 The distinction between the method of history and that of science is not a distinction between the explanations of psychology understood as an empirical science of the mind and those of physics or astronomy. It is a distinction between two different forms of knowing with distinctive explananda: actions and events. The action/event distinction designates therefore not a distinction between inner/private psychological processes and outward/observable phenomena, but between two different ways of knowing the past: qua actions or qua events. The description of the past qua actions is the correlative of a certain kind of (historical) explanation; the description of the past qua events is the correlative of a certain kind of scientific/nomological explanation. The action/event distinction is, in the vocabulary of An Essay on Philosophical Method a philosophical distinction which does not capture two separate classes of things, but brings the past under different descriptions, qua natural and qua historical past.