| Phi 109 Spring 2016 |
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William Dray (1921-2009) is best known for a book, Laws and Explanation in History (1957) that was published just a few years after the article we will discuss (and whose last chapter is quite close in content to the article). Although Dray’s focus in the article, as in the book, is on writing in history specifically, he presents two sorts of ideas that have a broader application.
The first is a distinction between two sorts of explanation. In his book, Dray employed the labels ‘why-necessarily explanations’ and ‘how-possibly explanations’, and I’ll follow others in shortening the qualifications used in them to ‘why-necessary’ and ‘how-possible’. Dray notes that the distinction can be applied beyond history in a narrow sense (see his example of the avalanche on pp. 21f), and people have found uses for it in thinking even about the natural sciences.
The second sort of idea is his emphasis on the place of explanations as answers to questions; and, more particularly, the idea that “no explanation can be given unless it is called for” (p. 22). This is one instance of a general point that many people began to emphasize about the time he was writing: the force and value of much that gets expressed in declarative sentences cannot be understood without looking at a broader context of discourse in which these sentences are asserted. Dray notes that the term ‘pragmatic’ might be used for this phenomenon, and that has come to be the way people speak about it. So Dray would now be said to make a point about the “pragmatics of explanation.” (Hempel used the term ‘pragmatics’ in passing, too, but he and others at the time he wrote had something a little different in mind.)
The following are a few suggestions of what to look for in particular parts of Dray’s article:
• Dray’s first section notes Hempel’s views on historical explanation and notes two alternatives. The first of these, which he says he is not addressing, is related to what Hempel called “the method of empathetic understanding” (see §6 of Hempel) and related also to the view Charles Taylor describes in the article we will discuss on Thurs. With regard to Dray’s initial presentation of his own alternative, notice the idea that the point of explanation is to show that something “need not have caused surprise” (p. 17).
• Dray is naturally seen as an example of what is known as “ordinary language philosophy,” and he approaches explanation by consideration of examples in ordinary discourse. (Whether scientific discourse can or should be different is one of the issues that will be raised by Taylor in the article we discuss Thurs.) His aim in §II is to use his example from ordinary discourse to make room for how-possible explanations.
• In §III, Dray’s main aim is to dispel misconceptions that the term ‘how’ might introduce; but, at the end of the section (mainly p. 23), he effectively sketches a general account of explanation. And this view of what explanation is can be distinguished from his interest in directing attention to how-possible explanations since those can be accounted for in terms of logic: how-possible explanations might be said to point to necessary conditions for something to happen while why-necessary explanations point to sufficient conditions. (Freezing temperatures and a radiator filled with water without antifreeze are sufficient for cracking while something like the presence of the scorekeeper’s platform is necessary for catching a fly ball high up the center field fence.)
• The final section §IV provides Dray's application of these ideas to the writing of history. The key thing to notice here is the difference between a narrative which answers a series of ‘why’-questions, and thus shows how later events represent a “development” from earlier events, and one which answers ‘how’-questions and tells the story of “what actually happened” in a way that rebuts in advance doubts about possibility.