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Summary Dray - Laws and Explanation in History
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- Oxford University (OX)
Notes on Dray's 'Laws and Explanation in History'
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Dray - Laws and Explanation in HistoryChapter Five - The Rationale of Actions
● The covering law model is inept at explaining human behaviour
○ even if behaviour does fall under a law, discovery of the law would not
enable us to understand it in the proper sense
● This is often expressed by the claim that a historian must penetrate, achieve insight,
identify with characters, revive, reenact etc...covering law models would at best grant external
understanding
○ Covering law logicians respond to this by claiming it is a method and
psychological description, but that alone it suggests that ostensible empathy is equivalent
to understanding/explanation
Explaining and Justifying Actions
● When we ask for an explanation of a historical action, often we want a reconstruction of
the agent’s calculation
○ but the agent may not have calculated deductively, or with propositions,
or even deliberately
■ in these cases there may be nothing for the historian to
do, but in any case, an action is purposive insofar as there is a calculation which
could be attributed to it
● There is an element of appraisal when we attempt explanations of social actions; we are
interested in what was seen to be appropriate; whether it was justified or excusable
○ of course, rational means more than the right/proper/intelligent thing to
do - we must investigate value norms/social context/individual psychology/extent of
information available to agent in ascertaining justification
■ the investigator must bring in foreign data to piece
together the calculation
● ‘What the historian declares to have been the agent’s reasons must really be reasons
(from the agent’s point of view).’
The Point of the ‘Identification’ Metaphor
● Hempel sees empathy as a shortcut to quasi-understanding without empirical laws or
generalizations, and that the device doesn’t ‘guarantee the soundness of the historical explanation
to which it leads’ which would depend on ‘the factual correctness of the empirical
generalizations’
○ But the approach may not be just a methodology - it may be that only by
empathising, piecing together in this way can we understand what was done
● The claim that it is a methodological dodge assumes, falsely, that all there is to notice in
these explanations is a second rate method of obtaining the same sort of result as can be obtained
more reliably with empirical covering laws
● There is a suspicion that empathetic historians seek to place explanation beyond the
bounds of empirical enquiry with words like ‘intuition’ ‘projection’ etc
○ this is false - the reconstruction of social norms and context requires
empirical evidence to be supported, but not for application to a general law, but in order
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