Collingwood rejected what he called «the history of scissors and collage,» in which the historian rejects a statement recorded by his subject, either because it contradicts another historical statement or because it contradicts the historian`s own understanding of the world. As he notes in Principles of History, a historian will sometimes encounter «a history he simply cannot believe, a history that may be characteristic of the superstitions or prejudices of the author`s time or the circle in which he lived, but which is not credible for a more enlightened age and should therefore be omitted.» [11] According to Collingwood, this is an unacceptable way to make history. Sources that make claims that are not in agreement with the current understanding of the world were still created by rational people who had reasons for creating them. Therefore, these sources are valuable and should be further investigated to understand the historical context in which they come and why. R. G. Collingwood (1889 † 1943) was a British philosopher and archaeologist. In particular, his philosophy of history was central to the debate in the 1950s and 1960s about the nature of explanation in the social sciences and whether or not it is ultimately reducible to scientific explanations. Thanks in large part to W. H. Dray`s interpretive efforts, Collingwood`s work in the philosophy of history has been seen as an effective antidote to Carl Hempel`s claim to methodological unity.
The relevance of Collingwood`s defense of the autonomy of history in debates about the unity/disunity of science was made available to a wider audience by W. H. Dray in the 1950s and 60s. Dray (1958, 1963) placed Collingwood`s distinction between action and event in the context of contemporary debates in social science philosophy and drew on Collingwood`s work in rejecting Hempel`s claim to methodological unity in his influential 1942 paper, «The Function of General Laws in History.» Hempel claimed that explanations in history are secretly nomological explanations because historians, like scientists, rely on general laws, even if they do not mention them explicitly. Dray argued that Hempel did not realize that what distinguishes action from explanations of events is the nature of the connection between the explanans and the explanandum. In naturalistic explanations, explanans are a previous state, a state which, in time, precedes the event of which it is supposed to be the cause; In the historical explanation of action, the explanatory is the logical reason for an action, the thought that makes the action understandable. While Collingwood played an important role in the debate of the 1950s and 60s about the logical form of the explanation of action and its difference from the causal explanation of events, his work lost influence in the second half of the twentieth century. The neglect into which Collingwood`s account of action and explanation fell is related to a shift in metaphilosophical assumptions and the return of the kind of metaphysics he had tried to replace with the presupposition analysis described in An Essay on Metaphysics. Thinking can never be a mere object. Knowing someone else`s thought activity is only possible by assuming that the same activity can be replicated in one`s own mind. In this sense, knowing «what someone thinks» (or «thinks») means thinking for yourself. To reject this conclusion is to deny that we even have the right to speak of acts of thought unless they take place in our own minds, and to accept the doctrine that my mind is the only one that exists.
I will no longer oppose anyone who accepts this form of solipsism. I think about how history is possible as knowledge of past thoughts (thought actions); And I am only concerned with showing that it is impossible, except by thinking that it means knowing someone else`s thought act, to repeat it for oneself. If psychology, as understood by Mill, is what Collingwood in An Essay on Metaphysics calls a «pseudoscience of thought» (EM 1998: 142) because it fails to recognize that the concept of mind, in the words of Gallie (1956), is an essentially controversial concept that needs to be disambiguated (as «cause,» «action,» «science,» and «the past»). This is not to say that empirical psychology is not a legitimate scientific enterprise, but that the object of empirical psychology and that of history are not the same, and that the attempt to grasp the mind by the methods of empirical science must be condemned as the attempt of one form of knowledge to enter the territory of another. Collingwood categorized history as a science and defined a science as «all organized knowledge.» [6] However, he distinguished history from natural sciences because the concerns of these two branches are different: the natural sciences deal with the physical world, while history, in its most common use, deals with the social sciences and human affairs. [7] Collingwood emphasized a fundamental difference between knowledge in the present (or in the natural sciences) and knowledge of history. In order to experience things in the present or about things in the natural sciences, «real» things can be observed as they exist or that currently have substance. The distinction between the method of history and that of science is not a distinction between the explanations of psychology, which is understood as the empirical science of mind, and those of physics or astronomy.