In this article, I am examining the role of categorization in understanding. The problem arises from well-known distinction between explanation and understanding, which has been for a century pursued in hermeneutic tradition. Categorization belongs to explanatory endeavor and its role in understanding is unclear. In order to delimit the scope of inquiry I am focusing on the weakest kind of categorization, so called categorization ad hoc. I am examining the hypothesis to the effect that categorization plays its role in hermeneutic circle as some sort of preunderstanding. Eventually, however, I reject this hypothesis. It is because it leads to hermeneutic paradox: The notion of pre-understanding has a meaning only in the context of full-fledged understanding, which is an unattainable ideal. Such ideal cannot be used as a personal criterion of the quality of one’s understanding. There is a tension between the feeling of understanding and the scarcity of personal means to justify this feeling. I am suggesting that similar, albeit weaker effect occurs also in more elaborate, scientific categorizations. What is really wrong in the passage from categorization to understanding is some form of self-understanding: We do not know whether we understand better, or at all when we put some categorical order onto our experience. We do not seem to have the required meta-understanding.

The paper depicts some negative consequences of the attempts of history comprehension. In the light of the settlements of the contemporary psychology such attempts lead to the biases in historical cognition results.

The paper depicts the relations between historian person and history cognition, especially the influence of his mind inclinations to cognitive biases on narrative.

The article presents some possibilities and limitations of the general psychological knowledge utilization in the causal explanation in history based on the probabilistic model.

The paper presents the mainstream methodological reflection in the field of art history, shaped by the reception of Karl Popper’s philosophy of critical rationalism from the 1940s to the 1980s. A key role in this process was played by various attempts to respond to the deductive-nomological model of scientific explanation. Referring to Popper’s ideas, Gombrich developed the project of deductive iconology, associated with the conventionalist approach to the principles of image representation and communication. In dialogue with Gombrich’s views, alternative and mutually contradictory versions of the adaptation of the DN model for the methodological explanation of images were put forward by Oskar Bätschmann and Michael Baxandall. Michael Fried and Norman Bryson proposed opposing versions of viewing the image as a form of response to the objective and fundamentally fixed initial conditions of contact with the viewer. The divergence and incommensurability of the methods of art history facing Popper’s methodology revealed the inherent paradox of the notion of fact, on the one hand treated realistically and opposed to theories, and on the other depending on the interpretive perspective and theoretical assumptions.

This interview with Paul Roth was conducted after a symposium dedicated to his latest book The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation, which took place at the European Network for Philosophy of Social Sciences conference on August 30, 2019. This interview is authorised. Translation from English and all footnotes – Piotr Kowalewski Jahromi.

The main goal of this paper is to present a fully developed concept of Paul A. Roth’s philosophy of history to the Polish reader. Of course, it is just an introduction, but with the interview it should be a good starting point for further analysis. These seem desirable given Roth’s very ambitious programme, which in addition is based on “old facts”; that is, an analytical philosophy of history and science. The rapprochement between the two “visions” is not only a philosophical consideration, but also responds to the often-raised voices of practitioners. This introduction refers primarily to Roth’s latest book, indicating a possible interpretation. This “reading” is conducted by indicating the historical context, recalling philosophical analyses and determining the validity of the proposed solutions in order to decide how much science there is in history and vice versa.