The Birthing of an Historical Fact

By -
Jacques Barzun and Henry F. Graff, in their book The Modern Research, discuss how an historian determined whether John Stuart Mill was the author of an anonymous letter that appeared in Le Globe in 1832, on the doctrines of the Saint-Simonians. Here is the evidence Hill Shine marshalled to decide the question (I quote from the book):
  • First, research discloses two earlier allusion [by a Le Globe editor] to the effect that "one of the most powerful thinkers in London" intended to write a series of open letters on the new ideas [for the paper].
  • Second, there exists a letter to that same editor announcing the visit of a third party who would bring him... "the work of your young friend M."...
  • Third, it was within three days of receiving the piece of news just recorded that the newspaper published the open letter of "an Englishman" who signed himself "J."
  • Fourth, a letter of May 30 from Mill to his Saint-Simonian friends refers to "my letter which appeared in Le Globe."
  • Fifth, a footnote added to that private letter by the editor of Mill's correspondence, states that Mill's public letter appeared on April 18, 1832.
Barzun and Graff here write, "At this point, no further doubt is possible" (pp. 80-81, emphasis mine).

This is a great illustration of what I have been talking about re history:
  • The historian starts not with facts upon which he puts his subjective interpretation, but with evidence from which he must derive the facts.
  • The actual work of the historian qua historian consists in determining what actually occurred. The facts are the conclusion of his research, and not at all his starting point.
  • His conclusions are as reliable as anything in any of the "hard sciences": not immune to revision based on further evidence, but fairly definitive given the evidence we currently possess.
(In fact, as Collingwood notes, if history is not reliable, the "hard sciences" cannot possibly be so, since all that we know of all earlier experiments in the hard sciences is itself historical knowledge.)

Comments

  1. Jim9:50 PM

    I want to state just how little use I had for all these blog posts of yours on the nature of historical knowledge. Until I remembered, midway through NaNoWriMo, that one of my novel's viewpoint characters was in a doctoral program in History . . .

    ReplyDelete
  2. PH10:14 PM

    "His conclusions are as reliable as anything in any of the 'hard sciences.'"

    You mean, "are sometimes as reliable," right? For instance, our population estimates for the Roman Empire are far more tentative than many things in, say, physics.

    ReplyDelete
  3. gcallah11:04 PM

    Yes, good point, PSH. But, of course, physics also contains many very tentative conclusions as well.

    ReplyDelete
  4. gcallah9:46 AM

    Jim, you should really find a copy of the book I mention in this post.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more