Editorial: How Many Worlds of History Are There?

Abstract

The focus on the narrative aspects of the writing of history since the 1970s has reinforced constructivist and pluralist assumptions about historiography. Narrativization and narrative features in texts have typically been understood as being dependent on the subject-side, and thus, on the narrator and her culture. Assuming then that narrativity is an essential feature of historical presentation, the conclusion that seems to follow is that there cannot be only one objectively correct narrativization of the past. Instead, there are many possible (literary) worlds of history. But are there other reasons to favor pluralism with respect to the worlds of history? By contrast, it is often thought that the sciences gradually reveal the secrets of nature and debunk our errors and myths. This form of progress has of course been questioned by Kuhn and other historical philosophers in particular but still captures the imagination of many. Could the past be approached in a similar way? That is, could we think that painstaking study reveals the shape of the real past, which could perhaps also function as a guide to the future? Further, if we think that historical explanations are causal, citing causes and effects of phenomena, does this add force to realism in historiography? Is it conceivable that there is something like one correct and describable causal structure in the past? And can we get to the one true account of the past? The papers of this issue are united by their concern with the form and philosophical bearing of historical knowledge. Specifically, they discuss narrativity, causality and plurality of historical (re)presentations. Bruce S. Bennett and Moletlanyi Tshipa argue most explicitly for the plurality of historical worlds. Their application of the Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI), borrowed from physics, strikingly states that all possible histories exist. It may be the case that we, in fact, inhabit a less probable world. The authors also suggest that MWI can help us to think about causation in history. Georg Gangl likewise studies the nature of causality in his research paper. Gangl argues that historiography shares the same form of explanation, causal narrative explanation, as other historical sciences, such as evolutionary biology and paleontology. According to Gangl, “historians track with their narratives ... ‘causal networks’ that spread through time,” which seems to take us beyond the historian-narrator’s world to the real mechanisms of the past. Yet,