Morton White and the Regularity Theory of Historical Explanation
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Monday 29 April 2024 is the 107th anniversary of the birth of Morton White (29 April 1917–27 May 2016), who was born in New York City on this date in 1917.
White is known, among other things, for his rejection of speculative philosophies of history. It’s not always clear what philosophers mean when they say they reject speculative philosophies of history, but one suspects that this is a way to indirectly distance themselves from that bête noir, Hegel, or that other bête noir, Marx, whose birthday is just a few days away. He opens his book Foundations of Historical Knowledge with exactly this gambit, naming and shaming Hegel, Marx, Vico, Spengler, and Toynbee in rapid succession.
White says that philosophy of history is, “a discipline with a checkered past, a respectable present and, I hope, a brighter future.” Presumably Hegel and friends represent the checkered past. Why was this past checkered? Because they went about the business of philosophy of history all wrong. Now we are smarter and we know better. Here is how White characterizes the change in philosophy of history that delivered us from the bad old days of all that had gone before:
“Instead of seeking to chart the development of epochs, cultures, and civilizations, the contemporary philosopher of history is more interested in analyzing historical thought and language. Instead of trying to advance or defend some general theory of the historical process itself, the contemporary philosopher of history who is not dominated by the aims of Marxism or by certain forms of theology is now primarily concerned with the logic of history, anxious to elucidate terms that are commonly employed by historians and historically minded thinkers, and eager to advance toward a clearer understanding of the chief intellectual activities of the historian.”
Notice that White here invoked a desire to advance toward a clearer understanding of the chief intellectual activities of the historian. This is the familiar figure of the practicing historian — one might even say the familiar philosophical figure of the practicing historian, sometimes called the working historian — which I previously discussed in my episode on Siefried Kracauer, who was also interested in a philosophical exposition of the practicing historian. In my Siefried Kracauer episode I argued that the idea of the practicing historian serves the philosophy of history much as the idea of the practicing mathematician serves the philosophy of mathematics. The underlying idea here is that philosophers get too focused on peculiarly philosophical problems and lose sight of the actual problems faced by historians doing history, scientists doing science, and mathematicians doing mathematics (as though this were the proper remit of the philosopher).
If specifically philosophical problems are illegitimate, as is sometimes implied, then if anything remains of philosophy, we are left with the Quinean dictum that philosophy of science is philosophy enough. I’m not going to argue this point at present, but I wanted to mention it so as to be on the up-and-up on the motivations that drive a lot of contemporary philosophy. But is the practicing historian, or the practicing whatever who is invoked by philosophers, really the philosophically pristine figure that they are made out to be? Or might it be that the practicing historian is a construction of the philosopher of history who wants to attribute his views to this pristine figure so as to derive the disciplinary authority of some figure not attached to a particular philosophical school? This might sound like an uncharitable way to characterize the work of a philosopher, but I think we can legitimately ask this question in relation to White’s use of the figure of the historian.
White does not himself use the language of the “practicing historian” or “working historian” but instead uses “professional historian,” as in the following from his Foundations of Historical Knowledge:
“…professional historians write their histories about a limited class of things. Not any thing may be a central subject of a historian’s history. Historians write histories of nations, civilizations, scientific societies, philosophical movements, revolutions, economies, religions. They usually do not write histories of planets, animals, stars, rocks, or galaxies. So we know that they are primarily concerned with the social behavior of human beings. However, the problem before us now is not that of defining the class of things or subjects of which historians with a large ‘H’ may write a history. We are asking what features of a given subject should be mentioned in a history of that subject. And if we are seeking a definition of the notion of what features should be recorded by a professional historian, I do not think that any useful one can be supplied.”
Historians today do write histories of planets, animals, stars, rock, and galaxies. We find this in particular in the school of big history, which I discussed in a recent episode on my paper, A Complexity Ladder for Big History. Nevertheless, it remains true that professional historians are primarily concerned with the social behavior of human beings. This loose way of understanding history allows for differences in scope as to what properly constitutes history, but, even given his wiggle room, White concedes the impossibility of a definition of what is to be included in a history, and what is to be excluded. This is the familiar problem of the historian’s selection of his material.
The historian’s selection has been a target for critics of the possibility of objectivity in history. White addressed the objectivity question for history in his book Social Thought in America. I have not yet been able to get a copy of this book, but there is a section reprinted in Hans Meyerhoff’s anthology The Philosophy of History in Our Time. White’s Social Thought in America was first published in 1949, some years before Danto’s Analytical Philosophy of History was published in 1965. I mention this because White implicitly discusses the problem of the perfect chronicler, which we find fully explicit in Danto, and White doesn’t make the breakthrough that Danto did, namely, that the logical structure of a narrative sentence is distinct from propositions such as one would find in a chronicle.
A narrative sentence describes an earlier event in terms of a later event — for example, the future 16th president of the United States was born in a log cabin in Kentucky on 12 February 1809 — which is a meaning that no chronicle, no matter how exhaustive, can capture. White has his own solution to this problem that is different from Danto’s, but since Danto’s work changed the field, White’s solution is not discussed today. But I wanted to mention this book by White — Social Thought in America — since it further develops the theme of the working historian.
As I said, I don’t have a copy of the book, but the extract from the book included in Meyerhoff is a discussion of American historian Charles Beard. Beard is among the most eminent of American historians, with a multi-volume work on The Rise of American Civilization and his influential book An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, among many other works. Beard would seem to be a perfect candidate for a working historian or practicing historian or professional historian. Beard did, however, occasionally express himself on philosophical matters connected to history, so his work isn’t perfectly pristine with respect to philosophy.
What I find interesting is that White does not take Beard as a model of historical practice from which philosophers should learn, but in fact he critiques Beard’s views. This strikes me as both strange and as understandable. It is strange because, if the philosopher is supposed to take his instruction in history from the professional historian, presumably it would be White’s business to follow the lead of Beard and provide a philosophical justification for why Beard’s historical practice is the proper model for philosophy of history. Is it understandable because no philosopher can resist poking holes in the philosophical arguments of others, especially when those others are non-philosophers who are a soft target for philosophical argumentation.
White does a poor job of selflessly serving professional historians, but he does a good job of drawing out the philosophical presuppositions of professional historians like Beard, and in demonstrating their previously unnoticed consequences of these presuppositions. Beard redeems himself in White’s eyes only because he fails to heed his own philosophical views in his historical practice:
“It should be said in Beard’s behalf that he was the only member of the group I have examined who has given a full account of the methods and aims of the social sciences. It is not surprising, therefore, that his ideas should be subject to detailed criticism. He raced around fields where most of the others stepped lightly and infrequently. And very often he says what they really thought, while they merely mumbled it incoherently or kept it to themselves. For all his mistakes and his philosophical confusions, Beard’s later work in the methodology of the social sciences remains stimulating. It goes without saying that his errors in philosophy cast no reflection on his work in social science itself. In this respect he takes his position in a long and worthy line of scientists — physical and social — who have worked with standards in philosophy which they dared not use in science.”
This final claim that scientists have worked with standards in philosophy which they dared not use in science — the crucial condition for Beard’s redemption arc — poses many interesting questions. Should scientists dare to employ their philosophical standards in scientific practice? Is it possible for scientists to hold philosophical views, if only in subtle and difficult to discern ways, that do not influence their scientific practice? I have been assuming that one of the reasons philosophers appeal to the practice of working historians or the practice of working mathematician as the justification for authentic philosophical views reflective of a discipline is because these practices are believed to be purer because there are uncontaminated by philosophy.
Of course, the forbidden views the intrusion of which is particularly unwelcome are usually metaphysical views. One of the presumed ingredients of a speculative philosophy of history such as proscribed by White is too much metaphysics, or the wrong kind of metaphysics. It is entirely possible that someone might formulate a metaphysical philosophy of history that was not a speculative philosophy of history. For example, an analytical philosopher of history might formulate an ontology of historical objects, events, and processes while remaining entirely agnostic on any laws governing these historical objects, events, and processes.
Of course, we can ask why someone would take the trouble to formulate an ontology for history while carefully avoiding noticing any pattern that these objects, events and processes might exhibit, especially as the historical events and processes that connect historical objects to one another might themselves be taken to be laws of history. But let’s assume, for purposes of argument, that it is possible dance around any connection between events and to lay out an ontology of history that has nothing to do with laws of history.
I strongly suspect that the same kind of animus that has been directed against speculative philosophy of history by analytical philosophers would be directed also against a non-speculative metaphysical philosophy of history. White himself acknowledges pragmatists, naturalists, and realists are anti-metaphysical and united in their rejection of speculative philosophy of history, which implies the equivalence of metaphysical and speculative philosophy of history, but, as we have seen, careful observance of the method of isolation can separate the two.
I said earlier that Danto had changed philosophy of history so dramatically that earlier approaches to narrative, such as we find in White, have fallen out of notice since Danto’s work took the field. This is sometimes expressed as Danto inaugurating an era of post-positivist analytical philosophy of history. White belonged to the still-positivism period of analytical philosophy of history. The high water mark of positivism prior to Danto is represented by Carl Hempel. In my episode on Carl Hempel I mentioned his covering law model of historical explanation. This is the tradition within which White was working, though he called Hempel’s covering law model the regularity theory of historical explanation, and he glossed it like this:
“It will be convenient to begin by considering what is sometimes called the covering law, or regularity, theory of historical explanation. On this view an explanation of a war, a revolution, or an economic depression is similar in structure to an explanation of a fire. We may explain a particular fire, it is maintained, by deducing the statement that the fire has taken place from the statement that a spark has fallen into a wastebasket of dry paper surrounded by oxygen and from the law that whenever a spark falls into such a wastebasket under such conditions, a fire will take place. Some philosophers who accept this view contend that not only the truth of a singular explanatory statement in ordinary language, like ‘The lit cigarette caused the fire’ or ‘The bent rail caused the derailment,’ but also that of a singular statement in history books, like ‘The Moslem seizure of the Mediterranean Sea caused the breakdown of the Mediterranean Commonwealth in Europe,’ is dependent on the truth of a law. Ever since Hume, such a theory has exerted a powerful hold on philosophers, even on those who recognize and emphasize the limits of historical speculation. The idea that we can intuitively see causal connections between historical events without appealing to inductively established laws, or that causes have unanalyzable powers to bring about their effects, has seemed indefensible to philosophers of an empirical turn of mind, and they have therefore been led to the view that causal statements are either disguised statements of laws or are in some way dependent upon them for their truth. Even though historians in their explanatory statements refer to particular events like the Civil War and the conflict between Northern and Southern economic interests, philosophers under the influence of Hume and Mill have maintained that such explanatory statements turn out upon analysis to imply, involve, presuppose, or depend on general laws.”
The covering law model presents a subtle problem for the analytical philosopher of history. The analytical philosopher of history has renounced the possibility of finding laws of history. But the idea of laws of history is ambiguous. What is and what is not a law of history? The covering law model of historical explanation makes explanations of historical events into law-like statements, but how is an explanation of history distinction from a speculative philosophy of history that gives a lawlike explanation of events? Are we not, with the covering law model, offering laws of history?
White is sensitive to this problem. He was concerned that the laws of the covering law model might be mistaken for the faulty generalizations of speculative philosophers of history, and on this problem wrote:
“Although the ‘laws’ of certain speculative philosophers of history do not always turn out to apply to single examples, there is no doubt that they often apply to very few examples by comparison to the laws of natural science, and this paucity of inductive evidence may lead some critics of the regularity theory of historical explanation to complain that any law of the sort the regularist may employ in an explanatory deductive argument will resemble the allegedly bankrupt laws of the speculative theorist of history. Once again, however, it must be pointed out that there is no a priori reason to suppose that regularism involves an appeal to indefensible laws, and also that where a speculative theorist asserts a law that is not supported by inductive evidence and he cannot compensate for that defect by, for example, deducing it from more fundamental statements, he is justly criticized. The fact that certain speculative philosophers of history assert faulty generalizations is not an argument against the regularity theory of historical explanation.”
Is it only the indefensible laws of history that are bankrupt, leaving defensible laws of history intact? If this is the case, how do we distinguish between defensible and indefensible generalizations in history? If we can offer more fundamental laws from which our laws of history are derived, and the fundamental laws are among the defensible generalizations, does that get us off the hook? Have we successfully avoided a metaphysical philosophy of history if we can support our historical generalizations with inductive evidence or more fundamental laws?
When White argues that historians are really using a covering law model even when they don’t realize that they are appealing to this kind of explanation of historical events, he is making an appearance/reality distinction: the appearance of ordinary historical explanation is not that of covering law model explanations, but in reality this is what the historian is doing. The historian doesn’t know that he is using a covering law model of explanation. That is to say, the professional historian doesn’t know what he is doing as he is doing history. This seems harsh, but it is exactly this lack of self-awareness that White thinks redeems Beard, who, according to White, doesn’t impose his naïve philosophy on his historical practice. So much for historical practice as a guide to philosophy of history.
Moreover, if making an appearance/reality distinction is metaphysics, White is engaged in a metaphysical philosophy of history because he distinguishes between the appearance and reality of covering law models of historical explanation. In all fairness to White, I agree with the essentials of his claim: historians are presupposing a number of covering laws in their historical explanations. The problem is often that the laws are so many, so subtle, so elusive, and so intricately tied together that it would be difficult in the extreme to tease out the exact deduction that is being made. The complexity of history defeats ordinary human deductive powers.
There is a relatively unstudied backwater in the philosophy of history that would consist in reducing this complexity of history to a manageable form — perhaps through an adequate taxonomy of historical objects, events, and processes, which I earlier called a metaphysical philosophy of history.
Here lies an opportunity to demonstrate that a metaphysical philosophy of history is possible within the framework of analytical philosophy of history. There is no reason to believe that this cannot be done, but exhibiting such on ontology would be more convincing that merely arguing for its plausibility.
