ABSTRACT
This chapter reexamines the discussion about reasons and causes before Davidson. The author first gives a sketch of Robin Collingwood’s approach. He categorizes Collingwood’s approach as monistic, for Collingwood argues that only historiography is the appropriate place for causal explanations, while their use in the sciences is only a metaphoric derivation from this primary use. According to Collingwood, the idea of causality is in its core an anthropomorphic one (agential causation), such that even natural phenomena are in the end explained as if they were human phenomena. Hempel was a monist of the opposite sort when he demanded to assimilate historical explanations to scientific ones by making use of general laws. Keutner then discusses some pluralist approaches (Gardiner and Dray), according to which rational explanations and explanations based on regularities are both appropriate in historiography, although they should be used complementary. Third, another type of relationship of both methods is characterized: that of a language game of mutual (pragmatic) contradiction: Explanations invoking efficient causes may be used to contradict a given rational explanation and vice versa.
