Historicism Now: Historiographic Ontology, Epistemology and Methodology Out of Bounds

The familiar challenges to historiographical knowledge turn on epistemological concerns having to do with the unobservability of historical events, or with the problem of establishing a sufficiently strong inferential connection between evidence and the historiographical claim one wishes to convert from a true belief into knowledge. This paper argues that these challenges miss a deeper problem, viz., the lack of obvious truth-makers for historiographical claims. The metaphysical challenge to historiogra-phy is that reality does not appear to cooperate in our cognitive endeavours by providing truth-makers for claims about historical entities and events. Setting out this less familiar, but more fundamental, challenge to the very possibility of historiography is the first aim of this paper. The various ways in which this challenge might be met are then set out, including ontologically inflationary appeals to abstract objects of various kinds, or to " block " theories of time. The paper closes with the articulation of an ontologically parsimonious solution to the metaphysical challenge to historiography. The cost of this approach is a revision to standard theories of truth. The central claim here is that the standard theories of truth have mistaken distinct causes of truth for truth itself. This mistake leads to distorted expectations regarding truth-makers for historio-graphical claims. The truth-makers of historiographical claims are not so much the historical events themselves (for they do not exist) but atemporal modal facts about the order of things of which those events were a part. Keywords historiography – knowledge – truth – truth-makers – real relations – time – abstract objects

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 1993

I DIFFERENTIATE between historiogruphy, the written product of historians (Historie in German); and history, the collective past of humanity and the subject matter of historiography (Geschichte in German). This is an essay about a theory of historiography. The minimum task of historiographic literature is to produce true statements about history.' Naive empiricist historians prided themselves on being the mouthpieces of the historical past, writing 'just what happened'. The historical past was supposed to be the author of historiography, while the historian presumed to be the living hand of the dead past. The reliability of historiographic accounts was supposed to be the product of the reliability of the evidence. Modern, called by its practitioners 'scientific', historiography was founded by Ranke who went beyond the previous critical reading of narrative accounts, written by contemporaries of the studied period, into reading original non-narrative documents in European archives. Ranke's assumption was that the best historical evidence comes from primary sources, not distorted by being put into sometimes misleading narrative form. Contemporary Histoire des Mentalit&, as has been developed mainly in the Annales school, attempts, in a sense, to be more Rankeian than Rankeian classical historiography by studying those aspects of the past that were repressed and thus maintained their pristine undistorted truth: histories of madness, untruth, taboo, automatisms of behavior, thoughts and actions regarding life and death, beliefs and rituals.* Nagele points to the similarity between the historian and the psychoanalyst in their relationship to the evidence: both share a free 'hovering' attention to the evidence, a total ideological suppression, at the price of eliminating a *My research has been helped by a grant from the Research Support Scheme of the Prague Central European University.'

Adam alemi

In this article, we are trying to grasp the role of hisroricism in the understanding of epistemology in the late of XX century. From Bacon to enlightenment, it has been understood that the only criterion of science based on natural sciences. The extent of science has also been determined as study according to the method of the natural sciences, therefore the sciences concerned with history and society has also determined according to method of the natural sciences. In this article authors aims to introduce to movement called Historicism. Which is emerged in XIX century as a critical viewpoint against classical approach to the science. Most influential figure of this movement was German thinker Wilhelm Dilthey. Dilthey had an anti-positivist attitude towards the established methodology by natural science. Which was saying that in order to be a science every researcher must have rigorous set of rules and their research must based on experiment results, observable facts, and objective ...

HISTORIOGRAPHY S ince very early times, human beings have had some sense of the past, both their own and that of their community or people. This is something that has distinguished us from other species. Having said that, historiography in the narrower sense of " intentional attempts to recover knowledge of and represent in writing true descriptions or narratives of past events " has had a rather briefer career throughout the world, though one more complex and variegated than most accounts allow. It is not possible in the space of a brief essay such as this to convey the entire richness of the human effort to recapture the past, but an effort must be made to summarize the historio-graphical traditions of many different regions. At least three major (in terms of their international scope, longevity, and influence) and a variety of minor independent traditions of historical thought and writing can be identified. The major ones are the Western (descended jointly from the classical Greek and Roman and, via the Old Testament, from the Hebraic), the Islamic (originating in the seventh century C.E.), and the Chi-nese. Minor ones include the various indigenous traditions of thinking about the past (not all of which involved writing), including ancient Indian, precolonial Latin American, African, and those arising in certain parts of east and Southeast Asia. The Western form (which would include modern Marxist Chinese writing) has predominated for a century or more in most of the world, but it would be a mistake to see that as either inevitable or as based on an innate intellectual superiority of method. Its hegemony springs much more from the great influence of Western colonial powers in various parts of the world during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and perhaps even more from the profound effect in the last hundred years of Western, and especially North American, cultural, linguistic, and economic influences. A consequence of the global dominance of Western academic historical practices is that not just history, but historiography, has been " written by the victors. " None of the major histories of historical writing produced in the last century addresses other historiographical traditions, undoubtedly in part owing to linguistic difficulties. This has produced a thoroughly decontextual-ized and celebratory grand narrative of the rise of modern method that has only been challenged in recent years. It is thus critical that any new survey of historical writing not only pay serious attention to non-Western types of historical writing (and indeed to nonliterary ways in which the past was recorded and transmitted), but that it also steer clear of assuming that these were simply inferior forms awaiting the enlightenment of modern European-American methodology.

Historiographic Reasoning, 2025

Historiographic reasoning from evidentiary inputs is sui generis. Historiography is neither empirical, nor self-knowledge, nor a genre of fiction or ideology. Historiographic reasoning is irreducible to general scientific or social science reasoning. This Element applies Bayesian insights to explicate historiographic reasoning as probable. It distinguishes epistemic transmission of knowledge from evidence from the generation of detailed historiographic knowledge from multiple coherent and independent evidentiary inputs in three modular stages. A history of historiographic reasoning since the late eighteenth century demonstrates that there was a historiographic scientific revolution across the historical sciences in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The underdetermination of historiography by the evidence, counterfactual historiographic reasoning, and false reasoning and other fallacies are further explained and discussed in terms of the probabilistic relations between the evidence and the theory.

Transversal: International Journal for the Historiography of Science

Review of Bordoni, Stefano. When historiography met epistemology: Sophisticated histories and philosophies of science in French-speaking countries in the second half of the nineteenth centuryReviewed by Jean-François Stoffel

O que nos faz pensar [PUC-RJ], 2022

LINK | https://oquenosfazpensar.fil.puc-rio.br/oqnfp/article/view/832/703 I aim to clarify some characteristics of historicity as a technical term of historiography, as well as a philosophical concept. I would therefore like to present a brief account of the concept, focusing on the initial main moments of its conceptualization – specifically in the works of Hegel, Dilthey, Yorck von Wartenburg and Heidegger – while also proposing an analysis on its ontological applicability or metahistorical validity. Following the contributions of Heidegger regarding the understanding of historicity as an ontological structure of existence in general, I argue that this philosophical concept of historicity still has something to teach the historical-philosophical way of thinking. Finally, given this context, I briefly introduce the paradoxical nature of the idea of past as one important logical evidence of what is commonly called the historical or temporal condition of existence, which can be epitomized by the ontological term historicity.

2019

This essay offers a critical assessment of Dmitri Nikulin's effort to advance a theory of history that avoids the pitfalls of universalism, on the one hand, and historicism, on the other. I focus my attention upon the relationship between three key concepts in Nikulin's study; namely, the fabula, the historical, and logos. On my reading, Nikulin implicitly adopts an epistemological orientation, inherited from late nineteenth-century neo-Kantian philosophers who envisioned history as an object that must be thematized in order to be studied scientifically. As a result, Nikulin comes to characterize history in terms of an untenable schema/content dualism that almost entirely extricates the historical past (or, data) from the contemporary effort to understand (or, interpret) it. By contrasting Nikulin's view with those of Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, I show that a hermeneutic conception of history offers a more convincing account of the dynamic relationship betwe...

Postnarrativist Philosophy of Historiography argues that narrativism has made important contributions to the theory and philosophy of historiography but that it is now time to move beyond it to postnarrativism. Much of the theorizing of historiography has focused on defending either absolutist historical realism or relativist postmodernism. Kuukkanen shows how it is possible to reject the truth-functional evaluation of interpretations and yet accept that historiography can be assessed by rational standards. The postnarrativist view maintains that studies of history are informal arguments for theses about the past and that they are always located somewhere between subjectivity and objectivity.

The content of this book is based on the conference held on 13–14th November, 2014 at the University of Debrecen. It was organized by our workgroup in historiography, which operates in the Institute of History of the same university. The title of this volume is „Approaches to Historiography”. It refers to one of the most important lessons of our previous events: there are many ways and methods of dealing with historiography. Some of the contributors to this volume argue that historiography is rather close to the history of ideas or at least their writings are inspired by it or rely on conceptual history and hermeneutics (the studies of László L. Lajtai and Pál S. Varga can be mentioned here). According to some others the anthropological aspects of historiography recently came to the fore (Jo Tollebeek), and there are scholars who imply that the philosophy of history and epistemology could be integral parts of historiography (Endre Kiss, András Kiss Lajos, Vilmos Erős). Some of them maintain that one of the main tasks of historiography is to discover the antecedents of modern social and economic history (Róbert Káli), and some others are trying to analyze the different national discourses and are drawing lessons from them (Greta Miron, László Dávid Törő). There are also historians who examine interactions between politics and historical writing (Radu Mârza); and there is a comparative analysis of how national ideologies affected modern high school textbooks of history in Hungary and Slovakia (Martina Pillingova).