worth saying a few words on each. It is not an
easy task to spell out what explanation is. Ever since Hempel’s covering law
model there has been much debate in contemporary philosophy on explana-
tion. But how exactly does a narrative sentence become explanatory? For Roth
narratives both constitute events and explain them. Narratives are sequences
of events and explanatory because a historian creates an event under descrip-
tion. But this is quite a weak sense of explanation if the aim is to merely trace
the “path of development”.5 Here we might go back to the time of analytic phi-
losophy of history and to another analytic philosopher Maurice Mandelbaum,
who wondered whether a sequential story amounts to a proper explanation,
because a sequence lacks an analysis of contextual factors that resulted in the
outcome.
Mandelbaum’s example is a case in which an election campaign was to be
told as linear sequential steps leading, in the end, to an oversimplification. Ac-
cording to Mandelbaum, the strategy in any election campaign depends on
an analysis of stable voting habits of some segments of population, and as he
says, on “a recognition of the manner in which long-standing interests, disaf-
fections, and needs in various geographic, economic or ethnic groups will be
relevant to eventual success or failure” (Mandelbaum [1967] 2001, p. 55). In oth-
er words, one must “grasp their relationship to longer enduring factors which
are not themselves links in the sequential chain of events which constitute the
‘story’ of the campaign” (Mandelbaum [1967] 2001, p. 55). Mandelbaum con-
cludes as follows:
The foregoing strictures on the narrative, linear-series model of historio-

graphical explanation should serve to suggest that the task of the histori-
an is not one of tracing a series of links in a temporal chain; rather, it is his
task to analyze a complex pattern of change into the factors which served
5 But see Roth 2017a for an attempt to specify what narrative explanation consists of.

to make it precisely what it was. The relationship which I therefore take

be fundamental in historiography is … a relationship of part to whole, not
a relationship of antecedent to consequent.
mandelbaum 2001, p. 56
I agree. This is exactly the idea of colligation and the idea of constitution
mentioned above. One should however note that even if arranging historio-
graphical data into larger wholes is an essential process of history-writing, it
does not follow that a text is such an undecomposable whole and that one
needs to commit to full-blooded holism.6 In any case, it is necessary to analyse
what else narrativization as explanation implies other than linking temporally
6 Roth claims that my understanding of holism is “confused” because Quine used his holist
argument against the analytic-synthetic distinction, while I make analyticity a feature of ho-
lism (Roth 2016, p. 276, n 17). I am, of course, well familiar with Quine’s argument in “Two
Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951). Roth thinks that the confusion is a consequence of following
Ankersmit in this matter. What Roth misses is the distinction between confirmation holism
and semantic holism. The former in the words of Kyle Stanford is the claim “that theories
or hypotheses can only be subjected to empirical testing in groups or collections, never in
isolation” (2016). And semantic holism can be understood as the position that the meaning
of an expression is determined by an entire web of other beliefs and meanings. A mean-
ing unit is thus not meaningful without all other meanings it is connected with (see: Block
1998; Fodor and Lepore 1992). If then a semantic unit is defined by the whole set of meaning
constituents, those constituents would be true by definition or by their meanings alone in
some way, thus analytically true. Of course, if one is committed in the spirit of Quine to the
view that the only meaning there is is (ultimately) empirical meaning, it seems that semantic
holism and confirmation holism fall together. But without this commitment it is consistent
(and this may offend Quineans) to think that empirical claims about the world are not tested
in isolation and maintain that our meanings can be meaningful without taking into account
all other meanings. In other words, the unit of meaningfulness is something less than the
entire language, theory or web of beliefs, which amount to a rejection of full-blooded holism
and an endorsement of something like molecularism in semantics (Kuukkanen 2015, p. 80;
Fodor and Lepore 1992, p. 31). Now it may be worth pointing that it is not only Ankersmit
and me, who concern themselves with semantic holism in the philosophy of historiography
and the philosophy of science. For example, Suppe accused Kuhn and Feyerabend (rightly
or wrongly) as advocating irrationality, which “stems from the fact that his doctrines on the
theory-ladeness of meaning entail that theories are analytically true” (Suppe 1977, p. 640).
Theory-ladeness is another name for semantic holism. Or one might wish to take a look at
the debate between Lovejoy and Spitzer even earlier, in which the former was concerned
about “the impossibility of using common nouns when referring to components of different
wholes … If every part of any such whole is a kind of thing capable of existing only in that
whole.” According to Lovejoy, this implies the incommunicability of that holistically defined
notion. (On this, see my “Making Sense of Conceptual Change”).

88 Kuukkanen
distinct events. It would not seem sufficient to show how events unfolded even
if that increased understanding on some level. Is narrativization necessarily
creating causal links between ‘events’? Could counterfactuality inform us of
what specifically a narrative explains? What is the “narrative logic” on a more
detailed level?
All in all, isn’t it better to regard an historian’s explanation as a sum of all
contextual factors and reasoning in a book, which in the end amounts to a
view of, say, why the English working class was born and was its own making
(Thompson 1991)? In this example, it is not that two or more ‘facts’ in time are
united; it is a much more complex process of syntheticising historiographical
data together. To explain why the English working class was born is not cit-
ing a sequence, but giving reasons why certain historical phenomena must be
considered as part of this process and how and why, and in what role, they are
linked together. It is reasoning, showing reasons for conclusions, that Thomp-
son does in his book.
I agree with Roth that justification is a theme of central importance. I take
it that no one wishes to accept that just any interpretation or view is equally
good. Some are, or should be, more acceptable than others. The difficult task is
to spell out how and why some are better and more recommendable. This need
to separate the wheat from the chaff emphasises the importance of justifica-
tion in philosophy. Roth correctly notes that peoples and cultures constantly
develop novel interpretations and ways of understanding the past. Or in Roth’s
vocabulary, they come up with new ways to constitute a historical event, and
he mentions critical race theory and feminist descriptions that have become
available quite late in the day (Roth 2018, p. 16). But one does not find any men-
tion of how to limit these descriptions that may become available in the course
of time. I take it that a description through a racist theory, for example, would
not do (either morally or epistemologically). There must be something that
limits acceptability but at the moment we are left in the dark as to what this
may be.
This lack of justification conditions may be an indication of a deeper prob-
lem in Roth’s position. For a naturalist, such as Roth, there is no a priori domain
of normativity or a priori method to decide what normativity and justification
are. It is practice that provides the norms, and the description of this prac-
tice that reveals those norms to us. But how could a description provide us
normativity and the principles of justification? Even if practice grounds nor-
mativity and may inspire normative theorizing, it is another matter to specify
the relevant features with regard to normativity within this practice. Pointing
out that there is this or that practice does nothing to reveal whether the prac-
tice is justified or should be seen as justified. Many naturalists refer to various

e xternalist and procedural features, such as causality, reliability and functions

to ground their views of justification, but it is not clear what Roth’s position is
in this sense in the case of historiography. And it is not, of course, self-evident
that conflating evidential with causal and other natural procedures would not
be a category mistake in epistemic matters. My suggestion, which cannot be
developed further in this context, is to go with Goldman’s more moderate nat-
uralism: we may need to begin with a priori method in epistemological theo-
rizing, i.e. with consultation of epistemic intuitions, in order to pick out what
features of practices are worth a deeper investigation: “without such a prior
method, the epistemologist would be like a blind man sent on a mission with
a guide, or guide dog, to help him. Without a guide, how can one select the
relevant extra-mental phenomenon?” (Goldman 2015).
Does Roth deny the epistemologists such a guide? Let me suggest that the
risks are substantial. If he denies, we fail to identify evidential relations, and if
we fail in this, we lose the entire aspect of normativity and capacity to evaluate
rival views epistemologically. It would be the situation of anything goes more
familiar to postmodernist theorizing.
Another issue that Roth (and Danto) owe us is a more nuanced account of
truth. Roth says that knowledge of the truth of a narrative sentence has “noth-
ing to do with some notion of correspondence between statements and states
of affairs” (Roth 2016, p. 273). It is notable that narrative sentences are never-
theless said to be true and their truth is said to be knowable (indeed, know-
ing already implies their truth-fullness according to all standard accounts of
knowledge). But in what sense are they then true? I admit that my intuition
is that the correspondence theory is the most intuitive theory to grasp what
truth-clauses mean (e.g. Kuukkanen 2015, p. 11, p. 132).7 Its application and suit-
ability in historiography is naturally another matter. Roth seems to have some
other notion of truth in his mind. What is it? In what sense do narrative sen-
tences become true retrospectively? Of what does their truth consist? Roth
writes that narrative provides a theoretical or conceptual connection that “re-
veals something known to be true of the earlier time in light of a later” (Roth
7 It is perhaps worth emphasising that here I am talking literally about the meaning of truth,
i.e. how should ‘truth’ be understood in sentences like “It is true that snow is white.” Theories
of truth are in this sense understood as semantic. It is my claim that, if one adopts a differ-
ent theory of truth from the set of obvious ones (correspondence, coherence, pragmatic,
deflationary), one owes an explanation of what he is talking about. Finally, the meaning of
truth is a different issue from epistemic problems of knowing, what is true (except perhaps in
epistemic theories of truth, in which the two are co-extensive). For more on the theories of
truth, Kirkham (1992) is a great and comprehensive book.

90 Kuukkanen
2016, p. 273; original emphasis). Is truth then relative to time? Relative to the
historian that provides a narrative sentence? If so, I wonder how useful this
notion of truth is.
Now in the end of this paper I move back to larger issues and consider the
type of philosophy that needs creating or re-creating.
vii Philosophy of Historiography = Historiography-specific Philosophy
So what kind of philosophy do we need? An answer to the question is best

found by thinking of what we want. In other words, what are the aims with
regard to the philosophy of historiography? And what are the virtues of good
philosophy?
It is necessary to ask first, whether the philosophy of historiography has an
object of analysis. Broadly speaking it has. The target of its analysis is the prac-
tice of history-writing and research, academic and non-academic, in the same
sense that different philosophies of science focus on gaining understanding
of their respective fields: the philosophy of economics, philosophy of biology,
philosophy of physics, etc. In the case of the philosophy of historiography, the
role of non-scholarly practices is naturally much greater than in any of these.
I wish to add that there is no prima facie reason to rule the historiography of
science out of the philosophy of historiography although this is typically done.
In so far as the focus is on the problems and presuppositions of history-writing
both kinds of historiographies should be studied. If the practice and problems
of writing history are more or less the same in both areas, it is not clear why
the object of these histories automatically would provide a demarcation line
between them. To put this differently, if philosophizing about the history of
science is excluded from the philosophy of historiography, it should be argued
why this is the case, rather than taken as a starting point.
Now the philosophy of historiography should not be anthropology either.
In other words, the aim of the philosophy of historiography is not to model
the practice of historiography but rather raise some problems and issues that
emerge from this practice, analyze and try to understand them better, clarify
positions, and make philosophical implications and entailments explicit. And,
because we are talking about philosophy, normative considerations have a role
to play as well. That is, if a certain practice has been defined and described, it
is the job of a philosopher to say whether it represents good epistemic and/or
ethical practice, whether it is perhaps better than another, and why.
Further, this linking to historiographical practice entails something also
philosophically. The primary object of analysis is the field-specific problems

of historiography, whether or not they link to the concerns of mainstream

analytic philosophy and the philosophy of science. Often they do and the
philosophical sources of mainstream philosophy may turn very fruitful in this
explication process. But not always. For example, considerations that emerge
from the problems of validating knowledge through observation and observa-
tion language have very little direct relevance to the problems of historiogra-
phy. And the same goes with most debates on empirical regularities and the
laws of nature. It is needless to say that a great number of discussions in the
analytic tradition deal with these problems in some sense or are reactions to
various problems that have emerged from the debates on these issues. Many of
the debates were initiated by logical positivists, and in this sense, the shadow
of logical positivism is very long and can be felt tangibly still in post-positivist
philosophy.
Let me take one more example of a clash between major philosophical doc-
trines and the needs of historiography. Naturalism is a widely spread philo-
sophical position and something that Roth is also committed to (e.g. Roth
2008a), as already discussed. Perhaps one of the foundational tenets of it is that
there is no distinction between meaning and empirical significance but that all
beliefs constitute one big mesh. That is, the unit of empirical significance is the
whole of science, even the whole of culture. One consequence could be full-
blooded holism, according to which every evaluation of any unit requires tak-
ing everything else into account (see footnote 4 above). It follows from it that
there is basically only one belief and one meaning defined by everything that is
connected to it. One option is to live with this although it would seem to make
communication, understanding and sharing beliefs, for example, incompre-
hensible. However, often in historiography, in its practice, the motivation is to
look for boundaries of its cognitive units. But naturalism cannot commit to the
idea of there being distinct meaning components and empirical components,
that is, that the origin of those cognitive units (or their boundaries) would be
something other than (natural (used)) science.
Here we are faced with the classical problem of definition. How to recog-
nize an instance of a specific concept or unit, if one does not have any prior
conceptual criteria. Goldman’s call for the need of a priori method (above) in
order to identify what to pay attention to was briefly mentioned above. If no
criteria can be identified, then any instance can be accepted as something X
without a limit. Suppose that we are asked to analyze Plato’s concept of justice
(see: Kuukkanen 2008; Knuuttila 2006). It would be impossible to even get off
the ground if we didn’t operate with some pre-defined notion and meaning
of ‘justice’. It may well need revising but at least it provides some preliminary
criteria of how to demarcate the concepts and the cases of justice from the

92 Kuukkanen
rest. And it is worth noting that this is a very practical problem and shows that
in the practice of historiography historians commit to the bounded units of
meaning.
My suggestion is that situations like these provide the rationale for the phi-
losophy of historiography. I am in favor of a pragmatic attitude to the needs
and problems of historiography. Mainstream philosophy and philosophi-
cal doctrines should help us to understand the situation and problems more
deeply. To explain why meaning-constitution is required, what it could be and
how it can be so. Maybe it’s hermeneutics that helps, maybe a theory of some
other tradition. Perhaps naturalism can make sense of this kind of meaning
constitution. Or if it is argued that the historian’s meaning-constitution does
not make sense, it must be shown why and why it doesn’t have such serious
consequences with regard to practice, as initially may seem. The crux of the
matter is that historiography-specific problems must set the agenda.
There are many issues and concepts in the practice of historiography that
require attention from the philosophers of historiography. To mention just one
final example from my scholarly past of participating in the research project
Philosophical Foundations of the Historiography of Science. A large number
of historians of science have assumed implicitly or explicitly that science is
local, but philosophers had not analyzed this widespread supposition (see:
Kuukkanen 2011b, 2012). In my view, to analyze and discuss concepts like these
is a prime target for the philosophy of historiography.
In sum, the philosophy of historiography should learn from other b ranches
of philosophy but not shy away from field-specificity when required. The
working order is from the problems of historiography to the ideas of other
philosophical traditions and branches. What we want from the philosophy of
historiography, I suggest, is conceptual clarity of historiography-specific no-
tions and problems—with awareness but not emulation of analytic philosophy.
References
Ankersmit, F. (1983). Narrative Logic. A Semantic Analysis of the Historian’s Language.

The Hague, Boston and London: Martinuss Nijhoff Publishers.
Block, N. (1998). “Holism: Mental and Semantic.” In: B.E. Craig (ed.) Routledge Encyclo-
pedia of Philosophy, vol. 4, pp. 488–493. London: Routledge.
Carroll, N. (2001). On the Narrative Connection. In: idem, Beyond Aesthetics. Philosophi-
cal Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Danto, A. (1962). Narrative Sentences. History and Theory 2, 146–179.
Fodor, J., Lepore, E. (1992). Holism: A Shopper’s Guide. Oxford: Blackwell.

Foster, E.M. (1927). Aspects of the Novel. London: Edward Arnold.

Glock, H.-J. (2008). What is Analytic Philosophy? Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Goldman, A. (2015). Review of Hilary Kornblith, A Naturalistic Epistemology: Selected
Papers. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
Gutting, G. (2012). Bridging the Analytic-Continental Divide. The Stone, February 19
[https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/bridging-the-analytic-contin
ental-divide/?_r=0].
Kirkham, R.L. (1992). Theories of Truth. A Critical Introduction. Cambridge Mass: MIT
Press.
Knuuttila, S. (2006). Hintikka’s View of the History of Philosophy. In: R.E. Auxier, L.E.
Hahn (eds.) The Philosophy of Jaakko Hintikka. Chicago: Open Court.
Kuukkanen, J.-M. (2008). Making Sense of Conceptual Change. History and Theory 47,
351–372.
Kuukkanen, J.-M. (2011a). Demystification of Early Latour. In: K. François, B. Löwe, T.
Müller and B. Van Kerkhove (eds.). Foundations of the Formal Sciences VII. Bringing
together Philosophy and Sociology of Science. Book series: Texts in Logic, pp. 161–185.
London: College Publications.
Kuukkanen, J.-M. (2011b). I am Knowledge. Get me out Here! On Localism and the Uni-
versality of Science. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 42, 590–601.
Kuukkanen, J.-M. (2012). Senses of Localism. History of Science 50, 477–500.
Kuukkanen, J.-M. (2015). Postnarrativist Philosophy of Historiography. Basingstoke: Pal-
grave Macmillan.
Leitner, Brian. Analytic and Continental Philosophy. The Philosophical Gourmet Report
2014–2015. http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/analytic.asp
Mandelbaum, M. (1967). A Note on History as Narrative. History and Theory 6, 413–419.
Reprinted in G. Roberts (ed.), (2001) The History and Narrative Reader. pp. 52-59.
London: Routledge.
Quine, W. van O. (1951). Two Dogmas of Empiricism. Philosophical Review 60: 20–43.
Raatikainen, P. (2001). Mitä oli analyyttinen filosofia? Ajatus 58, 189–217.
Roth, P.A. (2002). Ways of Pastmaking. History of the Human Sciences 15, 125–143.
Roth, P.A. (2008a). The Epistemology of Science after Quine. In: S. Psillos, M. Curd (eds).
The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Science, pp. 15–26. London: Routledge.
Roth, P.A. (2008b). Varieties and Vagaries of Historical Explanation. Journal for the Phi-
losophy of History 2, 214–226.
Roth, P. A. (2013a). Narrative in Historical Explanation. Sage Encyclopedia of Political
Theory, pp. 643–644. Los Angeles: SAGE Publications Ltd.
Roth, P.A. (2013b). The Silence of the Norms: The Missing Historiography of The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science,
545–552.

94 Kuukkanen
Roth, P.A. (2016). Back to the Future. Postnarrativist Historiography and Analytic Phi-
losophy of History. History and Theory 55, 270–281.
Roth, P.A (2017a). Essentially Narrative Explanations. Studies in History and Philosophy
of Science, available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2017.03.008.
Roth, P.A. (2017b). Philosophy of History. In: L. McIntyre, A. Rosenberg (eds.) The
Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Social Science, pp. 397–407. New York:
Routledge.
Roth, P.A (2018). Reviving Philosophy of History. In. K. Brzechczyn (ed.). Towards a
Revival of Analytical Philosophy of History. Around Paul A. Roth’s Vision of Historical
Sciences. Poznań Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, 110,
pp. 9–27. Leiden/Boston: Brill.
Stanford, K. (2016). Underdetermination of Scientific Theory. In: E.N. Zalta (ed.), The
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2016 Edition) [URL = <http://plato.
stanford.edu/archives/spr2016/entries/scientific-underdetermination/>].
Suppe, F. (ed.) (1977). The Structure of Scientific Theories. Urbana Ill: University of
Illinois Press.
Thompson, E.P. (1991). The Making of the English Working Class. London: Penguin.
Tucker, A. (2009). Introduction. In: A. Tucker (ed). A Companion to the Philosophy of
History and Historiography, pp. 1–7. Chichester: Blackwell.
White, H. (1980). The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality. Critical
I nquiry 7, 5–27.
White, M. (1965). Foundations of Historical Knowledge. New York and London: Harper
and Row.
Williams, B. (2002). Contemporary Philosophy: A Second Look. In: N. Bunnin, E.P.
Tsui-James (eds), The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy. Blackwell Publishing.
Blackwell Reference Online. 30 September 2015 <http://www.blackwellreference.
com/subscriber/tocnode.html?id=g9780631219088_chunk_g97806312190885>.
Williamson, T. (2014). How Did We Get from There? The Transformation of Analytic
Philosophy? Belgrade Philosophical Annual 27, 7–38.

The Future of Philosophy of Historiography Reviving or Reinventing

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Future of Philosophy of Historiography Reviving or Reinventing

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Towards a Revival of Analytical

For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV

Notes on Contributors vii

1 Reviving Philosophy of History 9

2 Why Did Analytical Philosophy of History Disappear? Three Narratives

3 The Mysterious Case of Analytic Philosophy of History: Paradigm Turn

4 Philosophy of History and Analytical Philosophy in Germany: A Special

5 The Future of Philosophy of Historiography: Reviving or

6 A Pragmatist Critique of Dogmatic Philosophy of History 95

7 Non-representationalism in Philosophy of History: A Case Study 116

8 What Do Narratives Explain? Roth, Mink and Weber 130

9 How Do Narratives Explain? A Comment from the Point of View

For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV

10 Antinomies, Multiple Realities and the Pasts 166

11 Is a Dramatic Theory of History Possible? Shakespeare’s Richard ii

12 Making up ‘Vulnerable’ People: Human Subjects and the Subjective

13 “Spring and Autumn Annals” as Narrative Explanation 254

14 Comments and Replies 273

Name Index 287

For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV