Abstract

In this chapter, Kobayashi and Marion first provide reasons to reject the many readings of Collingwood that sought to draft him as a participant in the Hempel-Dray debate about the status of covering laws in history. After all, this debate was not part of Collingwood’s context and, although one can pry from his writings a contribution to it, one may simply, by doing so, misunderstand what he was up to. In the second part, they present the Gabbay-Woods Schema for abductive reasoning, as it occurs in the context of inquiry, as triggered by an ignorance problem, and as being ‘ignorance preserving’. They then argue that this allows us better to see the point of Collingwood’s ‘logic of questions and answers’, as derived from his own practice in archaeology, and his use of the ‘detective model of the historian’, as opposed to merely focussing on understanding what ‘re-enactment’ could mean as a contribution to the Hempel-Dray debate.