Central Subjects and Historical Narratives

At first glance, the changes in contemporary philosophy of science necessary to accommodate the intuitions of historians about historiography are as great as those required in Aristotelian science by Copernicus' suggestion that the sun, not the earth, occupied the center of the universe. If fire instead of earth resided in the center of the universe, then the entire Aristotelian system of the four elements, humors, and polar principles had to be discarded or else modified out of all recognition and all of this just to eliminate a few epicycles from predictive astronomy.3 As might be expected, contemporary philosophers of science have been no more anxious to overthrow their entire analysis of science just to accommodate the intuitions of historians than sixteenth-century scientists were to abandon all of Aristotelian science just to eliminate a few epicycles. Thus, philosophers have been forced to argue either that historical narratives do not concern unique sequences of events or else that they are not explanatory. In this paper I shall attempt to show that the apparent conflict between historiography and philosophy of science