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Beyond Positivism: A Research Program for Philosophy of History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Raymond Martin
Raymond Martin*
Affiliation:
University of Maryland
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Abstract

It is argued that the debate over the positivist theory of historical explanation has made only a limited contribution to our understanding of how historians should defend the explanations they propose importantly because both positivists and their critics tacitly accepted two assumptions. The first assumption is that if the positivist analysis of historical explanation is correct, then historians ought to attempt to defend covering laws for each of the explanations they propose. The second is that unless a historian can justify an explanation that he proposes, then his preference for that explanation is not rationally defensible. It is argued that the first assumption is false and that if in order to justify an explanation, one must justify a covering law for it, then the second assumption is also false. A program for investigating how historians should defend their explanations is suggested.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 1 , March 1981 , pp. 112 - 121
Copyright
Copyright © 1981 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

I am grateful to a referee of Philosophy of Science for many perceptive criticisms of an earlier version of this paper.

References

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