© 2015–2025 Charles H. Pence and collaborators, content released under CC-BY-NC-SA unless otherwise noted
Guest Editors: Charles H. Pence (UCLouvain) & Daniel G. Swaim (Marquette)
It has long been recognized that the methodology of certain sciences – paradigmatic examples include evolutionary biology, paleontology, archaeology, and astronomy, though there are certainly many more – simply does not seem to resemble the picture of “The Scientific Method” as it is commonly transmitted (as perhaps encapsulated in Hempel and Oppenheim’s “deductive-nomological” account of explanation). We do not seem to formulate hypotheses then subject those hypotheses to severe, empirical tests capable of refuting them. After all, what would it mean to repeat the history of life on earth in order to see what would happen had the dinosaurs not been rendered (mostly) extinct some sixty-five million years ago? We also do not seem to accumulate large quantities of observational data in order to infer our way to inductively supported generalizations. There simply isn’t enough information available to us about the life history of a particular species or about the development of a particular star system to enable that kind of procedure.
For around the last twenty-five years, this apparent difference has been taken to ground a distinction important enough to separate the sciences into two classes, with the “experimental” sciences on one side and the “historical” sciences on the other (sometimes construed as a difference between so-called “nomothetic” as opposed to “idiographic” sciences). What makes the latter different, it is claimed, is that they share significant affinities with the methodology of history itself. We are not interested in some general theory of the rise and fall of civilizations, or of what kinds of characteristics might make some abstract, theoretical group of organisms go extinct. Archaeologists are interested in what in fact made some particular society collapse (say, the mound-building cultures of North America) and evolutionary biologists are interested in what in fact led to the extinction of some group (like our ill-fated dinosaurs), in much the same way that a historian is interested in the actual choices that led Napoleon down the series of fateful events that ended at Waterloo.
The philosophy of the historical sciences, then, has focused on a variety of questions that had previously been foreign to the contemporary philosophy of science. How does science deploy historical narratives, like the story of the extinction of the dinosaurs? How is evidence reconstructed from historical traces – what are the standards of quality or epistemic acceptability for such inferences? How do explanations in the historical sciences draw upon other kinds of epistemic resources, like the use of experiments or more fundamental theories to establish claims of possibility? Is there some sense in which, within the scope of these sciences, we can salvage some space for a kind of “hypothesis testing?” Are there other patterns of reasoning at work in these cases that have less similarity with historical reasoning, such as comparative arguments?
There exists also, however, a strand of research in this area that rejects the idea that there is anything distinctive about the (perhaps merely) apparent difference between historical and non-historical science. It may be, for instance, that historical scientists deploy, in a basically essential way, many of the same kinds of generalized inferential schemas that are present in other forms of scientific inquiry. The devil may be, as it were, in the details, but in any case, this opens up a range of questions concerning what it is that makes good historical inference reliable.
This has been, and remains, a fast-moving area of the contemporary philosophy of science, and this special issue proposes to bring together a group of papers directed at these questions.
We are thus opening a call for papers in the Revue Philosophique de Louvain (RPL). The RPL is the oldest continuously publishing philosophical journal in the world, having opened its doors in 1894 as the Revue néo-scolastique. It publishes papers across philosophy, in both French and English (and we thus would welcome contributions in either language).
The publication process for special issues at the RPL works a bit differently than at other journals: authors will work with the editors to refine their articles (possibly including advice from one another or external readers). The entire special issue will then be reviewed by an external peer reviewer, much like the manuscript for an edited volume. (It remains possible that an article could be rejected at this phase.) The entire issue is then published together.
Authors interested in submitting a manuscript to the special issue should send an abstract of around 500 words to both charles.pence@uclouvain.be and daniel.swaim@marquette.edu, by October 1, 2025. Authors will be contacted about their submitted abstracts by January, 1, 2026. Finished drafts of papers should be submitted by (flexibly) July 1, 2026.