ABSTRACT
Causalists assume that in order for historiography and the humanities in general to be scientific at all, those disciplines have to take over the explanation methods of the sciences, i.e. their causal mode of explanation. Against this, the author argues that disciplines like history and social sciences deal with human actions which have to be explained teleologically, not causally. The author makes use of some anti-causalist arguments, mainly an improved version of the “Logical Connection Argument”. It is argued that explanations of human actions require an investigation of the action’s context to determine the goals aims and intentions of the agent. This is applied to past human actions: Historians comb through the bequeathed source data, to get a picture as precise as possible concerning the context of past actions and to reconstruct from it the intentions, goals, purposes, and beliefs of the historical agents. So, to explain an action by a reason is not to refer to another event which is a Humean cause of it, but to embed the action in a context such that it can be understood, what the agent went after and thereby it will be understood, what the action was.
