Daniel Swaim (University of Pennsylvania)
There is a fairly longstanding distinction between what are called the ideographic as opposed to nomothetic sciences. The nomothetic sciences, such as physics, offer explanations in terms of the laws and regular operations of nature. The ideographic sciences, such as natural history (or, more controversially, evolutionary biology), cast explanations in terms of narratives. This paper offers an account of what is involved in offering an explanatory narrative in the historical (ideographic) sciences. I argue that narrative explanations involve two chief components: a possibility space and an explanatory causal mechanism. The presence of a possibility space is a consequence of the fact that the presently available evidence underdetermines the true historical sequence from an epistemic perspective. But the addition of an explanatory causal mechanism gives us a reason to favor one causal history over another; that is, causal mechanisms enhance our epistemic position in the face of widespread underdetermination. This is in contrast to some recent work that has argued against the use of mechanisms in some narrative contexts. Indeed, I argue that an adequate causal mechanism is always involved in narrative explanation, or else we do not have an explanation at all.
