Troubles with Mechanisms: Problems of the 'Mechanistic Turn' in Historical Sociology and Social History

2007 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 160-200 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zenonas Norkus
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Social History ◽  
Scientific Explanation ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
Narrative Discourse ◽  
Historical Explanation ◽  
Historical Representation ◽  
Causal Processes ◽  
Covering Law

AbstractThis paper discusses the prospect of the "new social history" guided by the recent work of Charles Tilly on the methodology of social and historical explanation. Tilly advocates explanation by mechanisms as the alternative to the covering law explanation. Tilly's proposals are considered to be the attempt to reshape the practices of social and historical explanation following the example set by the explanatory practices of molecular biology, neurobiology, and other recent "success stories" in the life sciences. Recent work in the philosophy of science on these practices by Peter Machamer, Lindley Darden, Carl Craver and others is used as the foil to disclose the difficulties of Tilly's project. Most important among them is the dilemma of specification: if diagrams (standard forms of the representation of mechanisms) are intended as representations of robust causal processes, they cannot be specific enough to provide complete mechanism schemata, and are bound to remain mechanism sketches. If mechanism sketches are elaborated in detail by tracing particular causal processes, they provide representations of fragile causal processes, which cannot be considered as mechanisms comparable to those in advanced life and other special sciences. Tilly's work on the explanation of mechanisms can be considered as symptomatic for the recent trend to visualize the forms of historical representation. As far as diagrams seem to be able to communicate stories in a direct way (without narrative discourse), this trend is a challenge for the theory of historical representation. The new theories of scientific explanation focusing on the explanatory practices of the life sciences can provide examples and be the source of inspiration for the work on the theory of historical and social explanation, going beyond the confines of the received framework of the covering law model of explanation.

Hayden White

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karyn Ball ◽  
Ewa Domańska
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Social History ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Narrative Discourse ◽  
Historical Representation ◽  
Liberal Humanism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Hayden White ◽  
The French Revolution

Hayden White (b. 12 July 1928–d. 5 March 2018) was a groundbreaking critic of conventional historiography whose emphasis on the moral, rhetorical, aesthetic, and fictive valences of narrative as a mode of figuration unsettled professional historians’ tendency to disavow the role of the imagination and form in the selective arrangement of evidence. Despite Metahistory’s manifest affinity with structuralist approaches, White’s 1973 monograph is widely viewed as having inaugurated a “postmodernist” critique of narrative historiography that resonated with the growing influence of a postwar, anti-positivist “linguistic turn” stressing the figural dynamics of texts as objects of discourse. In grasping the implications of referential fragility, White articulated a quintessentially Nietzschean antipathy toward naively mimetic notions of “truth” that govern history treated as an objective mirror rather than as an imaginative construction of the past. In consonance with Roland Barthes, White recognized that narrative historiography shared stylistic ground with realist fiction in adhering to poetic conventions that shore up the “referential illusion,” or the reader’s feeling that descriptive writing bears an intimate relationship with a sometimes arbitrary and disordered reality. Insisting upon historical narrative’s status as a verbal structure, White additionally demonstrated that history’s figural operations are irreducible to a rigorously logical methodology and “science” as such insofar as history’s form reflects choices that cannot be evaluated on epistemological grounds. For this reason, while traditional historians continue to disavow the import of White’s interventions, scholarship in the humanities and social sciences attests to his abiding influence beyond the critique of historiography. Before the appearance in 1973 of the textbook The Greco-Roman Tradition and his monograph Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, White translated Carlo Antoni’s From History to Sociology: The Transition in German Historical Thinking from Italian (with a foreword by Benedetto Croce) (1959); co-authored two textbooks respectively entitled The Emergence of Liberal Humanism: An Intellectual History of Western Europe, Vol. 1: From the Italian Renaissance to the French Revolution (1966) with Willson H. Coates and J. Salwyn Schapiro; and, again with Coates, The Ordeal of Liberal Humanism: An Intellectual History of Western Europe, Vol. 2: Since the French Revolution (1970). White also edited The Uses of History: Essays in Intellectual and Social History (1968) and co-edited Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium with Giorgio Tagliacozzo (1969). With his wife, Professor Margaret Brose, White co-edited Representing Kenneth Burke in 1982, but following Metahistory, he primarily published essays, some of which reappeared in four collections: Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (1978); The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (1987); Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (1999); and The Practical Past (2014). The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory 1957–2007, an anthology of White’s essays, co-edited and introduced by Robert Doran, appeared in 2010.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Reutlinger ◽  
Juha Saatsi
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Scientific Explanation ◽  
Central Question ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Covering Law

What is a scientific explanation? This has been a central question in philosophy of science at least since Hempel and Oppenheim’s pivotal attempt at an answer in 1948 (also known as the covering-law model of explanation; Hempel 1965: chapter 10). It is no surprise that this question has retained its place at the heart of contemporary philosophy of science, given that it is one of the sciences’ key aims to provide ...

Event and Portent: the Fall of Old Oyo, a Problem in Historical Explanation

Africa ◽  
1971 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 186-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Smith
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Main Issue ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Crucial Importance ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Explanation ◽  
Covering Law ◽  
Opening Paragraph

Opening ParagraphExplanation, or the identification and assessment of the causes of events and situations, occupies the central place in nearly all historical writing in the present century. It is also the aspect of history which is most keenly debated by philosophers, and is the main issue today in the unending, wearisome, but seemingly inescapable controversy as to whether history belongs, or belongs more, with the sciences or with the humanities. The scientific or positivist school, numbering among its recent exponents Popper and Gardiner, emphasizes the extent to which historical explanation attains a regularity akin to, though not identical with, that found in the physical and other sciences, Hempel adding the contention that such explanation can always, and often should, be reduced to a ‘covering law’, or single universal statement subsuming the whole explanation. The idealists, among whom Croce, Collingwood, and most recently Oakeshott are prominent, stress conversely the uniqueness of history, and Dray has reinforced their position by his attack on the covering law thesis. The debate is one in which historians themselves have taken little part, and African historians none at all, despite its crucial importance for almost every aspect of their profession. Yet it is a debate which needs continuous illustration from the historiographical process, a need which historians are best able to meet. The aim of the present article is to contribute to the debate by examining as a problem in historical explanation the fall of Oyo, the powerful state of the northern Yoruba, in the early nineteenth century.

Mechanistic versus Functional Understanding

2019 ◽  
pp. 209-230
Author(s):  
Tania Lombrozo ◽  
Daniel Wilkenfeld
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Developmental Psychology ◽  
Causal Processes ◽  
Functional Understanding

Many natural and artificial entities can be predicted and explained both mechanistically, in term of parts and proximate causal processes, as well as functionally, in terms of functions and goals. Do these distinct “stances” or “modes of construal” support fundamentally different kinds of understanding? Based on recent work in epistemology and philosophy of science, as well as empirical evidence from cognitive and developmental psychology, this chapter argues for the “weak differentiation thesis”: the claim that mechanistic and functional understanding are distinct in that they involve importantly different objects. The chapter also considers more tentative arguments for the “strong differentiation thesis”: the claim that mechanistic and functional understanding involve different epistemic relationships between mind and world.

Establishment and Dissent in Nineteenth-Century Medicine: An Exploration of some Correspondence and Connections Between Religious and Medical Belief-Systems in Early Industrial England

1982 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 165-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
John V. Pickstone
Keyword(s):  
History Of Medicine ◽  
Social History ◽  
Belief Systems ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
Sociology Of Religion ◽  
Industrial Society ◽  
Medical Attendant ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Social History Of Medicine

I know the historical sociology of religion only as an outsider; as an historian of medicine helped by that literature to a better understanding of early industrial society and perhaps to a clearer vision of what the social history of medicine ought to be. To read a recent review of the social history of religion, such as A. D. Gilbert’s Religion and Society in Industrial England, Church, Chapel and Social Change, 1740-1914, is to recognise how underdeveloped by comparison is the social history of medicine. Historians of medicine have the equivalent of church histories, of histories of theology and, of course, biographies of divines, but we lack the quantitative and comprehensive surveys of the chronological and geographical patterns in lay attendance and membership, and in professional recruitment and modes of work. For as long as medicine was generally only a transaction between an individual and his medical attendant, few statistics were produced and there is little national data. Yet there are very few local studies of how diseases were handled and how the various kinds of practitioner interacted with each other and with their various publics, so it will be some time before we shall be able to generalise on such matters.

The Left and the Revolutions

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Priestland
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Ethnic Politics ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
The Caucasus ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Interpretation ◽  
The Impact

This article provides a new interpretation of Europe’s revolutionary era between 1917 and 1923, exploring the origins of the revolutionary wave and its diverse impact across Europe, focusing on the role of the Left. It seeks to revive the insights of social history and historical sociology, which have been neglected by a recent historiography, that stress the role of contingency, the impact of war, and the influence of militaristic cultures. Yet unlike older social history approaches which emphasised domestic social conflict at the expense of ethnic politics and empire, it argues that the revolutions were the result of a crisis of old geopolitical and ethnic hierarchies, as well as social ones. It develops a comparative approach, presenting a new way of incorporating the experience of eastern Europe and the Caucasus into the history of Europe’s revolutions, and a new analysis of why Russia provided such fertile ground for revolutionary politics.

3. Explanation in science

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samir Okasha
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Explanation ◽  
Good Explanation ◽  
Multiple Realization ◽  
Symmetric Relation ◽  
General Law ◽  
Covering Law

What exactly is scientific explanation? ‘Explanation in science’ begins with Carl Hempel's covering law model of explanation, which says that to explain a phenomenon is to show that its occurrence follows deductively from a general law, perhaps supplemented by other laws and/or particular facts, all of which must be true. This model does not deal with symmetry or irrelevance. The covering law model implies that explanation should be a symmetric relation, but in fact it is asymmetric. Also, a good explanation of a phenomenon should contain information that is relevant to the phenomenon's occurrence. Causality-based accounts of scientific explanation and the concepts of reduction and multiple realization are also explained.

Test and Evaluation: The Changing Nature of our Scientific Knowledge

2000 ◽  
Vol 44 (37) ◽  
pp. 565-568 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joyce A. Cameron
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Scientific Explanation ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
The United States ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Physical Sciences ◽  
Newtonian Physics ◽  
Test And Evaluation ◽  
Conceptual Foundations

Traditionally, human factors/ergonomics professionals, especially in the United States, use concepts and methods derived from engineering and experimental psychology, both of which are rooted in the conceptual framework of classical, seventeenth-century, Newtonian physics. As a result, our conceptual foundations emphasize reductionism and determinism. However, we need to update these conceptual foundations to reflect the reality of the science of today. Concepts such as holism demand re-thinking the structure of scientific knowledge; principles such as uncertainty have profound implications concerning observation and measurement; and principles such as complementarity require re-examination of the nature of scientific explanation. Many variables of interest to Test and Evaluation (T&E) professionals can be investigated using concepts and methods derived from the physical sciences, the life sciences, and/or the human sciences. However, the science used will profoundly influence the available explanatory concepts and the resulting explanations. Thus, in addition to defining the questions to be asked, T&E professionals need also to consider the kind of science to be used in each investigation.

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