The natural sciences explain phenomena by subsuming them under general laws. Drop an object, and physics tells you precisely why it falls and how fast. But what happens when we turn this explanatory ambition toward the past? Can we explain the French Revolution the way we explain planetary motion?

This question has haunted the philosophy of history since the nineteenth century. It touches something fundamental about what historians actually do—and whether their work constitutes genuine knowledge at all. If history cannot achieve the causal explanations of physics or chemistry, does it remain merely storytelling with footnotes?

The stakes are higher than academic turf wars might suggest. How we answer this question shapes historical education, determines what counts as legitimate historical scholarship, and ultimately influences how societies understand their own pasts. The distinction between explaining and understanding is not merely terminological. It represents two fundamentally different conceptions of what knowledge about human affairs can be—and what it should aspire to become.

Wilhelm Dilthey, writing in late nineteenth-century Germany, confronted a discipline in crisis. History had long been practiced as a literary art, but the stunning successes of natural science created pressure to transform it into something more rigorous. Dilthey's response was neither simple surrender nor defiant rejection.

He argued that the Naturwissenschaften (natural sciences) and Geisteswissenschaften (human sciences) required fundamentally different epistemological frameworks. Natural phenomena exist independently of human meaning. But historical events are constituted by the intentions, beliefs, and purposes of human actors. You cannot understand the signing of the Magna Carta the way you understand the crystallization of salt.

Dilthey introduced the crucial distinction between Erklären (explanation) and Verstehen (understanding). Explanation seeks causal mechanisms operating from outside the phenomenon. Understanding seeks to grasp meaning from within—to reconstruct the lived experience and intentional framework of historical actors.

This was not anti-scientific obscurantism. Dilthey sought to establish the human sciences on their own rigorous foundations, appropriate to their distinctive subject matter. The historian's task was not to discover laws governing human behavior but to achieve empathetic understanding of past minds in their full contextual complexity.

The Dilthey divide created a lasting fault line in historical theory. On one side: those who believe history can and should pursue the explanatory ideals of natural science. On the other: those who insist historical knowledge is irreducibly interpretive, requiring methods suited to meaningful human action rather than mechanical causation.

Takeaway

The distinction between explaining and understanding is not about rigor versus intuition—it is about whether human action requires different cognitive tools than natural processes.

The positivist tradition, from Auguste Comte through Carl Hempel, mounted a powerful counter-argument. If historical knowledge cannot be formulated in terms of general laws and causal explanations, how can it claim objectivity at all? Understanding, critics argued, seemed dangerously close to subjective projection.

Hempel's covering-law model proposed that genuine historical explanation must work like scientific explanation: particular events are explained by showing they follow from general laws combined with initial conditions. Why did the Roman Empire decline? Identify the relevant sociological or economic laws, specify the conditions, and the decline becomes logically necessary.

This approach had significant intellectual appeal. It promised to rescue history from vagueness and impressionism. It offered clear criteria for distinguishing good explanations from bad ones. And it aligned historical knowledge with the most successful knowledge-producing enterprise humanity had developed.

Social scientific history flourished under this influence. Quantitative methods, statistical analysis, and explicit hypothesis testing became markers of serious scholarship. The Annales school in France, while not strictly positivist, shared the ambition to uncover deep structural forces operating beneath the surface of events.

Yet the covering-law model faced persistent difficulties. Historical explanation rarely if ever conforms to the deductive schema Hempel proposed. Historians almost never cite explicit general laws. And the laws they might invoke—that revolutions tend to occur during periods of economic stress, for instance—seem embarrassingly weak compared to the laws of physics.

Takeaway

The appeal of scientific history lies in its promise of objectivity, but the price may be forcing historical reality into frameworks that distort rather than illuminate.

The interpretive tradition did not simply reject scientific rigor—it proposed a different conception of what rigor means for historical knowledge. R.G. Collingwood argued that historical understanding involves re-enacting the thought of historical agents. This is not mystical communion but disciplined reconstruction.

Consider understanding why Caesar crossed the Rubicon. No general law about ambitious generals explains this particular decision. Understanding requires reconstructing Caesar's situation as he perceived it: the political constraints, the personal stakes, the available options, and the reasoning that made this choice intelligible rather than another.

This interpretive approach has its own standards of adequacy. Good historical understanding must be consistent with available evidence. It must render actions intelligible without anachronism. It must acknowledge the otherness of past minds while making their reasoning accessible to present understanding.

Hermeneutic philosophers from Hans-Georg Gadamer onward emphasized that understanding is always a dialogue between past and present. We never achieve a God's-eye view of the past. Our questions, categories, and concerns inevitably shape what we find meaningful. But this does not collapse into relativism—genuine understanding involves disciplined self-awareness about our own interpretive situation.

The payoff of interpretive history is a kind of knowledge unavailable to natural science: insight into the possibilities of human meaning-making across different contexts. History understood this way does not predict or control. It expands our sense of what human beings can think, do, and become.

Takeaway

Historical understanding is not failed explanation but a distinctive cognitive achievement—grasping how human meaning-making worked in contexts fundamentally different from our own.

The explanation/understanding debate is not merely historical. It continues to shape methodological choices working historians make daily. Do you seek structural causes operating behind actors' backs, or do you reconstruct the meaningful world within which they acted? Different questions, different archives, different narratives.

Perhaps the most productive stance acknowledges that both modes of inquiry have their place. Some historical questions genuinely benefit from causal analysis and generalization. Others require the patient reconstruction of alien meaning-worlds. The error lies in assuming one mode exhausts what historical knowledge can be.

What remains philosophically significant is Dilthey's core insight: human beings are meaning-making creatures, and knowledge about them must engage with meaning rather than explaining it away. This does not make historical knowledge subjective. It makes it humanistic—and perhaps more difficult to achieve than natural scientific knowledge, not less.