Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2brh9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T21:20:52.392Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Internal History versus External History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 February 2017

Bence Nanay
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to generalize a pair of concepts that are widely used in the history of science, in art history and in historical linguistics – the concept of internal and external history – and to replace the often very vague talk of ‘historical narratives’ with this conceptual framework of internal versus external history. I argue that this way of framing the problem allows us to see the possible alternatives more clearly – as a limited number of possible relations between internal and external history. Finally, I argue that while external history is metaphysically prior to internal history, when it comes to historical explanations, we need both.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 92 , Issue 2 , April 2017 , pp. 207 - 230
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Musil, Robert, The Man without Qualities (New York: Random House, 1995), 390–391 Google Scholar.

2 See Mannava, S., ‘Micro-narratives compensating the omission of grand historical narratives’, Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences 158 (2014): 320–325 CrossRefGoogle Scholar for a summary.

3 White, H., Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973)Google Scholar. White, H., ‘The value of narrativity in the representation of reality’, Critical Inquiry 7 (1980): 5–27 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. White, H., ‘The question of narrative in contemporary historical theory’, History and Theory 23 (1984): 1–33 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Wölfflin, Heinrich, The Problem of the Development of Style in Early Modern Art (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 1915/2015), 11 Google Scholar.

5 Ibid., 305.

6 Baxandall, Michael, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972)Google Scholar.

7 See Summers, David, Real Spaces (London: Phaidon 2003)Google Scholar; Davis, Whitney, A General Theory of Visual Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Davis, Whitney, ‘Succession and Recursion in Heinrich Wölfflin's Principles of Art History’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 73 (2015): 157–64Google Scholar, see also Nanay, Bence, ‘The history of vision’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 73 (2015): 259–271 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 See esp. Baxandall, Michael, Giotto and the Orators. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971)Google Scholar and M. Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy, Chapter 2.

9 Lakatos, Imre, ‘Falsification and the methodology of scientific research programmes’, in: Lakatos, I. and Musgrave, A. (eds) Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 91–195 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Lakatos, Imre, ‘History of science and its rational reconstruction’, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 8 (1971): 91–136 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Lakatos's way of using these terms is highly idiosyncratic (see Lakatos: ‘History of science and its rational reconstruction’, 123, n. 1; Hacking, Ian, ‘Imre Lakatos's philosophy of science’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 30 (1979): 381–410 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 394. Hacking, Ian, Representing and Intervening (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 122 CrossRefGoogle Scholar: it is very different from what intellectual historians mean by internal and external history (see Shapin, Steven, ‘Discipline and bounding: The history and sociology of science as seen through the externalism-internalism debate’, History of Science 30 (1992): 333–369 CrossRefGoogle Scholar for a good summary of the many ways this distinction is used by intellectual historians).

10 I. Lakatos, ‘Falsification’, 180. Note that Lakatos would count the beliefs and motives of individual scientists as part of external history – Wölfflin probably would not (see Wölfflin: Principles, 305).

11 Lakatos had an idiosyncratic view on the relation between the internal and external history of science, which I will return to in Section 5.1. But we do not need to accept his views about the relation between internal and external history to use the concepts themselves.

12 Latour, Bruno and Woolgar, Steve, Laboratory Life (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1979)Google Scholar

13 Another famous example is Shapin, Steven, ‘The history of science and its sociological reconstruction’, History of Science 20 (1982): 157–211 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Shapin, Steven and Simon Schaffer, ‘Leviathan and the Air Pump’, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985) for an important theoretical/methodological manifesto for the sociology of science approach.

14 Latour and Woolgar's Laboratory Life is a good example.

15 Some famous examples include Popper, Karl R., The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London Routledge, 1959/2002)Google Scholar; Popper, Karl R., Conjectures and Refutations (London Routledge, 1963)Google Scholar; Popper, Karl R., Objective Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972)Google Scholar; Popper, Karl R., ‘The rationality of scientific revolutions’, in Harré, R. (ed.) Problems of Scientific Revolutions (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 72–101 Google Scholar (reprinted in Popper: The Myth of the Framework (London: Routledge, 1996)); Popper, Karl R., ‘Natural selection and the emergence of mind’, Dialectica 32 (1978): 339–355 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Toulmin, S., ‘From logical systems to conceptual populations’, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 8 (1970): 552–564 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Toulmin, S., ‘The evolutionary development of natural science’, American Scientist 55 (1967): 456–471 Google ScholarPubMed; Toulmin, S., Human Understanding (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972)Google Scholar; Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 172 Google Scholar; Fraassen, Bas Van, The Scientific Image (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 39–40 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hull, D. L., ‘A mechanism and its metaphysics: An evolutionary account of the social and conceptual development of science’, Biology & Philosophy 3 (1988): 123–155 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hull, David L., Science and Selection, (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001)Google Scholar. See Bradie, Michael, ‘Assessing Evolutionary Epistemology’, Biology & Philosophy 1 (1986): 401–459 CrossRefGoogle Scholar for a typology.

16 See D. L. Hull, ‘A mechanism and its metaphysics’; D. L. Hull, Science and Selection; Aunger, Robert, The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think and Communicate (New York: Free Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Distin, Kate, The Selfish Meme (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

17 Dawkins, Richard, The Selfish Gene (Second edition, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1976/1989)Google Scholar; Dawkins, Richard, The Extended Phenotype (Oxford: W. H. Freeman, 1982)Google ScholarPubMed; Dawkins, Richard: ‘Replicators and Vehicles’, reprinted in: Brandon, R. N. and Burian, R. M. (eds) Genes, Organisms, Populations: Controversies over the Units of Selection (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Dennett, Daniel C., Darwin's Dangerous Idea (New York: Touchstone, 1995)Google Scholar; Dennett, Daniel C., Freedom Evolves (New York: Viking, 2003)Google Scholar; Dennett, Daniel C., Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Viking, 2006)Google Scholar.

18 Sperber, Dan, ‘An objection to the memetic approach to culture’ in Aunger, Robert (ed.) Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar. Wimsatt, W. C., ‘Genes, Memes, and Cultural Heredity’, Biology and Philosophy 14 (1999), 279–310 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Richerson, Peter J. and Boyd, Robert, Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Sterelny, Kim, ‘The Evolution and Evolvability of Culture’, Mind & Language 21 (2006): 137–165 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sterelny, Kim, ‘Memes Revisited’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 57 (2006): 145–165 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Selectionist explanations of scientific change that do not help themselves to the concept of meme are also subject to the same criticism. See especially Stephen Toulmin's evolutionary account, especially Toulmin, ‘From logical systems to conceptual populations’, 560–564.

20 I. Lakatos, ‘Falsification’, 180.

21 Not just in the quoted passage, but also in Lakatos, ‘A postscript on history of science and its rational reconstruction’, in Lakatos, Imre, The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes (eds) Worrall, John and Currie, Gregory. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 189–192 CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Lakatos, ‘History of science’, 179.

22 K. Popper, Objective Knowledge, 159.

23 Ibid.

24 I. Lakatos, ‘A postscript’, 128.

25 I. Lakatos, ‘History of science’, 127, footnote 61.

26 Ibid, 106.

27 See, e.g. Elkana, Y., ‘Boltzmann's scientific research programme and its alternatives’, in Elkana, Y. (ed.) The Interaction between Science and Philosophy (New York: Free Press, 1974), 242–297 Google Scholar, at 245; Kulka, Tomas, ‘Some problems concerning rational reconstruction: Comments on Elkana and Lakatos’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 28 (1977): 325–344, at 331CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Palmer, Notably E., ‘Lakatos's “Internal history” as historiography’, Perspectives on Science 1 (1993): 603–626 Google Scholar.

29 I. Hacking, Representing and Intervening, 122.

30 Toulmin insisted that evolution should be more than a mere metaphor when we describe the progress of science (Toulmin, ‘From logical systems to conceptual populations’, 560–564). It is not enough to compare the trial and error method of science to the trial and error method of natural selection. The evolutionary model is indeed explanatory (Toulmin, ‘The evolutionary development of natural science’, 470): selection among scientific theories explains some of the features of these theories, most importantly, their survival. Lakatos's main problem with Toulmin's account is that this selectionist explanation bypasses scientists and philosophers, very much like the cunning of Hegelian reason. In other words, he seems to be criticizing Toulmin for ignoring external history – something Lakatos himself is often accused of. The most detailed account of Lakatos's problems with Toulmin's evolutionary explanation is in Lakatos, ‘Toulmin's Wittgensteinian epicycles’ (manuscript in the Lakatos archive, file number 8/4). For a shorter summary, see Lakatos, ‘Understanding Toulmin’, Minerva 14 (1976): 126–43 at 137–138 Google Scholar. See also his letter to Jon Cohen, who reviewed Toulmin's book in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (which Lakatos edited) in 1972. Lakatos here explicitly agrees with Cohen's criticism of Toulmin's Darwinism, ‘Lakatos to Jon Cohen’, October 22, 1972, Lakatos archive, file number 13/166.

31 Lakatos, Imre, ‘Proofs and refutations’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 14 (1963/1964): 1–25 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 120–139, 221–243, 296–342 at 146.

32 Lakatos, ‘History of science’, 94, see also his tirades against Toulmin, who he accuses of radical internalism – of what could be rephrased as the claim that internal history fails to supervene on external history.

33 See especially Hauser, A., Philosophie der Kunstgeschichte (Munich: Beck, 1958)Google Scholar and also Summers, D., ‘Forms: 19th-Century metaphysics and the problem of art historical descriptions’, in Preziosi, D. (ed.) The Art of Art History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 127–142 Google Scholar for a summary.

34 Wölfflin, Principles, 305.

35 Ibid.

36 H. White, Metahistory; H. White, ‘The value of narrativity’.

37 See e.g. Davidson, Donald, ‘Mental events’, in Foster, L. and Swanson, J. (eds) Experience and Theory (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970), 79–101 Google Scholar.

38 I. Hacking, Representing and Intervening, 124 alludes to the same analogy briefly.

39 See e.g. K. Popper, Objective Knowledge, 179.

40 I. Lakatos, ‘Falsification’, 106.

41 Ibid.

42 See Nanay, Bence, ‘Rational reconstruction reconsidered’, The Monist 93 (2010): 595–615 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43 I. Lakatos, ‘History of science’, 107. Lakatos reiterates this idea about relegating actual history to the footnotes three times on one page in this same paper.

44 Kuhn, T., ‘Notes on Lakatos’, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 8 (1971): 137–146 at 143CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45 Kuhn, T., ‘Reflections on my critics’, in Lakatos, I. and Musgrave, A. (eds) Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 237–278 at 256Google Scholar.

46 Laudan, Larry, Progress and its Problems (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 170 Google Scholar.

47 Holton, Gerald J., The scientific imagination: Case studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 106 Google Scholar, see also Holton, Gerald J., ‘On being caught between Dionysians and Apollonians’, Daedalus 103 (1974): 65–81 at 75Google Scholar, Koertge, Noretta, ‘Rational reconstruction’, in Cohen, Robert S., Feyerabend, Paul K. and Wartofsky, Marx W. (eds) Essays in Memory of Imre Lakatos (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1976), 359–369 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, McMullin, E., ‘The history and philosophy of science: A taxonomy’, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 5 (1970): 12–67 Google Scholar.

48 I. Lakatos, ‘Falsification’, 138, n. 40.

49 I. Lakatos, ‘History of science’, 91 – this is not a passing remark, but the summary of the third of the three main claims he argues for in this paper.

50 Ibid, 94.

51 Ibid, 105.

52 Musgrave, Alan, ‘Facts and values in science studies’, in Home, Roderick Weir (ed.) Science under Scrutiny: The Place of History and Philosophy of Science (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983), 49–80 at 66CrossRefGoogle Scholar – see also the similarly charitable interpretation of Brown, James Robert, The Rational and the Social (London: Routledge, 1989), 109–111 Google Scholar; Ian Hacking, ‘Lakatos's philosophy of science’, 396; I. Hacking Representing and Intervening, 125.

53 See e.g. Lakatos, ‘History of science’, 92, 105.

54 Ibid, 105, see also I. Lakatos, ‘A postscript’, 191 and Lakatos, ‘History of science’, 92 for similar formulations.

55 I. Lakatos, ‘A postscript’, 191.

56 See, e.g., I. Lakatos, ‘History of science’, 118, I. Lakatos, ‘A postscript’, 191–192.

57 See I. Lakatos, ‘A postscript’, 192.

58 I. Laudan, Progress, 170.

59 I. Lakatos, ‘Falsification’, 93.

60 Ibid.

61 Becker, Felicitas, Becoming Muslim in Mainland Tanzania (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

62 Van Fraassen, Scientific Image, 142–143.

63 Gould, Stephen Jay, ‘Fleeming Jenkin revisited’ in Bully for Brontosaurus (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 340–353 Google Scholar; Bulmer, Michael, Francis Galton: Pioneer of Heredity and Biometry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 141–145 Google Scholar; Bulmer, Michael, ‘Did Jenkin's swamping argument invalidate Darwin's theory of natural selection?’, British Journal for the History of Science 37 (2004): 281–297 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Morris, S. W., ‘Fleeming Jenkin and The Origin of Species: A reassessment’, British Journal for the History of Science 27 (1994): 313–343 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bowler, Peter J., The Eclipse of Darwinism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Bowler, Peter J., The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical Myth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Bowler, Peter J., Charles Darwin: The Man and his Influence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Cookson, G. and Hempstead, C. A., A Victorian Scientist and Engineer: Fleeming Jenkin and the Birth of Electrical Engineering (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000)Google Scholar.

64 Letter to Joseph Hooker, in Darwin, F. and Seward, A. C., More Letters of Charles Darwin, 2 vols. (London: Murray, 1903, vol. 2), 379 Google Scholar, see also a similar claim in his letter to Alfred Russel Wallace also in 1869.

65 See Hull, David L., Darwin and His Critics. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973)Google Scholar and Vorzimmer, P., ‘Charles Darwin and blending inheritance’ Isis 54 (1963): 371–390 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Vorzimmer, P., Charles Darwin, The Years of Controversy: The Origin of Species and Its Critics, 1859–1882 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1970)Google Scholar, for summaries.

66 See, for example, Lewontin, R. C., ‘How important is genetics for an understanding of evolution?’, American Zoologist 26 (1986): 811–820 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67 Mayr, Ernst, The Growth of Biological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 512–514 Google Scholar, see also Kitcher, Philip, Living with Darwin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 73–75 Google Scholar, who also nicely exposes the racist undertones of Jenkin's paper.

68 See especially Mayr, Ernst, ‘Typological versus population thinking’, in Meggers, B. J. (ed.) Evolution and Anthropology (Washington: The Anthropological Society of America, 1959), 409–412 Google Scholar, see also Sober, Elliott, ‘Evolution, population thinking, and essentialism’, Philosophy of Science 47 (1980): 350–383 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Nanay, Bence, ‘Population thinking as trope nominalism’, Synthese 177 (2011): 91–109 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

69 See especially E. Mayr, Growth, 514.

70 See, e.g. Vorzimmer, Charles Darwin.

71 E. Mayr, Growth, 514, see also ibid., 681–697.

72 This work was supported by the FWO Odysseus Grant G.0200.12N and the FWO grant G0C7416N.