Historical explanation is tautological, already implicit in the initial description

Evidence

Michael Scriven, for instance, has shown how all apparent explanations in historiography, whether they claim to establish laws or merely causes, turn out in reality to be simply “truisms” in disguise: they are, in other words, already presupposed to begin with in the initial phenomenon to be accounted for, and what we took to be explanation was nothing more than an articulation of that initial “postulate,” as in geometry, an analysis reducing it to its various implied propositions. … Understanding in history does not, therefore, derive from the combination of two wholly different items, such as a law and its manifestation, or the premises of a syllogism, but rather simply from the enlargement of the description of the basic event itself, and the rearticulation of its parts into cause and effect, or problem and explanation. Such understanding is therefore something on the order of a form moving in time, but as a separate thought process it collapses into tautology when we become aware of the real nature of the mental operation performed. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 691

Categorization

• XREF: This tautological-structure critique echoes what Jameson elsewhere in this volume attributes to Sartre’s conceptualization and to Lukács’s mediation — understanding as enlargement of description rather than syllogistic combination of law and instance.
• DEEPTHINKING: The closing formulation — understanding as ‘a form moving in time’ that collapses into tautology when isolated — is a compact statement of dialectical temporality that rewards extended reflection.