Reasons, generalizations, empathy, and narratives: The epistemic structure of action explanation

History and Theory

Volumn 47, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 31-43

  Stueber, Karsten R ^a  

^a Department of Biology

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EID: 61149522790     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2303.2008.00434.x     Document Type: Review

References (34)

1. For a brief survey of these developments, see also Frank Ankersmit, "The Dilemma of Contemporary Anglo-Saxon Philosophy of History," History and Theory 25 (December 1986), 1-27;
2. Chris Lorenz, Konstruktion der Verganganheit (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 1997), chaps. 7 and 8;
3. and David Carr, "Narrative Explanation and Its Malcontents," this issue, History and Theory 47 (February 2008), 19-30.
4. For an argument for the epistemic necessity and explanatory power of appealing to supra-individual facts or properties in historical explanations, see also Tor Egil Førland, "Mentality as a Social Emergent," this issue, History and Theory 47 (February 2008), 44-56. As Ankersmit has persuasively argued, the character and development of the debate in what he calls Anglo-Saxon philosophy of history and its distance from actual historical practice has to do with its peculiar disassociation from the German hermeneutic tradition of philosophy due to the perceived crisis of historicism in the first half of the twentieth century. Moreover, as he points out, the debate about the adequacy of the covering-law model for historical explanation has to be seen as probing the veridicality of the unity-of-science thesis, which lies at the heart of logical positivism.
5. For a systematic reconstruction of the debate between Dray and Hempel, see Chapter 5 of my Rediscovering Empathy: Agency, Folk-Psychology and the Human Sciences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006)
6. and Empathy and Agency: The Problem of Understanding in the Human Sciences, ed. Hans Herbert Kögler and Karsten Stueber (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000), 12-15.
7. For a historical take on this debate, see Ankersmit, "The Dilemma of Contemporary Anglo-Saxon Philosophy of History. "
8. See, for example, the representative selection of articles in History and Theory: Contemporary Readings, ed. Brian Fay, Philip Pomper, and Richard T. Vann (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998).
9. They thus conceived of the explanatory power of narratives very differently than did Danto, one of the earliest proponents of the role of narrative within the context of analytic philosophy of history. For Danto, the explanatory power of narratives is still dependent on law-like generalizations. See his Narration and Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), chaps. 10 and 11. Danto's view, however, constituted a minority opinion within the camp of narrativists.
10. See Louis Mink, "History and Fiction as Modes of Comprehension," in Fay, Pomper, and Vann, eds. , History and Theory: Contemporary Readings, 129.
11. See also "Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument," in his Historical Understanding (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 182-203
12. and Ankersmit, Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis of the Historian's Language (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983).
13. See Paul Roth, "How Narratives Explain," Social Research 56 (1989), 449-478.
14. Roth conceives of the explanatory power of narratives by analogy to Kuhnian paradigms, which explain by "providing stories to solutions to problems. " Carr on the other hand suggests that narratives explain because their structure is isomorphic to the structure of action itself. Narratives thus explain by linking the explanandum to a realm with which everybody is intimately familiar. See his "Narrative Explanation and its Malcontents" in this issue, and his Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). In contrast to both Roth and Carr, my goal in this paper is more limited. I do not want to make general claims about how all narratives explain. Rather, I limit my investigation to the specific problem of how we explain the actions of individual agents. An individual's actions constitute certainly not the only topic worthy of a historian's attention, but it is one such topic to be dealt with in a comprehensive historical narrative. Moreover, while I am very sympathetic to Carr's approach insofar as the explanation of individual action is concerned, in my own account I attempt to delineate more specifically the epistemic contributions of empathy, knowledge of generalizations, and the information provided by a full-blown narrative in a historian's explanatory account of individual agency.
15. Suffice it to say that I am not persuaded by the arguments for narrative antirealism. I develop a robust yet pluralistic version of narrative realism in the second part of my "Agency and the Objectivity of Historical Narratives," in The Philosophy of History: A Reexamination, ed. William Sweet (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Press, 2004), 197-222.
16. Interestingly, the discussion in contemporary philosophy of mind seems to develop a similar dialectic mirroring the development in the philosophy of history. Narratives are again appealed to as an autonomous alternative in contrast to simulation/empathy or theory as a means of understanding other agents. See, for example, Daniel Hutto, "The Limits of Spectatorial Folk Psychology," Mind and Language 19 (2004), 548-573
17. and his Folk Psychological Narratives: The Sociocultural Basis of Understanding Reasons (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). My response to this proposal would be similar to the argument developed here: such a position insufficiently distinguishes among different epistemic aspects of our folk-psychological practice of understanding others that need to be held apart.
18. I indeed do think that folk-psychological explanations have an autonomous explanatory power. For this reason, I regard it as very unlikely that they can be replaced by advanced neuroscience. For an argument to this effect, see my "Mental Causation and the Paradox of Explanation," Philosophical Studies 122 (2005), 243-277.
19. For the purposes of this article I assume only that ordinary folks and not so ordinary historians as a matter of fact do use the folk-psychological framework in order to try to explain the behavior of other people. Historians, for example, seem to spend a lot of time and effort trying to describe the specific belief system of historical agents in order to make sense of their actions and in order to understand why they acted the way they acted. For an empirical study of the various strategies used by ordinary folks to explain behavior, see the work of the psychologist Bertram Malle, How the Mind Explains Behavior; Folk Explanations, Meaning, and Social Interaction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). In this article I try merely to analyze the epistemic ingredients of such a presumably explanatory strategy.
20. See my "The Psychological Basis of Historical Explanation: Reenactment, Simulation, and the Fusion of Horizons," History and Theory 21 (February 2002), 25-42
21. and Rediscovering Empathy: Agency, Folk-Psychology, and the Human Sciences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press: 2006). In the latter publication I call the conception of folk psychology that recognizes the concept of rational agency as being central, the engaged conception of folk psychology. I argue that it is a major shortcoming of the dominant strand in contemporary philosophy of mind to view folk psychology in what I call a detached manner in analogy with a purely scientific theory according to which mental states are understood merely as inner causes.
22. See the articles of Jane Heal collected in her Mind, Reason and Imagination (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), particularly essays 2-4.
23. This briefly summarizes what I call the argument from the contextuality of thoughts as reasons. I also argue for empathy using the argument from the essential indexicality of thoughts as reasons. See "The Psychological Basis of Historical Explanation," and Rediscovering Empathy, 152ff.
24. In "The Psychological Basis of Historical Explanation" I did not sufficiently address those concerns. My focus there was Gadamer's objections to Collingwood's conception of reenactment.
25. See, in this respect, Carl Hempel, Aspects of Scientific Explanation (New York: Free Press, 1965), 239-240.
26. William Dray, Laws and Explanation in History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 132.
27. For further discussion of Dray's position, and a very similar position that Jaegwon Kim articulates in the contemporary context of philosophy of mind, see chap. 5 of my Rediscovering Empathy. I argue that Dray's position implies an unacceptable bifurcation of our ordinary concept of causation.
28. For a survey of the well known problems of Hempel's conception of explanation, see Wesley Salmon, "Four Decades of Scientific Explanation," in Scientific Explanation; Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science ( 13), ed. P. Kitcher and W. Salmon (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, Press, 1989), 3-219.
29. J. Woodward and C. Hitchcock, "Explanatory Generalizations, Part I: A Counterfactual Account," Nous 37 (2003), 4.
30. For a comprehensive explication of his account of explanation, see Woodward, Making Things Happen: A Theory of Causal Explanation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
31. See also David Henderson, "Norms, Invariance, and Explanatory Relevance," Philosophy of the Social Sciences 35 (2005), 324-338.
32. Bertram Malle, How the Mind Explains Behavior: Folk Explanations, Meaning, and Social Interaction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).
33. See, in this regard, the last chapter of my Rediscovering Empathy, "The Limits of Empathy. "
34. See R. G. Collingwood, "Goodness, Rightness, Utility," in The New Leviathan: Or Man, Society, Civilization and Barbarism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 391-479, particularly 472-479.