dr. andrew hopkins

a.e.hopkins@lse.ac.uk

 In line with my scientific background, my primary interest has been in how geologists and other historical scientists reconstruct the past on the basis of often meagre evidence available today. Pursuing this thread raises a number of interesting research questions that impinge directly upon the concerns of the Project. For example, because explanations in the historical sciences tend to adopt an explicitly narrative form, does this mean that the historical sciences are inferior to those which are more experimentally-based and which deploy explanations that invoke laws and rely on deductive logic, as some philosophers of science maintain? If not, what is the basis for accepting narrative forms as legitimate scientific explanations? In this respect, does the work of philosophers of history, who have had to deal with questions of the legitimacy of narrative explanation in their own field, have a bearing on the historical sciences?

These philosophical questions also invite research into the history of the historical sciences, and into the origins of the critique that narrative explanations are mere sketches and as such are subordinate to “proper” law-based scientific explanations. The roots of this view appear to extend much deeper than the work of 20th century philosophers of science such as Popper and Hempel. Among other historical inquiries therefore, I intend to investigate the relationship between natural philosophy and natural history since the 17th century, the influence of the Newtonian worldview on the perceptions of what constitutes “proper” science, and the role of narrative in major works of historical science that have been criticised for their failure to reference scientific laws, such as Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1831) and Darwin’s Origin (1859).
​
In recent years there has been an upsurge of interest in the historical sciences, as well as in the phenomenon of “science without laws” (as the title of at least two significant books has it). My research into the philosophy and history of narrative in historical science aims to feed into these themes.