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SUNY Series in Philosophy and Biolog!David Edward Shaner, Furman University, editot

HISTORYAND EVOLUTION

edited by

Matthew H. Nitecki

and

Do s V. Nitecki

tI

State Universiry oI New York Press



What's So Special about the Past?

Rachel Laudan

During the past half-dozen years, a number ol biologists have become in-

trigued by ana.logies between history and their own dhcipline. SPurred by

the problems of reconsttucting phylogenies, they have asked whether biolo'

gists might find solutions to these prcblems in the historical litemture

(O'Ham 1988a, 1988b). For centuries, after all, histonans have been prcfes_

sionally concemed with reconstructiflg the past and have done so witl con_

siderable success. Surely biologists could benelit from this experience, or so

the argument goes.

I shall counter by suggesting that t]le iflitially plausible program of

turnirrg to history to learn how to deal wilh the biological past is miscon_

ceived, resting as it does on a couple of tacit assumptions that on caleful

examina[on tum out 10 be problematic. The program assumes first, that all

investigations of the past share c€rtain conrmon features that set them off

from other kinds of inquiry, and second, that philosophy of history is tbe best

guide to these features. Because it can be more quickly dealt with I shall

start wilh the second of these assumptions.

Tuming to the philosophy of history to find out what has been dh_

covered about ways to reconstruct the past seems only natural, IJ nothing

else, what has been written on th€ philosophy of history far outweighs whathas beefl written on all the other historical sciences combined. Indeed, apart

from history the only historical scienc€ io have leceived any metlodological

attention at all has been geolog/ (Kitts 1977;I-audan 1987). But the lessons

to be leamed from philosophy of history are much more limited tlan mrght

at fkst siglt appear. To begin witlt, philosophe$ of history struggle with a

number of prcbleris that axe quito irelevant io biologists. Prominert among

these are how to handle humar intentions and how to cope with the absence

of a good causal theory of human behavior, probl€ms that history shares wlth

thc social sciences but not with biolos/. Biology after all does rct deal witb



56 Rathel Laudan

intentions and ir evolutionary theory it already possesses some rather good

causal hypotleses. More important tlough philosophers of history are

preoccupied with the nature of historical explanation, particularly narrative

explanatiorl Begindng in the 194G Carl Hempel claimed that historical

explaflations were sketchy versions of explaDations in the natural scieflces

(Hempel [1942] 1965, 1962). According to his deductive-nomoloSlcal model,

scientific explanations worked by deducing what was to be explained from

general laws, and historical explanations differed chiefly in the degee ol

explicitness of the laws invoked. This sparked an intense debate amongst

philosophers of history. Many, perhaps mos! cogdzant of history's roots iD

literaturc and the humadties, and its fierce independence from the social

sciences in spite of t}re recoDciliatory moves of social and economic histor-

ians, rejected the idea that history was nothing more than embryonic science

and insisted tlat history differed from science in fundamental ways (see

papers in Dray 1966). In the years since, philosophers of history have con-

tinued to debale whether the structure of explanation in history is or is notthe same as the structure of explanation in th€ natural sciences, frequently

identirying narrative explanation as characteristic of history and questioning

whether it can be reduced to deductive-nomological or statistical explanation

(Danto 1985; wlite 1965; Richards this volume).

This debate was imiiated fifty years ago and since theD philosophers

of history, with a few honorable exceplions (Mandelbaum 1977; Roth 1988,

1989) have failed to keep pace with change in cognate disciplines. For ex-

ample, philosophers of history still tate recelt political ard diplomatic his-

tory as their prime e\amples, oblivious of the fact that much of the best arld

most methodologrcally sophisticated histo cal scholarship in the last quartercentury has beeD in other areas such as economic ard sooal history, This

would not matter were it not for the fact thal, as we shall shortly see, politi-

cal and diplomaiic history are perhaps the branches of history furthest re-

moved from the problems biologrsts encou er when they try to recoDstruct

the past. Furthermore, philosophers ol history have not incorporated the

results of the extensive research on tleory ol explanation carried out since

Hempel's pioneering work, research that might significa[tly alter tleir anal-

ysis of history (surveyed in Kit.her and Salmon 1989). Nor is that all, for irthcir cnthusiasm for qucstions of cxplsnation, philosophcrs of history have

Wha.'s So Special aboul the Patt?

neglected other active lesearch areas in ihe Philosophy of science such as

realisrq theories of screntific change, and validatiorL that are equally rclevant

to history The latter is particularly importaflt because what is driving the

biologists' inlerest in philosophy of history is, I believe, Dot a question of

explanation but of epistemology, not a question of the form their theories

take but of whether they ale ieliable and well_founded, that is to say, ques_

tions of validatiorl Biologrsts wan! strategies for recomtructing the past as

reliably ar possible in situations of incomplete information. Of course,

theories of explanation demand that tle components of th€ er?lanation are

well warafied. But most discussions of historical explanation are much

ftore coflcemed with form and with the differences in form between histori

cal and rcnhistorical explanation than they are with warrant. In sunl there

are reasons to be suspicious about tuming to philosophy of history in its

present state for guidance about reconstructirg tle biological past.

But even if this were not so, and philosophy of history once again

became a sigruficant branch of philosophy, I would have qua]ms about as-suming its relevarce to biologists interested in the past without further ques_

tiorl This is nol because I think history is unscientific. On the contmry [ am

completely convi ced that history is (or should be) scientific. Rather, it is

because I doubt that t]rc Nstorical sciences share conmon features that

distinguish them from the other sciences. To explain why I shall broaden the

discussion beyofld history to include all tle scierces that deal with the past

- the 'historical sciences" al I shall term them since tle word "history" is

generally restricted to human history. Historical sciences are far commoner

thaD is generally rccognized, Perhaps because the accidents of the organiza_

tion ofmodem u.dversities mask

tleiubiquity. Cosmogony, for example,

has always found its home in depa.rtments of physics and aslronomy. Isrge

parts of paleoDtolog/ have been housed in geolos/ departments, not in

biology departments, because through most of the nineteenth and twentieth

centudes geologists fouDd their results oucial while biologists found tbem

peripheral. Archaeolog/ aIId antkopolosr are relatively new disciplines

without well-established Diches h the uaiveruity slructure. But once we

appreciate the range of historical sciences, then it makes sense to ask uhe_

ther biologists might not leam as much aboul reconstrucling the past from

gaologists, arahaeologists, or cosmogonists as from historians.



What's So Special abou rhe Past?

be a sophisticated task involving evidence from litholog/, paleontology and

oth.r disciplines. Similar diffiqrlties were encountered irl oiher historical

sciences. Scientists lecognrzed fossils as the remarns of living beings only

after centuries of argumeDts and countetuguments, GeoPhysicists found

globa.l geomapetic reversals so improbable and sodependen! on sophis-

ticateal instrumentation that tley subjected both the concept and the instru_

meDts to severe scnrtiny befole accePtirg tlem irl the mid'1960s. Scholars

regarded chipped stones wiih skepticism for yea$ before they were prePaxed

to gla.nt that they had been manulactured by prehistoric man. Historians

now, as iD the past, s€e as one of their tdckiest problems fiDding appropiiate

units to periodize the Past.

Onc€ geologistr had identified their units, developed means of in-

dividuating ihem, and found ways of detecting them in the impeifectly pre_

selveal record, they laced their second problem, how to detemine the rela-

tions between them, in this case relations of earliet and later' They relied on

the theory ihat formatioDs had been deposited sequentially, with younger

rocls supenmposed on older rocl(s (the principle of superposition). They

recognized the limitatioDs of this pdnciple. Igneous rocks, intruded from

belov/ into the sequence of lotmations, might be under, not over, oldel rocks;

structual disturbances subsequent to deposition could overturn the sequence

of formalions, again resulting ifl younger rock under, not over, older rocks.

CoDsequently, they developed ancillary lines of evidence to supplement the

pdnciple of superpositiorl They argled that fossilized worm casts and rrpple

marks indicated which side of a sfatum had originally faced up even if the

rock was novr reversed, and they checked which sedimentary rocks were

intersected ty i8leous rock. Gradually they Put together an increasingly

Iine-$ained and retiable chronolos/ of the dePosition of rock on the earth's

contine s, a chronolos/ that they had every reason to believe had sound

warant. Thus, it is clear that descriplive geolory, and other descrlptive

historical scieDces, too, ilvolve tricky epistemic problens, problems that

saicntists have found strategres for solving in many cases, so that they have

Sood reasol to believe their conclusions to be well-founded.

lf this is cofiect, we can retum bdefly to the philosophy of history to

concct what I see as a widesPread misconception in that literaiure. A de'

scrlptlvc historical sci.ncc is nothinS other than what Philosophe$ of history

59

To sEucture my discussion of the historical sciences, I shall bonow away of analyzing them f.om the great Victorian philosopher of science.Wiliam Whewell, aware that doing so opens me to the charge that myphilosophy of the historica.l sciences is even more outdated than that of thephilosophers of history, I believe rhe choice is justified, however. on a num-ber of grouDds. Wlewell was the first, and thus far the las! philosopher ofscience to pay attention to all the historical sciences, not just history itself,As a former President of the ceological Society of Irndon and colleague atT.inity College, Cambridge of the leading historians of the day, he was in-timately familiar with the best contemporary practice in the historical scien-ces. And he was much morc interested in vatidation than in explanation. Sowhile his ana.lysis of the historical sciences (or as Wlewell termed them, thepalaetiological sciences) will doubtless need to be modified, it provides agood starting point. Among them he numbered geologr, paleontology, cos-mogony, philolo$/, and wha! we would term archaeologr aIId history. He

took geolog/ as his main example, a move that I shall copy, and distinguishedthee task for such a historical science (1837, 3: 402-3): ,,the

Descdption ofthe facls and phenomena; - the general Theory of the causes of change ap_propriate to the case; - and the Application ofthe tbeory to the facts.,,Thesehe called respectively 'descriptive geology,,, ,,geological

dynamics,,, and"physical geology."

As afly scientist knows, description of a domain is not easv. As I se€ir. descriprive geolos/ faces rwo major problems: tirst. how ro ijenril, andindividuate its basic u lj or entities; and second, how to detemine th€rclations between those uaits. Nineteenth_century stratigraphers, for ex-

ample, had to establish the existence and significance of their units arddevise rEeans of detecting and observi[g them, particdarly in the mary caseswherc the record is impe ectly preserved, even before determining iheirrelatioruhips. Only after long debate did they decide that the ,,formation, _all the rock laid do\{rl in a given period - was the appropriate unit forreconstructing tle past (Iaudan 19g7). They knew full well that most west-e r European rock wete inaccessible to observation over most of theirextent. Th€y recognized that since litholo$/ also reflected environmentalconditions, it was not an cntircly rcliablc guidc to thc pcriod in which a roc*was dcpositcd. Idcntirying and lndividuadng formations thus turncd out to



Ra.hel L@dan What's So Special abou the Past?

quite well in other histoncal sciences that deal with obiects deposiied in

laye , such as paleontolos/ alld archeology. ln history of lanSrage it is rct

so easily applied: when the distinguished nineteenth-century linguist, Max

Muller, struck by the apparent analogies between geolos/ and language,

attempted to adopt geological methods, he met wiih sorry results. In written

history it is inappropriate sirce documents are not arranged in layers: his_

todans trace anachronisms, references from one text to another, and other

clues to establish sequence. And in astto omy, it is quite useless: aslrono-

mers establish the relative ages of stals by their colols. I1l biology, which is

the chief concem of this volume, Paleoniologrsts can use these methods to

reconstnrct the outlines of the history of life on earth while finding them

absolutely useless when it comes to the details simply because the preserva'

tion of the record does not support such a fine-grained analysis. Thus the

possibility of using a melhodolog/ developed in one hhtorical dhcipline to

rcsolve prcblems in anotler depeflds on how similar the two domains are.

That both deal with the past is not enough.

That leads to t]le second question. Are the epistemic problems we

have discussed ard the stralegies for overcoming them unique to the histori_

ca.l sciences? The answer must be no. Problerns of idettifying and individu_

ating umts and of determining the relations between them occur in all tle

scienaes, not just in the historical sciences. The chronologres of the hislorical

sciences are simply a speoal case of the general class of descriptive theories.

Scientists develop descriptive tleories of their domains, whether or not these

domains have a diachroric dimension. Doing so involves more thatl simply

reading olf the evidence, if for no other reason than that the evidence is so

often imperfecl. Constructing descriptive theories in nonhisto cal sciencesinvolves difficulties simitar to tlose encounlered in the historical sciences and

calls lor resort to the same kinds of methods to dea.l witl them. When

Kepler propounded his theory of planelary motioq for example, he used a

unit - the planet - the defi tion of which had been forged over centudes of

astronomical inquiry. He could no more easily read off &e description of

planetary motion from tables of astronomical obs€rvatiolts than could geolo_

Sists easily read off the sfatigaphic column from tecords of Iield obse a_

tions. Thc same is lrue of descriptive theories in natural hhtory (most sys-

t.matics), crystallography (crystal structure), biolog (cell theory), and a host

61

call a chronicle or chronolos/. They defirc it as on arangement of pastobjects or evenls in a temporal sequence (White 1965:222) _ not just a[yobjects or eve[ts, but those that we have reason to b€Iieve are the sa.rDe orsimilar kinds. Thei. misconception, I suggest, is their tendenca to dismisschronolos/ a6 "mere. ahronolosr. just a preparation for tha narrative they

assume to be the characteristic product of historicat inquiry and on whichthey focus most of their attention. This rnay bc because they ta.ke their ar-chegpal examples of history from reccrt political or diplornatic history whereihe problerns ol establishing chronolog, arc minor or nonexistent.

. Wlewell knew better. He recog zed the epistemic difriculties geolo-gists encountered in constructing the stratigmphic column and racing tlehistory of life. We caE see that these difriculties occur in many of th; his-torical sciences. ReceDtly geomagnetists have struggled to track the recordof geomagnetic reversals. paleontologists who have done a magnificent jobtracing tle sequence of major life forms, nonetheless, still face problerns with

an imperfecdy pres€rved recoral. Archaeologistj, at least until thc advent ofthc "new archaeology,, a couple of alecades ago, were almost exclusively

Preolcrpied sorting out piehistoric chronoloS),. Even within history chronol-ogy tas not a.lways bee[ easy becausc many events were eithea not dated ordated otr diffe.ent time scales in different pa s of the world. From the fif-tee h through the eighteenth century, historians, including leading scholarssuch as Isaac NeMo& devoted interr[iDable hours to reconciling thie recordsof the Hebrcws, Greeks, and RoEans with the records of other peoples ofthe Near East. To this da, demographiq social ard economic historianshave to determitre chronologies in their domaim, In sum, we should Dot bemisled by

the rich written record of modem political ard intellectual hisbryitrto underestimating the difriculties of constructing chronologies. Except inrare cases of well-prese.ved records (and even there problems of individuat-iDg udits caD occur), descdptive historical science oI chronologr faces, and inmany cases has overcohe, severe epistemic difficulties.

_ This leads to two fu.ther questions. First, can the strategies de-veloped to overcoma ihese probl€ms in one historical domain be suJessfullyexportcd to aEothcr histodcal dornain, in thc way that soDe biologists hop;to axport solutions from history lo biolo&r? Thc arrswcr is that it alt dcpcndsoll tha naturc of thc dom8ifi. Th. prlncipla of superpositioq ray, works



Rachel Laadan

of other scienccs. Ibe imperfectly preserved traces of past objects andevents that historical scientists oflen bemoan as if they faced speciat prob,lerns do not differ in sigdificant epistemic respccts from the imperfect tracesof objecb t}lat are too la.rgc, too small, or too distant to be easily observed,Ovcrcoming observational difficutties is always a challenge to scientists: tle

fa.t that in the historical sciences many of these difficulties arise hom imper-fect preservation of the past does not establish th€ epistemic uniry arduniquencss of lhe historical sciences. Even lhe claim that records of the pastmay be completely destroyed and tlus forevet inaccessible to observationdoes flot make the historical sciences unique, fo. it is quite possible to imag-itre ihat therc are contemf,oEry features of tle world that we cannot observedirectly or indirectly. HeDce if we ask,Do alescriptive theories in the histori-cal sciences differ epistemically from descriptive theories in the nonhistoricalsciences?', the ans\rer is "No.,' So far as descriptive theory goes tleD, thehisrorical scieoces look jusr like any orber sciences.

Having spelledout my case for the descriptiv€ historical sciences atsoEe length, I car now briefly deal with geologicat dynamics and phlsical

geolory. It might be argued that it is in ,geologicalalynamics,, (or causal

tleory) that geologists (or historical scientists) really find themselves at anepistemic disadvaltage compared to their peers in physics or chemistry.Physicists and chemists routinely perform expe.iments, systematically varyingcauses and examining the rcsultant effects. But historica.l scientists frequentlyinvestigate causes ihat operate too slowly for their effects to fall within theken of contemporary observation. The dse and lall of mountains and themovernent of plates take place ov€I millions of years. The selective prcs-sues on living beings opemte over many generations, Human populationsand economic systems change over hundreds ofyeaN. Causal processes thatact so slowly as to dwarf the human time scale obviously cannot be inves-tigated experimentally.

In this context, though, it is worth remembering tlat once again his_torical scieltists are not in a uDique positio[ many nonhistodcal scientistsstudy phenomena on which they cannot perform experiments. yet, far fromlanguishin& they have produced some of our proudest causal theories, suchas NewbniaE mechadcs, relativity thcory, and the tleory of evolution. Ifihis is so, then therc seem6 no rcason why historical scicntirts cannot con-

Whd's So Special about the Past?

struct causal theodes also. And they have in fact regularly done so. Charles

Lyell (183G33), for example, deftly adapted a methodolog/ established in the

nonhistorical scierces to dea.l with the past (Isudan 1982). This was t}te so_

called wra ca.$a fie]J.lrc,d, initially articulated by Newton in his famous rules

of philosophizin& By the early nifleteenth century, the v?m causa method

was gercrally assumed to involve two strictules. First, scientists shouldinvoke oDly causes for which they had evidence indeperdeDt of the eflect

they were explaining; second they should also have independent evideDce

that these causes were adequate to produce the effect. Modirying these

strictures to the geological c{se, Lyell argued that the only way geologists

could obtarn independent evidence Ior the existence of postulated past causes

wrs to observe these causes acting at present, and that the or y way they

could obtai[ evidence that th€ cause was adequate to prcduce the effect was

to assume that the present intensity of the cause was no different from its

past irtensity. On this basis he consEucted a causal theory of long_tem

climatic change. Not everyone agreed with the theory or with his choice ofthe veru cawa melhod in particular, but nobody questioned the appropriate_

ness of his strateg/ of modirying a methodologt developed in a nonristorical

science to overcome related epistemic difficulties in a historical scienc€.

Yet here agai[ philosophers of both history and geolog/ may mislead

us, for they routinely deny lhat historical scientists construct causal theories,

suggesting inslead that they rely on theories developed in the nonl storical

sciences. For reasons of their o\IT r, historians, at least in public, have usually

eschewed tlle suggestion that tley formulate causal iheories, msisting that

they resort to intuition, cornmofl sense, or latterly to the social sciences for

their repertoire of causes. The philosopher of history Maurice Mandelbaum,

while distancing himself ftom t}Ie position, could state that it was "a com'

monplace in tle literature of our subject that histo.i.urs are coDcerned with

particular events that occurr€d at specific times and places, and not with

them oily iD so far as they represent events of a given type" (1977:4). The

philosopher of science, Ertst Nagel, took the same line: ". . a geologist

scek to ascertain . . . the sequential order of Seologic formations, and he is

ablc to do so irl part by applying various physical la\Is to his materials of

study" (196f:550). For him, the key difference between the historical and the

nonhistorical scienccs was that the hhtorical sciences rely on the nonhistod_



64 Ra.hel Laudarl

cal sciences for their causal theories, ". . . it is not the geologist,s taslg 4uageologist, to establish the laws of mechari.s or of radioactive disinte$atioDwhich he employs in his investigations." The philosopher of geologr, DavidKitts, followed Nagel when he claimed that the goa.l of geology was ,,the

construction of a chronicle of specific events occ-urring at specific times land

thatl wil]r aI the emphasis in recent yeaN upon ta(h scierlce' and thetheoretical physical-chemical foundation of geolosr, the pdmary concem withspecific events [rct with causes] still domiDates our discipline,' (1977t5). But,as my brief disclrssion of causal iheory in geolory suggests, alrawing this sha4,

distinction between the historical and nonhistodcal scienc€s may be prema-ture, for there is a clear paaallel between the two. Both construct causal

theories. With the exception of experiment, both have the same battery oftesls for tleir tbeories. And the limits ol the use of experiment do notcoincide with the boundary between tle historical and nonlistorical science.

Fina.lly w€ come to "physical geolog/. which Wlewell defined as thepairing of descriptive geolog

andgeological

dynamics to produce a causalhistory of t]re ea(h (a sense quite different &om tle otrrent mearing ofphysical geolos/, it should be noted). By this Wlewell meanr just what manyphilosophers of history call naffative. W})ile studies of nax.ative are %dousatrd frequently arcaner one widely accepted meaning is the use of causal

theory (generally believed 10 have been constnrcted by the rcnhisto calsciences) to litrI pasr eveds togerher (White 19651223). phitosophers ofhistory ard [terary theodsts have made much of narrative, frequently rest ct-ing the term "history" to mrative accounts of the past, excluding ,mere,,

chronicle as at best protohistory Following their example a number ofscientists and philosophers of science have explored the concept of narrativeand have made interesting use of the concept in dealing with the sciences(Ruse 1971; Hull 1975; O'Hara 19884 1988b). I place more emphasis onihe role of desoiptive and causal theories in the historical sciences, Butwhethor or not na.rative is the distinctive form of the historical sciences isirrelevant to my argument, because there is no reason to believe that tlewarrant lor larrative is epistemically of a different kind from that for chron-

olog/ or causal theory albeit that it involves the additional step of decidingon the appropriateness of using particular causal thaodes to cooncct par_

ticular parh of chronologics.

Wat's So Special about the Past?

Readers may Dotice that throughout this discussion I have fudged the

issue of just what makes a theory vrell-founded be it descriptive, causal or

narrative. This is because we do not have a good account, let alone consen-

sus, about what compdses a reliable, well-founded theory, though most

scientists and philosophers of science would agee that at least a part of that

warrant comes ftom the way we use evidence to support the iheory, For-tunately for my purposes though, we do not need to settle t}le vexed question

of exaclly *hat constitutes a well-founded theory. All we n€ed is to show, as

I have sought to do in this essay, is that evidential support for theories about

the past is garnered and tested in wals similar to evidential support for

theories about the present. If that can be done, the thesis that investigations

into the past are epistemically unique can be dismissed because the problems

of the historical sciences, like tlose of the nonlistorical sciences, boil down

to the problems of warranting claims based on partial evidence.

I conclude that, if our aim is to devise means of acquiring reliable

krcwledge, classirying the sciences into the hislorical and the nonhistorical isnot particulaxly rclevant, a conclusion that others have also argued for (Ere-

shefsky, this volume). True, past objects and eve[ts cannot be directly ob-

served. But neither can many of the objects and events witl which the

nonlistorical sciences deal. All the sciences have to work out tactics lor

overcoming these difriculties. Whether or not a particular histo cal science

can learn ftom some other science dep€nds on the nature of that inacc€s-

sibility, not oD whether it is past or present. In arguing that tlere is no

significart epistemic difference between the historical ard lhe rcniistorical

science, I am not forcinS the historical sciences back into the procrustean

mold of philosophy of physics. If we have learned an)1hing over the past

tweDty-five years it is that depending on their subject matter different scien-

ces face different methodological problems and that their theories take

differenl forms, It is simply to say that these differences do not map on to

the distinction between historical and DoD] storical. The investigation of the

past does not have a sei of common features that sets it ofl from other lofirs

of iDquiry and, hence, there is no reason to thinl that biologists can learn

more from the philosophy of history lban they can from the philosophies of

other sciences witl cognate epistemic prcblems, be the sciences historical or

nonhistorical. To return to tha quesliod motivating this chapter, "What's so

6S



66 Rachel In)non

special about the past?", I suggest that the answer, from an epistemic poiDt

of view, is "Absolutely rcthing."

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What's So Special about the Pa.tt?

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