The Modern Paradigms of Explanation: Significance, Agency, and Writing History in the Era of Climate Change

Abstract

When has a historical narrative offered a satisfactorily “complete” explanation of an event? In order to understand how useful archetypal narratives are in terms of historical explanation, this essay tests these paradigms for “completeness” in historical explanation, operationalizing the distinction between explanans and explanandum, the latter category of which implies that an argument for how an event matters is a criterion of a complete historical explanation. Arguments about significance in history generally take the form of a specification of why an event matters in a particular longue durée narrative. The essay concludes by relating the problems of significance and explanation to major trends in the contemporary history of science. In particular, it recognizes the potential power of new work that has instrumentalized material accounts of the history of global warming in relation to a longue durée history of climate change. It argues that, in general, across methodologies and schools, history is an exemplary science in terms of its instrumentalization of sources, which leaves room for multiple interpretations of significance over the longue durée.