Currie, Adrian (Author)
British Journal for the Philosophy of Science
Volume: 68
Issue: 4
Pages: 929-952
Our epistemic access to the past is infamously patchy: historical information degrades and disappears and bygone eras are often beyond the reach of repeatable experiments. However, historical scientists have been remarkably successful at uncovering and explaining the past. I argue that part of this success is explained by the exploitation of dependencies between historical events, entities, and processes. For instance, if sauropod dinosaurs were hot blooded, they must have been gluttons; the high-energy demands of endothermy restrict sauropod grazing strategies. Understanding such dependencies extends our reach into the past in spite of incomplete data. In addition, this serves as a counterexample to two accounts of method in the historical sciences. By one, historical science proceeds by identifying ‘smoking guns’: traces that discriminate between live hypotheses. By the other, historical hypotheses are supported by consilience: the convergence of independent lines of evidence. However, testing for ‘coherency’ between past hypotheses also plays a critical role in historical confirmation. Just as historical scientists exploit dependencies between past entities and present entities to infer what the past was like, they also exploit dependencies between past entities themselves. I do not suggest that archetypical historical science proceeds in this manner. Rather, the lesson I draw is that historical methodology cannot be characterized as archetypically relying on one method or another. Historical science is at base opportunistic, and is resistant to unitary analyses.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Article
Catherine Greene;
(2021)
Historical Counterfactuals, Transition Periods, and the Constraints on Imagination
(/isis/citation/CBB731857942/)
Book
Thomas S. Kuhn;
Bojana Mladenovic;
(2022)
The Last Writings of Thomas S. Kuhn: Incommensurability in Science
(/isis/citation/CBB418530960/)
Article
Daniela K. Helbig;
(2019)
Life without Toothache: Hans Blumenberg's Zettelkasten and History of Science as Theoretical Attitude
(/isis/citation/CBB837512068/)
Article
Kean, Sam;
(2012)
Retrodiagnoses: Investigating the Ills of Long-Dead Celebrities
(/isis/citation/CBB001320462/)
Article
Adrian Currie;
Kim Sterelny;
(2017)
In Defence of Story-Telling
(/isis/citation/CBB462798357/)
Article
Feest, Uljana;
Sturm, Thomas;
(2011)
What (Good) Is Historical Epistemology?
(/isis/citation/CBB001024687/)
Article
Tillmann Taape;
Pamela H. Smith;
Tianna Helena Uchacz;
(2020)
Schooling the Eye and Hand: Performative Methods of Research and Pedagogy in the Making and Knowing Project
(/isis/citation/CBB372601310/)
Article
Paola Radici Colace;
(2013)
Il 'mestiere' di storico. La scrittura della storia dall'opinione alla ricostruzione scientifica
(/isis/citation/CBB172173475/)
Article
Cavicchi, Elizabeth;
(2008)
A Witness Account of Solar Microscope Projections: Collective Acts Integrating across Personal and Historical Memory
(/isis/citation/CBB000850472/)
Article
Martí-Henneberg, Jordi;
(2011)
Geographical Information Systems and the Study of History
(/isis/citation/CBB001211160/)
Book
Sven Dupré;
Anna Harris;
Julia Kursell;
Patricia Lulof;
Maartje Stols-Witlox;
(2020)
Reconstruction, Replication and Re-enactment in the Humanities and Social Sciences
(/isis/citation/CBB837947575/)
Article
Dion, Sonia Maria;
(2013)
Pierre Duhem and the Inconsistency between Instrumentalism and Natural Classification
(/isis/citation/CBB001211300/)
Book
Palmieri, Paolo;
(2008)
Reenacting Galileo's Experiments: Rediscovering the Techniques of Seventeenth-Century Science
(/isis/citation/CBB000952012/)
Article
Lawrence M. Principe;
Hjalmar Fors;
H. Otto Sibum;
(2016)
From the Library to the Laboratory and Back Again: Experiment as a Tool for Historians of Science
(/isis/citation/CBB807654224/)
Essay Review
Maarten Van Dyck;
(2022)
Jochen Büttner, Swinging and Rolling: Unveiling Galileo's Unorthodox Path from a Challenging Problem to a New Science, Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, 2019.
(/isis/citation/CBB028097226/)
Book
Carrier, Martin;
(2011)
Wissenschaftstheorie zur Einführung
(/isis/citation/CBB001420974/)
Article
Stefan Reiners;
(2020)
“Our Science Must Establish Itself”: On the Scientific Status of Lazarus and Steinthal’s Völkerpsychologie
(/isis/citation/CBB618868886/)
Book
Adrian Currie;
(2018)
Rock, Bone, and Ruin: An Optimist's Guide to the Historical Sciences
(/isis/citation/CBB457045771/)
Article
Christine Aicardi;
(2016)
Francis Crick, cross-worlds influencer: A narrative model to historicize big bioscience
(/isis/citation/CBB943380856/)
Article
Koen B. Tanghe;
Lieven Pauwels;
Alexis De Tiège;
Johan Braeckman;
(2021)
Interpreting the History of Evolutionary Biology through a Kuhnian Prism: Sense or Nonsense?
(/isis/citation/CBB663981998/)
Be the first to comment!