On Tue, 14 Mar 2000, Bob wrote:
> I'm sorry, but I must disagree. Certainly there are historical
> "facts" which generally are pretty much accepted as "true." An
> example of such a fact might be the date of the signing & names of
> the signers of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. After the
> "facts," everything is pretty much interpretation/rhetoric.
<snip>
> If, indeed, historians invent the past, then how do you reconcile
> this with your notion of "historical truth" above?
This is rehashing an old dispute coming out of the German
Methodenstreit ("Dispute over method") that extends to the
question of truth in all of the Geisteswissenschaften ("Human
Sciences," or "social sciences" as we have in English now),
including History. I think Dilthey really gets this ball rolling,
and philosophical hermeneutics seems - to me at least - to have
had the greatest influence over this sphere (how far beyond the
human sciences hermeneutics extends is much more controversial).
We speak of "historical periods" as those which we have only
accounts left of, i.e. no living people who remember their
events. In this way, then, historians /do/ create history.
Our only access to historical events is through the accounts
of historians. There is no way we can get behind these accounts
to compare the real events with the descriptions of them. There
is no natural science of historical events (except within a
very limited range, as in archealogy - but this certainly isn't
what we refer to when we seak to establish historical events).
Historians, as Gadamer puts it, immerse themselves in the
stream of history - history is like one extremely large text,
and its events and epochs constitute chapters or books.
Of course, we do make claims as to what "happened" or "didn't
happen" in history, but we do so not by comparing an account
(text) with phenomena (world) - as we would in the natural
sciences, but by examining the consistancy between the
various accounts. A historical "truth" like the one you
describe above is simply one on which all historical accounts
agree. Just because a historical "fact" like this is
unanimously agreed to by all historians does not mean that
it wasn't created by earlier historians. Only in the model
of the natural sciences does consistancy (between account
and phenomena) make a claim to having discovered something
independent of those offering the accounts. With historical
events, you are never independent of the accounts made of
them.
----Ben