It is often the case that, in historiography, we have two explanations for some outcome, and we wish to know when one is better than the other. We assume here that both explanations are true in the sense that they explain. Consider the following explanations: E1: Eddington observed gravitational deflection in 1919 because Einstein formulated […]

In this post, I explain how to explore issues in the philosophy of history. Here, I focus on the issue of causal explanation in historiography, the study of the past. I reserve the term “history” to the events, processes, and conditions in the past. The main question of such inquiry is what historiography needs to […]

In philosophy of causation, the notion of proportionality is important. It came to the philosophical literature from Yablo (1992) and has been extensively discussed since then. Woodward (2021, 15-16) characterizes the notion as follows: “Proportionality concerns the extent to which there is a match between the variation in the cause and the variation in the […]

In this post, I claim that focusing on timespans shorter than the traditional ones sheds new light on the study of the future. I argue that a microperspective on time can shed new light on issues related to future and futures research. Here is a summary of the differences between a microperspective and more common […]

In this post, I discuss how to assess the nature of a field of research and its differences from other fields. I focus on futures studies and discuss whether the approaches of futures studies are intellectually unified and whether there is some minimal unity in the field. I use the term “intellectual” to highlight to […]

In this post, I introduce a distinction between first-order future possibilities and second-order future possibilities and discuss why it is important. There are two ways of mapping the space of future possibilities: (1) We can take some view on the world (for example, a theory about some domain or a personal idea of the workings […]

I received an insightful response to my previous post from Chiel van den Akker who disagrees on several issues and nicely discusses the shotcomings of my thinking. Below, I publish the comment (it is already publish in the previous post with a permission) and provide some quick though on it. “C” refers to Chiel van […]

”The world is a messy place” – Adrian Currie In this post, I reflect on the nature of philosophy of historiography. I discuss what I think are significant turns in the practice of the field. Last week, June 2022, we had a workshop “The Future of Philosophy of Historiography” at Oulu, Finland. During and after […]

Consider the following claims: (A) Had the weather been cloudy, Eddington would not have observed gravitational deflection in 1919. (B) Had Eddington not been a pacifist, gravitational deflection would never have been observed. Claim (A) implies that the weather was an explanatory cause of the observation in 1919, and claim (B) implies that the pacifism […]

There are two senses of *contrastive* explanation that are confused with each other too often. Consider we ask “Why did my friend buy a house?”. There are two types of contrast, one of which is at the conceptual core of explaining while the other is not, although the latter might be methodologically useful. The first […]