ABSTRACT
Historiography is distinguished epistemically in its essential inference of descriptions of past events, processes, and causal relations. Everything we know and can possibly know about the past, including causal connections between past events, must be inferred from information that the past transmitted to present receivers. Statements of historiographic causation are derived from information in the present that was transmitted from past events, processes, and causes and effects. The debates about causation in the philosophy of historiography focused on an epistemic derivative, rather than on the basic inference of origins from receivers, an inference that distinguishes the historical sciences from theoretical or experimental sciences. The extent to which historians can and do offer causal explanations of events, or for that matter rational explanations of action or understanding of historical minds, depends entirely on the information from the past that reached receivers in the present that can be decoded to infer their origins, whether they are causal chains, or rational actions and decision making, or the minds of past agents. Models of historiographic explanation, causation, understanding, rational choice, and so on are derivative and not primary and so are not mutually exclusive.
