CALL FOR PAPERS

Historical and Scientific Explanation: Reexamining the Connection

KU Leuven

June 15-16, 2018

Event website: here

Keynote Speaker: Michael Strevens (NYU)

Invited Speakers: Philippe Huneman (CNRS/Paris Sorbonne 1), Sylvia Wenmackers (KUL)

In a 1942 article Carl Hempel famously described historical explanations as (scientific) ‘explanation sketches’: incomplete explanations where the historians had failed to explicitly refer to the underlying universal laws. In reaction, Arthur Danto rejected the notion that historical explanation had anything to do with scientific explanation. Instead, historical explanation is a humanistic, interpretative activity, and all attempts to bring historical and scientific explanation together (e.g. Marx) have resulted in “intellectual monsters”.

Despite Danto’s protests, the past 50 years has seen a creeping expansion of the application of scientific explanation. Historians incorporate social science into their explanations; literary criticism is often influenced by psychology. With the advent of ‘Big History’, some have even attempted to fit the whole of history within a quasi-predictive framework. Intellectual monsters abound.

Has Hempel been vindicated? A number of important developments in philosophy of science give pause. The first is that our conception of what it means to explain something scientifically has much widened. It is no longer automatically means to subsume phenomena under timeless universal laws, but can also mean, for instance, to find the mechanisms causing the phenomenon, or to explain a state of affairs as a path-dependent, irreversible outcome.

The second is that scientific explanation is now distinguished from understanding, at least by some philosophers. Giving an explanation of a phenomenon is not the same as understanding that phenomenon. This distinction was alien to the early generation of logical positivists, but would have been sympathetically received by Danto.

These developments invite a reexamination of the relationship between scientific and historical explanation – a topic that has fallen into neglect since 1970.

For this workshop, we invite contributions on the relation between scientific and historical explanation. Addressed questions include but are not limited to:

1. What role does history play in scientific explanation? Why does history play a role?
2. Can we reduce historical explanation to a form of causal explanation?
3. Is there a form of explanation or perhaps understanding that historians seek that is distinctive from that of social scientists?
4. What is the difference between explanation in history and explanation in social science?
5. Is there a difference between scientific understanding and humanistic understanding?

Submission information

We have a number of 45-minute slots for contributed papers (no parallel sessions). For this we invite submissions of abstracts of between 300 and 500 words, excluding references and footnotes.

Abstracts must be blinded, but include personal information (affiliation, contact info) in your submission email. Send to hugh.desmond@kuleuven.be

Deadline: April 8, 2018.

Notification: April 15, 2018.

Travel grants

We have funds to award travel grants to PhD students and early career researchers. Please indicate in your submission whether you would like to be considered.

Practical Info
Location: Higher Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium
Dates: afternoon of June 15 – afternoon of June 16 

Scientific Committee

Bendik Aaby (KUL)

Dr. Hugh Desmond (KUL)

Prof. Dr. Bert Leuridan (UA)

Prof. Dr. Grant Ramsey (KUL)