Real History

Reflections on Historical Practice

Martin Bunzl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415159616
• eBook ISBN: 9781134722570
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

In Real History, Martin Bunzl brilliantly succeeds in bringing together two schools of thought at the forefront of the philosophy of history: that of realism and objectivity. He shows us how the realism debate is inhabited by philosophers, whereas the objectivity argument lies in the hands of historians. In his lucid and direct style, Bunzl proposes a synthesis between these two parallel traditions. We see that what historians say they are doing is not necessarily what they are actually doing. Bunzl draws on recent work (from the likes of Foucault to Rorty) to develop a new model for the philosophy of history; a model which essentially calls for the collapse of the realism/objectivity dichotomy.
Martin Bunzl clearly merges the two parallel debates of history and philosophy. He draws on relevant discussions ranging from post-structuralism, to the philosophy of science, to notions of realism and objectivity, to debates about the history of women.

1

OBJECTIVITY RECONFIGURED

Let us begin again with Novick on objectivity:

The assumptions on which it rests include a commitment to the reality of the past, and to truth as correspondence to that reality; a sharp separation between knower and known, between fact and value, and, above all, between history and fiction. Historical facts are seen as prior to and independent of interpretation: the value of an interpretation is judged by how well it accounts for the facts; if contradicted by the facts, it must be abandoned. Truth is one, not perspectival. Whatever patterns exist in history are “found,” not “made.” Though successive generations of historians might, as their perspectives shifted, attribute different significance to events in the past, the meaning of those events was unchanging.¹

And, for the purposes of argument, let us accept this as a consensus position among historians about how to characterize objectivity.² Even so, from a philosophical point of view, we need to ask whether this is the only way or the best way to do so. I take the descriptive position Novick outlines to include a number of elements that it shares in common with the philosophical position of metaphysical realism as it is often characterized. On that characterization, metaphysical realism is the position that there exists a mind-independent world, claims about which are true in virtue of their correspondence with features of that world.

OBJECTIVITY AS METAPHYSICAL REALISM

Now metaphysical realism itself is a position that has been out of favor in the philosophical literature for some time, but, before we examine this literature, we need to ask if Novick’s characterization goes beyond metaphysical realism. In order to do so, it will be useful to break down the above quotation into its constituent parts. I take these to be as follows:

1 There is a fact of the matter about the past that is settled by the correspondence of historical accounts with the past.

2 Interpretation is secondary to facts and facts always trump interpretations.

3 Truth is not position-relative.

4 If history has patterns, they are found and not made.

5 The meaning of history is unchanging.

And I take the issue to be whether “objectivity” needs to assume anything beyond point 1, for I take point 1 to be essentially equivalent to the position of metaphysical realism as outlined. So what do the other points add? Strictly speaking, point 2 does not assert that interpretation is inconsistent with objectivity, only that, as it were, the facts come first. Thus the value of an interpretation may be judged by “how well it accounts for the facts,” but that is not to say it is the only basis for valuing an interpretation. I say “strictly speaking” because the spirit of That Noble Dream is much more in line with reading point 2 as the assertion that accounting for the facts is the only basis for judging competing interpretations. But whichever of these alternatives you embrace makes little difference here, for, on either view, point 2 asserts the primacy of facts. And it is by way of point 1 that an account of facts gets offered implicitly; namely, that facts are truths that get settled by their correspondence to the “real” past. So on the argument I have just given, I take point 2 simply to be an extension of point 1. Whatever the role of interpretation, only the facts matter when it comes to the question of objectivity.

What about point 3? What does it mean to say that “truth is one” and not “perspectival”? In the context of historiographical discussion, I take this to be anti-presentist. That is, it stands against the view that, unlike the past itself, our historical writing about the past is inextricably tied up with considerations not in the past itself. That might be thought to come down to this: correspondence with the past is not the only relevant consideration in evaluating historical writing (and, as the “present” changes, so too will its histories). Still, so far, truth itself has not entered into these presentist considerations. Point 3 is consistent with considerations from the “present” being relevant. It just rules out their relevance as far as truth-considerations are concerned. So here, too, point 3 turns out to be parasitic on point 1 in asserting that, as far as truth is concerned, the past is all that is relevant.

Point 4 is a conditional whose antecedent few today will think is satisfied at any sort of grand level (of, say, laws). But irrespective of the level at which we engage the question of “patterns” in history, we would do well to think of a parallel in science: just as you can be a realist in science about unobservable entities without being one about laws, so too in history you could be a realist about the events³ in the past but not about “patterns” about the past. As such, point 4 is a point about the scope or range of point 1; namely, whether it applies to patterns about the past.

Finally, what about point 5? Here the situation is complicated by the use of the term “meaning.” If you allow that the significance of the past may change for differently situated actors in the present, in what sense should we speak of the “meaning” of past events as unchanging? “Meaning” means a variety of things, none of which is synonymous with “truth.” Nonetheless, I take this point to reinforce the principle that, even as our interests may change with respect to the past, that does not change those events or their meaning which is rooted in the “reality” of the past.

Based on the above considerations, on Novick’s account, what is crucial about the assumptions of objectivity is a version of metaphysical realism applied to the past. But what is the standing of metaphysical realism itself as a position? Historians often object to versions of what is essentially metaphysical realism on what are epistemological grounds. But it is important to note that the position (in contrast to scientific realism) makes no epistemological claims per se.⁴

METAPHYSICAL REALISM

When historians deny that there exists a past to which history can be said to correspond, an inference is often made to the conclusion that it therefore follows that history is somehow “constructed” tout court. But the fact that what happened in the past no longer exists does not in itself undermine the notion of correspondence for history any more than it does in the area of cosmology or the area of criminology. To claim that it does is to assume erroneously that correspondence can only obtain in the here and now. That it need not makes for an epistemological problem. But from this it does not follow that there is an ontological problem about the past. Correspondence may be hard to establish epistemologically without it being ontologically problematic.⁵ That is to say, unless you are a skeptic, the fact that our epistemic situation forces us to make inferences from evidence does not undermine the ontological conclusions of what it is we infer from that evidence.

Whether we have the means to discover features of a mind-independent world may be treated as an open epistemological question for the metaphysical realist. Nor need there be an assumption that we could not turn out to be wrong in our knowledge claims.⁶ Still, that is not to say that the truth of such claims is not (to use Jamesean language) “absolute and true always” for a metaphysical realist—but both of these features are much weaker than this (Jamesean) rhetoric implies, in that they are conditional on what we take to be true actually being true. If it is true that Nixon was the 37th president of the United States, then that is a truth that is always and absolute. Of course, it may turn out that it is not true—we can speculate why: maybe (to vary a story of Putnam’s) the real Nixon was replaced by a cleverly disguised Martian robot after he lost to Kennedy, but we won’t find this out for another few years until his body happens to be exhumed for study. And if, in fact, it is not true, then it never was true—always and absolutely…instead, we were just mistaken in our belief about the 37th president of the United States.⁷

I don’t think the difficulty of metaphysical realism is one of arrogance about the veridicality of our beliefs about the world—metaphysical realism is compatible with a variety of epistemic stances, from the overconfident to the overcautious. Nor is the difficulty one of the notion of truth itself. For, even though metaphysical realism is naturally allied with a correspondence notion of truth, it need not be. Indeed, I think we can proceed just as well in an account of metaphysical realism without truth itself. For any statement you make that uses the word truth assertorily, I can issue an equivalent one that dispenses with the word. You say “It is true that Richard Nixon was the 37th president of the United States,” to which I say “Richard Nixon was the 37th president of the United States.” Why is this not philosophical sleight of hand? Because I don’t want to have to define “truth.” What about the assertion “Richard Nixon was the 37th president of the United States”? Maybe you will say you want to know if it is true. But then most likely (to steal an image from Appleby, Hunt and Jacob)⁸ we will be off to the archives—we will be involved in an evidential debate. We have a common enough discourse for us both to take it that the sentence “Richard Nixon was the 37th president of the United States” is true just in case Richard Nixon was the 37th president of the United States. Now you can cash this in via a correspondence theory of truth if you want to, but nothing prevents you cashing it in by another theory or simply leaving it as is.⁹

Rather than a matter of epistemology or a theory of truth, the core difficulty that I think metaphysical realism faces is instead a problem of reference. If we allow that human knowledge is articulated via language (of course there are other senses of knowledge, but they are not at issue here), the challenge the metaphysical realist faces is just how we manage to break out of language to (as it were) connect with or accurately to reflect the mind-independent world. The problem is not one of a misplaced desire exhaustively to reflect that world—just worrying about the statement “Nixon was the 37th president of the United States” raises the problem, and here the worries even start with the most straightforward part of that statement. How does “Nixon” pick out Nixon?¹⁰ Now it may seem that this worry about reference for accounts of metaphysical realism will only arise if we take its polar opposite seriously—that is, if we take seriously the non-referential views about language championed by poststructuralists. And that would create a problem for the proponent of a middle position who wanted to reject both meta-physical realism and poststructuralism. But it is not necessary to embrace the linguistic extravagance of a Derrida in order to make stark the referential challenge that the metaphysical realist faces—the indeterminacy of translation does just as much damage.¹¹ While it is easy to reject a Derridean view of language because of the very breadth of its clash with nearly every important feature of our linguistic performance, I do not think the thesis of the indeterminacy of translation can be dismissed nearly so easily.¹²

Let us outline the moves open to the metaphysical realist under this line of attack. One alternative would be to reject the indeterminacy arguments themselves. A second alternative would be to modify metaphysical realism to make it a thesis that does not depend on reference at all. But neither of these turns out to be very easy to accomplish. In what follows I will do no more than outline the difficulties each approach faces.

Nearly all defenders of contemporary realism have taken the first option. But to do so persuasively requires some outline of just how determinative reference might take place. The favored way of answering this challenge has been to embrace some sort of causal theory of reference. That is, a theory in which a causal link may be said to connect referential acts to referents. So, for example, as Kripke argues, names may be thought of as connected to people so named by way of their initial naming (their “baptism”), to which all other successful uses are directly or indirectly linked.¹³ However, in such accounts, not any causal link will do. All causal theories fall prey to counter-examples of the wrong kind of causal connection.¹⁴ To work, such accounts need something more to distinguish between right and wrong kinds of causal account. But that has proved to be exceedingly hard to do while holding on to the virtues that such accounts possess over their competitors.

The challenges to a causal theory of reference suggest that, if we could sidestep the referential component of metaphysical realism, we could avoid these problems altogether, and that is a strategy that has been defended most vigorously by Michael Devitt.¹⁵ But such a view is hard to make sense of if (abstract) theories are to fall within the subject matter of metaphysical realism, as I think they do if we take the aspirations of the doctrine at face value.

REALISM WITHOUT METAPHYSICS

What if we proceed without metaphysical realism in the light of these challenges? Then the road quickly divides between embracing some form of full-blown anti-realism or the hope of some sort of middle position between metaphysical realism and anti-realism.

Now it seems to me that, all other things being equal, anti-realism is in a much better position than any version of realism from a philosophical point of view. Because realism is a much more ontologically laden position than antirealism, the burden of proof will always be on realism and, by extension, on any middle position, and it remains to be seen whether middle positions can meet this challenge. Certainly the most obvious place to look is in the work of Hilary Putnam.¹⁶ Putnam’s account of “internal realism” is driven by the commitment to avoid any assumptions about the success with which language may be treated as determinant. The reference of all terms is to be allowed to be radically indeterminate. And that is to include terms like “truth,” “objects,” “events,” “facts,” and even “reference” itself. Thus even our attempt to talk about these matters is subject to these indeterminacies. Hence there can be no talk about realism except in so far as it is relativized to an interpretation, and that frame of interpretation will be only one of an infinite number of alternative interpretations. Hence the notion that such a version of realism is “internal.” But how does such a position avoid collapsing into full-blown relativism and, with it, full-blown anti-realism? Putnam is aware of this challenge, but sidesteps it by arguing that it arises out of a misconceived idea that a “totalistic explanation” is available to us.¹⁷ All we have available to us is our internal explanations. Hand in hand with that goes the (Wittgensteinian) idea that it is a philosophical pretension to think we can move beyond the features of everyday use in seeking to analyze the central terms that drive the realism debate.¹⁸ Suppose we accept such an account for the purposes of argument and “go” internal. Still, even from such an internal perspective, what is to prevent me asking if our stance is realist or anti-realist or something in between? Nothing makes such a question incoherent—even if this version of realism is more tempered than the full-test version of metaphysical realism with which we began.¹⁹

But can such a position withstand scrutiny?

TWO MODELS

In a series of important papers, Arthur Fine has developed and defended the view that the proper reading of scientific practic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Objectivity Reconfigured
• 2 Historical Facts
• 3 The Construction of History
• 4 Foucault by Historians
• 5 Extending the Argument
• 6 Concluding Worries
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index