In: K. Brzechczyn (ed.), Idealization XIII: Modeling in History (Poznań Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, vol. 97), pp. 7-30. Amsterdam/New York, NY: Rodopi, 2009. Krzysztof Brzechczyn BETWEEN SCIENCE AND LITERATURE: THE DEBATE ON THE STATUS OF HISTORY * 1. The Nature of the Debate Let us consider in detail two standpoints. According to the first one: general laws have quite analogous functions in history and in natural sciences, that they form an indispensable instrument of historical research, and that they even constitute the common basis of various procedures which are often considered as characteristic of the social in contradistinction to the natural sciences. . . . In history no less than in any other branch of empirical inquiry, scientific explanation can be achieved only by means of suitable general hypotheses, or by theories, which are bodies of systematically related hypotheses. 1 Whereas the second standpoint maintains that the historical work is nothing else than: verbal fiction, the content of which are as much invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with their counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences. . . . History is no less a form of fiction than the novel is a form of historical representation. 2 The statements quoted above point to the variety of positions in the debate on the place of history in culture. 3 According to the first, positivist approach, of which the most prominent representative is Carl G. Hempel, * My work upon this article was possible thanks to the scholarship from The Kościuszko Foundation, which allowed me to spend the first half of 2000 at the University of Illinois in Chicago. 1 Hempel ([1942] 1965), pp. 231 and 239. 2 White (1978), pp. 82 and 122. In the whole volume emphases in italics, if they are not marked by a separate note put in brackets, come from the quoted authors [footnote by the editor]. 3 The opposition of positivism/narrativism certainly does not exhaust the plentitude of approaches which obtain in contemporary history of philosophy. I have chosen the two theoretical approaches as they represent extremes on the whole continuum of positions.