In this paper I argue that historiography employs causal narrative explanations just as other historical sciences such as evolutionary biology or paleontology do. There is a logic of explanation common to all these sciences that centers on causal explanation of unique and unrepeatable events. The explanandum of historiography can further be understood as mechanism in the sense developed by Stuart Glennan and others in recent years. However, causal explanation is not the only way historiography relates to the past. Arthur Danto has given us the theoretical tools to differentiate between causal narratives and conceptual colligations, with both playing a pivotal role in historiography even though Danto himself has not expressed that thought clearly.

在本文中，我认为历史编纂学使用因果叙事解释，就像进化生物学或古生物学等其他历史科学一样。所有这些科学都有一个共同的解释逻辑，其中心是对独特和不可重复事件的因果解释。史学的解释可以进一步理解为斯图尔特·格伦南等人近年来发展起来的意义上的机制。然而，因果解释并不是史学与过去相关的唯一方式。亚瑟·丹托 (Arthur Danto) 为我们提供了区分因果叙事和概念拼贴的理论工具，尽管丹托本人并未明确表达这种想法，但两者在历史编纂中都发挥着关键作用。