The problem of historical explanation consists in how historical facts are put together. No mere collection of facts constitutes an explanation: there must be some underlying explanation for why those facts occurred in the way they did. Many competing theories of historical explanation have thus been offered, from the highly technical D-N or covering law model, to narrative-based explanations. This paper exposes the flaws in the covering law model proposed by Carl Hempel, and offers a justification for narrative-based explanations by appealing to the notion of language games as used by Ludwig Wittgenstein, as well as the narrative and paradigm models of Arthur Danto and Thomas Kuhn for explaining historical events. / Master of Arts / The problem of historical explanation consists in how historical facts are put together. No mere collection of facts constitutes an explanation: there must be some underlying explanation for why those facts occurred in the way they did. Many competing theories of historical explanation have thus been offered, from the highly technical D-N or covering law model, which imitates the methods of explanation in “hard” scientific inquiry through a careful description of initial conditions and relevant laws and formulas, to narrative-based explanations, or explanations that use a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. This paper exposes the flaws in the covering law model proposed by Carl Hempel, and offers a justification for narrative-based explanations by appealing to the notion of language games as used by Ludwig Wittgenstein, as well as the narrative and paradigm models of Arthur Danto and Thomas Kuhn for explaining historical events. The aim of this project is to prevent scientific analysis being incorrectly applied to non-scientific entities, such as persons (e.g. Napoleon Bonaparte) and places (e.g. Russia) which are referenced in ordinary language, and which are in principle irreducible to the primary entities of the so-called “hard” sciences, such as subatomic particles and fundamental forces.

This dissertation treats of the problem of attributing the occurrence of an individual event or state to a single cause — a problem commonly understood either as a question of distinguishing the cause from the mere conditions or as a matter of singling out, from several causes, one cause, as the cause. The main purpose of the study is to clarify some basic concepts, and some criteria of ascertainment of the cause, that may be discerned in the literature on causal attribution. Special attention is devoted to how the adequacy of causal attributions depends on pragmatic factors. The study begins with an analysis of J. S. Mill’s distinction in A System of Logic between a scientific and a common-parlance approach to the problem of causal attribution. Mill’s assumption that causal attribution in science always requires a universal-law subsumption is then examined in the context of a general discussion of the range of applicability of the covering-law model of explanation. Mill’s scientific and common-parlance notions of cause are compared with R. G. Collingwood’s historical (sense-I) and scientific (sense-II and -III) notions of cause. It is argued that there are purposes of inquiry for which Mill’s common-parlance approach is more relevant to causal attribution in natural science than his scientific approach. And, more generally, it is argued that although law subsumptions are necessary for the ascertainment of the causes, more is often required for explaining the effect. Samuel Gorovitz’s differentiating-factor analysis is discussed, and limitations of the model are identified. The relevance of Morton White’s abnormalistic approach to historical research is also examined. Further, a number of objectivistic approaches are discussed, and it is argued that objectivity is not attainable in causal attributions in a sense in which it always implies an improvement of our ability to attribute the occurrence of an individual event or state to a single cause.