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MAURICE MANDELBAUM
Viewing the matter in historical perspective, one should recall that covering-
law theorists were in rebellion against a very widespread and influential
movement in German thought which attempted to show that the methods of
the historian were necessarily different from the methods employed in the
natural sciences. The contrasts between "Naturwissenschaft" and "Geistes-
wissenschaft", between "erklaren"and "verstehen", between "the repeatable"
and "the unique", between nomothetic and ideographic disciplines, were the
stock-in-trade of those against whom the covering-law theorists rebelled.
This the reactionists have scarcely taken into account. Therefore, while the
reactionists have been unsparing in their criticisms of covering-law theorists,
they have not in fact noticed one point which should by now be abundantly
clear: that these earlier distinctions between historical understanding and
other forms of understanding were either falsely drawn or were badly over-
drawn. For example, no historical event could even be described, much less
could it be in any sense explained, if it were wholly unique. To have insisted
upon this and allied points, and to have done so effectively, is something
which we must surely place to the credit of the covering-law theorists.
Nonetheless, as Dray and the other reactionists have pointed out, there is
something quite odd in viewing the task of the historian as that of explaining
the events of history by showing that they follow deductively from a general
law. What is odd is not that the covering-law theorists claim that there
should be such laws, though they are of course often criticized for this by
the idealists. What is odd is that we do not really have the laws which,
according to the covering-law model, would serve to explain the particular
events which we wish to explain. As Dray has insisted, those general state-
ments which might be claimed to serve as the grounds for acceptable ex-
planations are too loose and too porous to serve as laws from which the
particular events of history might be deduced. And, as Dray has also shown,
when these laws are tightened and sealed, we find that they are not really
general laws, but statements so particularized that we would not expect them
to apply to any other instance in the world, save the one which they pur-
portedly explain. All of this part of Dray's argument I accept, and in fact
(as Dray would acknowledge) these difficulties were at least adumbrated by
Gardiner, and even earlier by Hempel when the latter found himself forced
4 Isaiah Berlin's "History and Theory: The Concept of Scientific History", History and
Theorv, I (1960), 1-31 reached me too late to receive the attention which it would
otherwise deserve. Fortunately, I was already familiar with his general views on the
subject, both through his Historical Inevitability (Oxford, 1954), and through having
been privileged to attend a seminar which he gave on the subject at Harvard University
in the fall of 1954. It does not seem to me that his article forces a revision of the
position which I here wish to defend, although the particularway in which he casts his
argument at some crucial points demands careful analysis.
A second article which came to my attention too late to be taken into account in my
paper was Ernest Nagel's "Determinism in History", Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research, XX (1960), 291-317. I derive considerable satisfaction from finding that I
am apparently not in disagreement with Nagel's analysis of the current situation with
respect to the theory of historical explanation. In section III, 4 of his article (301-4),
where he deals with the same problem with which I am here concerned, he too points
out that it is doubtful whether even in the natural sciences the pattern of deductive
explanation is followed in explaining "concrete individual occurrences". However, in
his discussion of Maitland's explanation of a concrete historical occurrence (303) he
does use the sort of generalization which I shall be criticizing Hempel for employing
as a basis for historical explanation; I am therefore unsure as to whether he would
accept the argument which I am propoundingin this paper.
This surely sounds as if Hempel holds that in order to explain the cracking of
this radiator we would have to find some set of events which regularly
accompanies the cracking of radiators; but this is precisely the sort of thing
which the arguments of Dray and of Donagan have shown that we cannot
do in history. Nor, I submit, can we do it with respect to the cracking of
radiators, the failure of missiles to leave their launching pads, and many
other events which no one (I should suppose) would deny to be wholly
explicable in terms of physical laws. While we do explain these events
through the introduction of laws, the laws which we introduce are not laws
of cracking-radiators or of missile-failures: there is, I assume, no one set of
conditions which is invariantly linked to a missile failure, nor to a cracking
radiator, since (for example) radiators can crack when we pour water into
them when they are overheated, no less than when we allow them to stand
outdoors on a cold night without anti-freeze in them.
In short, what I am contending is that the laws through which we explain
a particular event need not be laws which state a uniform sequence concerning
complex events of the type which we wish to explain.7 Rather, they may be
laws which state uniform connections between two types of factor which are
contained within those complex events which we propose to explain. This
should be perfectly clear from Hempel's own analysis. What he wishes to
explain is "the cracking of an automobile radiator during a cold night", and
he holds that that event is explained when "the conclusion that the radiator
cracked during the night can be deduced by logical reasoning" from a knowl-
7I use the expression "need not be", rather than "is not", for I wish to leave it an
open question as to whether there are any cases in which the laws which explain a
particular type of complex event are merely laws in which such an event is related to
another type of complex event, or whether in all cases the explanationof a particulartype
of complex event does not demand a resolution into laws of particular component
factors within it.
8 For example, in his use in para. 5.2 of the quotation from Donald W. McConnell's
Economic Behavior.
9 Laws and Explanation in History, 3, 60, et pass. A similar point is made by Nowell-
Smith.
It would seem that the preceding argument has brought us around to the
position of Professor Dray, in which historical explanation is conceived on
the model of what he terms "a continuous series". And this analysis of
historical explanation is in many ways similar to what W. H. Walsh has
referred to as the historian's task of "colligation"
.12
The paradigmatic case used by Dray is not the case of a radiator cracking,
although it too is drawn from automotive mechanics. It is the case of the
engine seizure (pp. 66 ff.). Dray wishes to show that causal explanations
are not to be given in terms of causal laws, but in terms of tracing a con-
tinuous series of sub-events which serve to explain what has occurred. His
paradigmaticcase runs as follows:
Suppose that the engine of my motor-carseizes up, and, after inspecting it, the
garage mechanic says to me: "It's due to a leak in the oil reservoir." Is this an
explanationof the seizure? I should like to argue that it depends upon who says
it and to whom... To me, who am ignorantof what goes on under the bonnet,
it is no explanationat all... If I am to understandthe seizure, I shall need to
beetold somethingabout the functioningof an auto engine, and the essential role
in it of the lubricatingsystem. I shall have to be capable of a certain amount of
elementarytrouble tracing. I need to be told, for instance, that what makes the
engine go is the movementof the piston in the cylinder;that if no oil arrivesthe
piston will not move because the walls are dry; that the oil is normallybroughtto
the cylinder by a certain pipe from the pump, and ultimatelyfrom the reservoir;
that the leak, being on the undersideof the reservoir,allowed the oil to run out,
and that no oil therefore reached the cylinder in this case. I now know the
explanationof the engine stoppage.
However, it should be obvious that such an explanation presupposes a
knowledge of certain uniformities concerning the relations of types of events,
that is, it presupposes a knowledge of general laws, and this fact is not
pointed out by Professor Dray.13 For example, the explanation of why the
engine stopped presupposes a knowledge of general laws concerning friction,
and concerning the relation between the absence of lubricants and the
presence of friction. It also presupposes a knowledge that liquids flow through
openings in the underside of reservoirs, and this too depends upon a knowl-
edge of general laws. In short, Dray's own knowledge of general laws is
presupposed in each step of the continuous series explanation, as he has
given it. Furthermore, a knowledge of general laws is tacitly involved not
only in tracing these connections but in distinguishing between what con-
stitute relevant conditions, and what is irrelevant to engine trouble. For
example, is the fact that the engine stopped just as another car passed it, a
circumstance which must be introduced into our account of the cause of the
seizure? Our judgment will in this case surely be negative, but that is only
because we have learned that, in general, the way most man-made machines
function, and in particular the way in which automobiles function, is that
they are designed to be independent of what happens in their environments.
In short, what alone makes it possible to trace a continuous series between
concrete events such as are here in question, is a background knowledge of
laws describing uniformities among given types of events. Such a knowledge
is necessary to tracing such a series in two respects: first, it alone provides
the necessary linkage between at least some of the components within the
series; second, it is necessary in order that we can rule out features of the
environment which are irrelevant to the series.
I am not certain that Dray would deny this, but I think it likely that he
would. What he seems to wish to defend is the proposition that a causal
analysis of a particular event depends upon what he calls "judgment", and
that judgment can function independently of a knowledge of general uni-
formities or laws. This seems to me to be a mistake. I think that what I
have just said about the explanation of the engine seizure shows it to be a
mistake.
But why, one might ask, does Professor Dray apparently cast aside all
appeal to general laws in historical explanation, if, indeed, that is what he
has done? The answer seems to me to lie in the fact that he has inadvertently
accepted too much from the Humean position of his opponents, the covering-
law theorists. He has assumed with them that in fields other than the sorts
of fields with which historians deal, it is appropriate to telescope the notions
of cause and law, and he himself does telescope these notions by speaking
of "causal laws".14 But then he finds that he must also speak of "causal
explanations" in history, and these explanations he regards as having a logic
of their own, distinct from the logic of those explanations which are sup-
posedly given through a use of the causal law model. The distinction which
one might have expected him to draw between the statement of a law con-
cerning a type of event and the statement of the cause of a particular event
is not, to my knowledge, drawn by him. If it were to be drawn, it seems to
me unlikely that Dray would have distinguished between the logic of those
explanations which scientists give and the logic of the explanations given by
historians. Rather, his position, like mine, would then have more nearly
approached the position which I take to be essential to Hempel's article:
14 It is noteworthy in this connection that when Hempel shifts from a Humean type
of explanation to an explanation in terms of laws characterizing relations among sub-
events, Dray simply calls this a more complicated version of the covering law model
(cf. 52-4). However, in my opinion, the shift from what he calls a "holistic" to a
"piecemeal" approach represents the adoption of a totally different model of expla-
nation, and not merely a shift in the scale of the events dealt with.
III