The aim of this paper is to generalize a pair of concepts that are widely used in the
history of science, in art history and in historical linguistics – the concept of internal
and external history – and to replace the often very vague talk of ‘historical narratives’
with this conceptual framework of internal versus external history. I argue that this
way of framing the problem allows us to see the possible alternatives more clearly – as
a limited number of possible relations between internal and external history. Finally,
I argue that while external history is metaphysically prior to internal history, when it
comes to historical explanations, we need both
