Portraits of Collingwood

Historical Explanation

Good resources are offered in:

• Bennet and George (1997) Process Tracing in Case Study Research. MacArthur Foundation Workshop on Case Study Methods. HERE.
• Clayton Roberts (1996) The Logic of Historical Explanation. Pennsylvania State UP.

The problem of "influences" in the history of ideas

The problem of "influences" in the history of ideas is another perpetual problem. "Action at a distance" seems to be admissible in the  field of intellectual influences

Collingwood's pronouncement:

"...these methods of description are characteristic of that frivolous and superficial type of history which speaks of ‘influences’ and 'borrowings’ and so forth, and when it says that A is influenced by B or that A borrows from B never asks itself what there was in A that laid it open to B’s influence, or what there was in A which made it capable of borrowing from B. An historian of thought who is not content with these cheap and easy formulae will not see Hegel as filling up the chinks in eighteenth-century thought with putty taken from Plato and Aristotle." Idea of Nature, 128

Claudio Guillen

"... to ascertain an influence is to make a value judgment, not to measure a fact. The critic is obliged to evaluate the function or the scope of the effect of A in the making of B, for he is not listing the total amount of these effects, which are legion, but ordering them. Thus "influence" and "significant influence" are practically synonymous."

Very interesting insights from Hyrkkänen (2009):

• according to the influence model, to explain some element of the thought of a writer A is to maintain that A has been influenced by an earlier writer B, i.e. A has adopted an element into his thinking from the works of B, or from discussions with B, or, indirectly, via C, or in some other way.
• According to Hermerén, the influence model is misused if research is ‘totally dominated by the search for influences’ – if, in other words, ‘the billiard ball model of artistic creation’ is followed.
• Adopting an influence entails reflecting on alternatives, which is a process of weighing more or less consciously the available influences.
• If we perceive an adopted influence as an answer to a question, or more generally, as a solution to a problem, it becomes understandable why human beings are receptive only to some but not to all possible influences.
• The cases of Vico and Hegel illustrate how people set apart by time can be reunited by similar problems they happen to share. Moreover, for the very reason that human beings may share similar problems, they may arrive at similar solutions.
• ...it would be more promising to try to explicate and understand the reasons for the similarity of problems.
• In the case of independent invention, the interpreter has to consider or imagine the alternative solutions to the problem the inventor had in mind. In the case of an influence being adopted, the task of interpretation is to understand why the agent happened to select a certain influence from the available alternatives. In both cases, the central task of the interpretation is to answer the question of why an idea has, more or less consciously, been adopted.

Concepts (The Formative Years of R. G. Collingwood by William M. Johnston, p. 87)

• Intellectual debts
• Source of stimulus for his own philosophizing
• parallels and similarities of doctrine
• ideas traceable to x
• "Collingwood ask us to focus not on what was borrowed, but on what led the borrower to select what he did. Intellectual borrowing tells us something about the borrower only if we go on from there to examine how it fits into the body of his thought. A corollary of this view, which Collingwood does not spell out but which he implies throughout his analyses of other men's thought, is that to borrow is to interpret... It was the multiplicity of his interests and his command of many fields of learning which made Collingwood "capable of borrowing" from Croce, Gentile, and Vico. It was his almost unique intellectual versatility which "laid [Collingwood] open to their influence." p. 87
• "If the source of specific ideas in Collingwood is obscure, the inspiration behind his life-work is clear. He is the fully-educated man, full according to the ideal of John Ruskin... One might say of Collingwood, as of Ruskin, that he is himself the greatest influence on his own thought." p. 89-90

References

• Hyrkkänen's All History is, More or Less, Intellectual History: R. G. Collingwood’s Contribution to the Theory and Methodology of Intellectual History.
• Claudio Guillen's The Aesthetics of Literary Influence, p. 38-39

Collingwood + Rex Martin on what is Historical Explanation

It may seem that the best summary of Collingwood's thinking was elicited by Dray:

"...for in so far as we say an action is purposive at all, no matter at what level of conscious deliberation, there is a calculation which could be constructed for it. .. And it is by eliciting some such calculation that we explain the action." Laws and Explanation in History 123

and C. Devanny (Dray actually),

"...what we very often want is a reconstruction of the agent's calculation of means to be adopted toward his chosen end in the light of the circumstances in which he found himself." (Laws and Explanation in History, 116-122)

Next figure is adapted from Rex Martin's Historical Explanation p. 69

Rex Martin expressed the meaning of each node and side of the triangle in a schema of seven propositions:

1. The agent perceived himself to be in a certain situation and was disposed to act toward it in some definite way (e.g., as Caesar was disposed to curb the hostile incursions of the Britons). 
2. There were a number of alternative courses of action (designated as A-e.g., invading-B, C, and so on) open to the agent who had the situational motivation described in (1). 
3. The agent did want to achieve or accomplish such-and-so end (e.g., conquest), which he believed would satisfy his situational motivation.
4. He believed that doing A was, in the circumstances already described, a means to accomplishing his stated purpose or a part of achieving it.
5. There was no action other than A believed or seen by the agent to be a means to his goal which he preferred or even regarded as about equal.
6. The agent had no other purpose which overrode that of accomplishing such-and-so. 
7. And we might add, although Collingwood gave little attention to it, that the agent knew how to do A, was physically able to do it, would be able to do it in the situation as given, had the opportunity, etc

I interpreted it graphically as (though not sure on 5 and 6):

The statistical criteria for proving the relevance are taken from Wesley Salmon:

1. Statistical relevance: (called simple relevance by Martin)
2. Screening-off: (Outweighing or overruling)
3. Homogeneity of the reference class (intrinsic relevance)

Collingwood's examples of Absolute Presuppositions

We do not acquire absolute presuppositions by arguing; on the contrary, unless we have them already arguing is impossible to us. Nor can we change them by arguing; unless they remained constant all our arguments would fall to pieces. We cannot confirm ourselves in them by ‘proving’ them; it is proof that depends on them, not they on proof (An Essay on Metaphysics 1998: 173).

What is the difference between presuppositions and assumptions? C. Ribeiro states:

Collingwood (1940) made a distinction between presuppositions and assumptions. Presuppositions are non-justified implicit implications. They differ from assumptions because the latter are stated openly, are explicit, not implicit. We assume by an act of free will: ‘To assume is to suppose by an act of free will. A person who ‘makes an assumption’ is making a supposition about which he is aware that he might if he chose make not that but another. (…)’ (Collingwood 1940: 27) Presuppositions, however, work in the darkness. But they establish logical connections with the statements formulated in our explicit thought. 

Hyrkannen () p. 255 observes:

• Presuppositions, especially absolute ones, could thus be defined as tacit assumptions, something humans take, more or less, for granted, or which are normally left unscrutinized, unreflected on, unquestioned, untested or unverified. We might call this dimension of thought the dimension of beliefs.

Louis O. Mink

• absolute presuppositions are ‘widely as well as deeply shared; they are ways in which men may think alike as well as be alike in what they think’
• What men have done can be understood only in terms of what they have thought. What they have thought can be understood only in terms of the questions and problems to which they sought answers. And what their questions and problems were can be understood only in terms of the conceptual systems in whose absence those questions and problems could not even arise and be formulated.

Some examples of AP:

• all events have a cause
• the principle of the continuity of nature in time and space, 
• the existence of God
• the principle that mathematics is applicable to the natural world and hence that natural science is essentially an applied mathematics
• all events happen according to law (EM, 150).
• nature is uniform (Mill's EM, 152)

References

• Ribeiro, C. (2015) http://www.philosophica.ugent.be/fulltexts/90-3.pdf
• Hyrkkänen, M. (2009) All History is, More or Less, Intellectual History: R. G. Collingwood's Contribution to the Theory and Methodology of Intellectual History, Intellectual History Review,19:2, 251 — 263
• Mink, L. Collingwood’s Dialectic of History, History & Theory, 7 (1968), 3–37 (25)