This review essay on Paul A. Roth's The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation follows Roth in accepting the notion of a “narrative sentence” (from Danto's Analytical Philosophy of History) and takes up Roth's view that a narrative explanation elucidates that which it constructs. I also analyze the “relating of events” within a temporal frame, but I come to different conclusions than Roth does: I deny any necessary connection between a narrative explanation and a narrative sentence and object to Roth's insistence on “nonstandardization” as a necessary feature of a narrative explanation. I argue that a “passage of time” is characteristic of all our descriptions, regardless of whether they are scientific, historical, or anything else. Like Roth, I draw on the work of W. V. O. Quine to address the pragmatic question of how large a “unit of empirical significance” is to be, and I show that different practical situations may require different practical decisions about what sizes of unit are required, with whole narratives being units of significance in themselves. Problems of the epistemic structure of narratives remain, and I argue that relating a passage of time requires a theory that enables us to preclude any temporal gaps. A theory of conceptual linkage of any stripe seems incapable of doing that.

中文翻译：

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要求：允许间隙理论

这篇关于保罗 A. 罗斯的历史解释的哲学结构的评论文章跟随罗斯接受了“叙事句子”的概念（来自丹托的历史分析哲学) 并接受罗斯的观点，即叙述性解释阐明了它所构建的内容。我也在时间框架内分析“事件的关联”，但得出的结论与罗斯不同：我否认叙事解释和叙事句子之间存在任何必要联系，并反对罗斯坚持将“非标准化”作为必要特征的叙述性解释。我认为“时间流逝”是我们所有描述的特征，无论它们是科学的、历史的还是其他任何东西。像 Roth 一样，我利用 WVO Quine 的工作来解决“具有经验意义的单位”有多大的实用问题，并且我表明，不同的实际情况可能需要不同的实际决定，即需要多大的单位，整个叙事本身就是重要的单位。叙事的认知结构问题仍然存在，我认为关联时间流逝需要一种理论，使我们能够排除任何时间差距。任何条纹的概念联系理论似乎无法做到这一点。