Patrick Gardiner and the Many Meanings of Explanation
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Sunday 17 March 2024 is the 102nd anniversary of the birth of Patrick Gardiner (17 March 1922–24 June 1997), who was born in Chelsea, London, on this date in 1922.
In my episodes on J. G. A. Pocock, Friedrich von Schlegel, and Raymond Aron I have suggested that there is an unmet need to map the conceptual space of history. Gardiner supplies us with more material for this. He acknowledges that many kinds of inquiry have gone by the name “philosophy of history”:
“It is, in fact, misleading to speak as if there were a single branch of study called ‘The Philosophy of History,’ to which various thinkers have at different times made contributions; nor can the subject be defined by pointing to a specific group of pivotal problems”
While he says we can’t define philosophy of history by a specific group of pivotal problems, this is actually a constructive suggestion on how to approach the mapping of the conceptual space of history. While there may not be any single group of pivotal problems, we would probably find, if we started systematically assembling the problems that various inquiries have attempted to resolve, that the problems tend to cluster together, and each cluster corresponds to a particular kind of inquiry, and that there are relationships among these clusters of problems. One way, then, to begin the conceptual mapping of history would be to start a list of the kind of questions that are asked by historians and philosophers of history, and how historians and philosophers have attempted to resolve these problems. Enough questions would start to sort themselves out into recognizable categories, though there would be a lot of overlap among categories of inquiry, and a lot of gray areas. Gardiner recognizes this:
“…the boundaries between what is known as ‘philosophy of history’ and other fields of speculation and inquiry are exceedingly difficult to draw: at some points it seems to shade off into sociology, at others into historical methodology, and at others again into history proper.”
In earlier episodes I’ve noted that there was a mid-twentieth century trend to assimilate history to sociology and psychology, and there are questions that definitely point in this direction. But there are other questions that point in different directions, since there are an endless number of questions we might ask about history. If we possessed a map of the conceptual space of history, every engagement with history would have its place on the map — the conceptual equivalent of there being a place for everything, and everything in its place — and in revealing the relationships between these engagements with history, it would help us to understand how the questions we are asking and attempting to answer are related to other questions, and to other engagements with history.
Here’s another quote in which Gardiner makes the same point in more detail about the many forms of philosophical engagement with history:
“What projects customarily referred to as ‘philosophies of history’ frequently have in common is the aim of giving a comprehensive account of the historical process in such a way that it can be seen to ‘make sense.’ Yet the notion of ‘making sense’ of the past is itself unclear, and is open to a range of different interpretations. To make an obvious distinction: it is one thing to suppose that history has a meaning in the sense that all that has happened or is going to happen has been (or is) preordained or intended by some ‘hidden hand’ — whether this hand be the hand of Providence or that of Hegel’s ‘cunning of Reason’; it is quite another to suggest merely that its course up to date has shown a trend in a certain direction and (perhaps) to prophesy on the basis of this observed tendency what its future development will be; and it is another thing again to claim that historical events conform to particular causal laws, in terms of which past occurrences can be explained and future changes predicted. Further, while some theories of the historical process have been propounded, as it were, ‘in isolation,’ others can only be understood as forming part of a wider scheme in which they have a definite place: Hegel’s theory, for example, falls into the latter category.”
Everything I have quoted so far from Gardiner comes from his introduction to a collection of papers. He edited the “Oxford Readings in Philosophy” anthology on philosophy of history, and this is probably the appropriate attitude for the editor of a collection papers, in order to present to the reader a broad survey of the various methods that have been brought to bear on some discipline like philosophy of history. But there is reason to believe that Gardiner carried this attitude — which we could call eclecticism if we wanted to belittle it, or we could call pluralism if we wanted to be kinder — into his own work.
There is an excellent overview of Gardiner’s life and work by A. E. Denham, published in Proceedings of the British Academy in 2006. Denham says that Gardiner resisted every philosophical fashion that came and went over his years as a professor:
“…certain of his peers embraced first one local philosophical fashion and then another: Ayer’s logical positivism captivated Oxford philosophy in the late 1930s and was still setting the tone on Gardiner’s arrival in 1940; this enthusiasm gave way, in the later 1940s and early 1950s, to an equally intense one for Rylean behaviourism and other Wittgenstein-inspired passions, on the heels of which followed an almost reverential preoccupation with Austinian linguistic analysis in the 1960s and into the early 1970s; finally, in the last years before Gardiner’s retirement in 1989, arrived Oxford’s decade-long enchantment with the American philosopher Donald Davidson and everything to do with the truth-conditional semantics he had inspired — a phase with which Gardiner, by then long accustomed to Oxford’s vulnerability to passing infatuations, was much amused.”
Gardiner carried this amused detachment from philosophical fashion into his own work on historical explanation. In his book on historical explanation he wrote:
“Explanation is a vague concept. We may explain somebody’s headache by saying that he has been sitting too long in the sun or that he has been working too hard, but we may also explain it by saying that it is a symptom of an oncoming attack of influenza. We may explain somebody’s manners by saying that he has been badly brought up, but we may also explain them by saying that he has an unfortunate personality. We may explain somebody’s arithmetical calculation by saying that he learnt mathematics at school, but we may also explain it by saying that he has observed the rules of long division.”
To make any progress with the problem of historical explanation, we need to address the ambiguity of explanation. What is an historical explanation trying to accomplish? What does it mean to offer an historical explanation of an event? Gardiner begins with a common conception of explanation:
“Hume argued that when we are said to explain an event, we refer to another event, or set of events, of a type which has always been observed in our previous experience to accompany the type of event to be explained. Another way of putting this is to say that an event is explained when it is brought under a generalization or law. It becomes an instance of a general rule stating that, given the presence of certain initial conditions, events similar to the one to be explained will occur. Such a rule or universal hypothesis may be regarded as asserting a regularity of the following type: whenever an event of a specified kind C occurs at a certain place and time, an event of a specified kind E will occur at a place and time which is related in a specified manner to the place and time of the first event.”
This is intended as an explanation of events in terms of laws, but (interestingly) he doesn’t refer to this as the covering law model, and he doesn’t mention Carl Hempel until more than half way through the book, when he tries to give a more precise account of Hempel’s conception of an explanation sketch. The discussion is careful; I would even call it meticulous.
Gardiner goes so far as to argue at the end of the book that the difference between materialistic conceptions of history, for which he takes Marx as the exemplar, and idealistic conceptions of history, for which he takes Collingwood as the exemplar, are the result of distinct presuppositions about explanation:
“…the conflict supposed to exist between materialistic and idealistic interpretations of history is an illusory one. We are not confronted by two realms of causes intersecting or running across one another. What we are confronted by are various uses of the word ‘explain’. To explain a person’s action by giving the purpose it is designed to serve is not the same as to explain an action by referring to a physical event or situation which caused it. And explanations in terms of reasons given, plans or policies adopted, principles followed, are likewise distinct from causal explanations. In the final part of this book I have only had space to suggest the lines along which I believe the analysis of explanations involving reference to how people behave and how they do things should proceed; I have not been able to consider such explanations in all the variety of their occurrence in history books. But what I have been concerned to show is the kind of confusions which arise when it is imagined that different types of explanation imply the existence of different types of causes.”
Gardiner only mentions Raymond Aron in a footnote, without any discussion, but in some ways his work resembles Aron’s recognition of pluralism. But one can clearly see the influence of Ryle and linguistic philosophy. Gardiner may not have followed the fashion of linguistic philosophy, as Denham observed, but he was not untouched by it. Even on the final page of his book on historical explanation he merely recommends more inquiries into other possible meanings of explanation.
Gardiner doesn’t really give the reader much to take home. There is very little suggestion of a bigger picture behind the desire to analyze the role of explanation in history, and it’s hard to imagine that he spent so much effort to clarify the idea of historical explanation and didn’t reflect on the motivation for providing a clear explanation of historical events. In this sense, Gardiner is the paradigmatic analytical philosopher of history. An analytical philosopher might say that he never lowered himself to the consideration of substantive philosophy of history, and all the better. A speculative philosopher of history might say that his work fell short of what it might have been, since his analysis of historical explanation tells us nothing about that which is explained by an historical explanation.
