This book presents a commonsense defense of the practices of professional historians against skeptical criticisms that historiography reflects present power relations rather than past events. The author acknowledges philosophical responses to relativism but focuses on presenting a systematic version of historiographic common sense from a historian's perspective. While providing pragmatic replies to relativist challenges, the book could have benefited from deeper engagement with philosophical debates on topics like causation and objectivity.
This book presents a commonsense defense of the practices of professional historians against skeptical criticisms that historiography reflects present power relations rather than past events. The author acknowledges philosophical responses to relativism but focuses on presenting a systematic version of historiographic common sense from a historian's perspective. While providing pragmatic replies to relativist challenges, the book could have benefited from deeper engagement with philosophical debates on topics like causation and objectivity.
This book presents a commonsense defense of the practices of professional historians against skeptical criticisms that historiography reflects present power relations rather than past events. The author acknowledges philosophical responses to relativism but focuses on presenting a systematic version of historiographic common sense from a historian's perspective. While providing pragmatic replies to relativist challenges, the book could have benefited from deeper engagement with philosophical debates on topics like causation and objectivity.
Allan Megill, Historical Knowledge, Historical Error.
A Contemporary Guide to Practice. xvi + 288 pp., index. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007. $25 (paper).
Aviezer Tucker
This book presents a commonsensical defence of the practices of professional
historians and what they write against sceptical criticisms and relativist interpretations of historiography. Megill confronts the reduction of knowledge to power, the claim that historiography reflects power relations in the present rather than events in the past. Megill engages historiography’s traditional theoretical critics from a commonsensical historiographic perspective. He acknowledges the presence of philosophic responses to the relativistic challenge from epistemology, the philosophy of science and the philosophy of historiography, but he mentions rather than joins in the philosophic debate, taking little advantage of the technical and conceptual sophistication of contemporary philosophy. Megill recognizes that the absence of interdisciplinary dialogue between philosophers and historians creates intellectual provincialisms. (161, 166) He acknowledges that middle of the twentieth century positivist philosophy of historiography advocated simplistic and impossible ideals of objectivity and explanation. Yet, instead of endorsing or developing some of the post-positivist alternatives, Megill presents in the first half of the book a systematic but simple version of historiographic commonsense, what many historians would conclude about their activities, if they thought of them carefully and systematically. Consequently, this is a book directed mostly at other historians, stronger in its pragmatic replies to relativist challenges than in debating them on their own abstract philosophic level. Sometimes, lacunae in the philosophic background become apparent, for example, in asserting a counterfactual account of historiographic causal explanation, but ignoring much of the relevant literature on causation, most notably how overdetermination prevents counterfactuals from picking up causes that were not necessary conditions. The first couple of chapters attempt to distinguish historiography from memory. Indeed, the Rankean paradigm in historiography was established by the rejection of memoirs and the adoption of contemporary documents as highly reliable information preserving forms of evidence, primary sources. Megill argues that the conflation of historiography with memory reflects piety and tradition, affirming an identity that precedes the constructed collective memories. Historiography, by contrast, is critical and founded on the analysis of traces of the past and testimonies. Megill uses an illuminating as well as entertaining example to illustrate the distinction, reinterpreting Collingwood’s famous “John Doe” murder investigation. Collingwood used this detective story plot to illustrate the inference of historiographic hypotheses from evidence; Megill adds a psychological dimension, analysing the likely traumatic mental effects of the murder and the extortion that preceded it on the memories of the protagonists A more difficult conceptual conflation to disentangle is between historiography and narrative: Some narratives are historiographic and some of the final results of historiography are in narrative form. Only some philosophers of historiography who analysed it as a narrative conflated it with fiction, but all those who do not distinguish historiography from fiction consider it a form of narrative. Megill holds that narrative has a cognitive value on a holistic level where even Braudel can be interpreted as having written narratives, though empirical historiography has little use for narratives. In my opinion, Leon Goldstein’s distinction between the superstructure and base of historiography, or the German distinction between historiography-writing Geschichtsschreibung and historiographic- research Geschichtsforschung would have been useful here, as historiographic research has no narrative components, while historiographic writing is often in narrative form. Lack of attention to the dimension of historiographic research leads Megill to analyze textbooks, the cardinal mistake of the old history and philosophy of science according to Kuhn, concluding that the task of historians is to describe, explain, justify their descriptions and explanations, and interpret history, in this order. But historiographic research is the inference of descriptions from evidence. Theory and evidence must precede then description and explanation. Further, rather than debate what historians actually do, how do they explain for example, Megill debates what some historians think of what they are doing, their professional ideology. The same goes for objectivity. Megill distinguished four senses of objectivity in historiography, absolute, dialectical, disciplinary and procedural. He acknowledges the existence of a philosophic discussion of objectivity but no more. He pays greater attention to what historians think of what they do than to what they actually practice. Chapter six (co-authored with Steven Shepard and Philip Honenberger) shifts the focus from textbooks to research. A case study of the relations of the evidence to hypotheses about the relations between Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings concludes that “all historians ought to have a commitment to seeking the best way of accounting for the totality of the historical evidence, found or findable, relevant to the particular issue in question, as well as a commitment to conveying to their readers some sense of the limits of this evidence…. The degree of certainty attributable to a set of beliefs about the past corresponds to the degree to which adopting those beliefs would serve to make sense of the totality of the historical record…” (128) This successful application of the abductive model of reasoning to historiography makes this the best part of the book, a fruitful application of Paul Thagard’s criteria for comparing competing explanations, consilience and simplicity. The last part of the book discusses in vary broad, even vague, terms grand narratives and “coherence.” Whether there is a single coherent historiography/grand narrative, and whether it can be known? This discussion does not distinguish historiographic research from textbooks, interpretation from inference from evidence, schools (which are most discussed, especially the transition from social to cultural historiography within Annales) from the general Rankean paradigm. Historians possess what Polanyi called “tacit knowledge,” like other professionals they can practice well without quite knowing consciously what they are doing. This book displays far more intellectual self-knowledge than most theoretical reflections by historians on their profession, and many philosophical tracts that display neither tacit nor explicit knowledge of historiography. But to produce an innovative and fruitful and true theoretical understanding of historiography, of the kind offered in chapter six, a better familiarity with the conceptual tools, technical skills, and methods of contemporary philosophy is necessary.