The Logic of History

Putting Postmodernism in Perspective

C. Behan McCullagh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134592937
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

The Logic of History reveals the rational basis for historians' descriptions, interpretations and explanations of past events. C. Behan McCullagh defends the practice of history as more reliable than has recently been acknowledged. Historians, he argues, make their accounts of the past as fair as they can and avoid misleading their readers. He explains and discusses postmodern criticisms of history, providing students and teachers of history with a renewed validation of their practice. McCullagh takes the history debate to a new stage with bold replies to the major questions historians face today.

Chapter 1
The possibility of historical knowledge

Before we can decide how to create arguments which will justify historical knowledge, we need a clear idea of what it is we are trying to justify. The traditional answer is that historians want to justify the claim that their descriptions of the past are true. Fine, but what is meant by ‘true’?

This has become a very difficult question to answer. Indeed some have decided we simply cannot know whether our descriptions of the world are true, and we should give up pretending that we can. Postmodern critics consider methods of historical inquiry and argument to be traditional practices which cannot yield truths about the past and so might as well be abandoned. They urge us to admit that traditional beliefs about the truth of history cannot be justified. For example, Keith Jenkins has written of ‘history whose end is signalled by postmodern thinking’ (Jenkins, 1999, p. 2). He says ‘it really is history per se that radical postmodernism threatens with extinction . . . [T]he optimum conditions for the creation and sustaining of history now lie behind us, and . . . we should now . . .
embrace a non-historicising postmodernism’ (ibid., p. 9).

In this chapter I will state, as briefly and clearly as I can, the traditional reasons for thinking we can discover truths about the past, and then the objections to that traditional view which render it no longer acceptable. But rather than becoming sceptical of historical knowledge, I prefer to build upon the insights of postmodern critics to create a more sophisticated theory of historical knowledge and historical truth. With this theory, although no knowledge of the world is infallible, it is often reasonable to believe many descriptions of the past are true. The traditional theory of truth is one of naïve empiricism. I have called the more sophisticated theory ‘a correlation theory of truth’ (McCullagh, 1998, ch. 1), but it could also be called ‘a critical theory of truth’.

Having established that there is an intelligible and appropriate sense in which historical descriptions can be understood to be true, I shall move on in the second section of this chapter to consider some objections which stem from a conviction that historians construct their accounts of the past from elements of their own culture, particularly its language and beliefs, so that they could not possibly tell us anything true about the past, which is ‘another country’. Those who do not enjoy philosophy could skip this chapter, as it really just clears an intellectual space for the chapters on justifying historical knowledge and understanding which follow.

Theories of truth

Naïve empiricism

The beliefs which historians have traditionally held about their capacity to discover what happened in the past are just commonsense beliefs which most people accept most of the time without question. They still do so without much harm. Strictly speaking, however, these commonsense beliefs are not warranted, as will be seen. The beliefs are as follows:

1. Our senses mirror the world. Well, more precisely, the world is as we sense it. It contains the objects we sense, with the features we sense them to have: the shapes and colours we see, the sounds we hear, the smells we detect and the textures we feel. (A theory of sensation.)

2. On the basis of our sensations and our knowledge of both language and the world we identify the things we sense, and draw inferences about their nature. (A theory of perception.)

3. A description of what we perceive is true if what we describe really is the thing we describe it to be, with the characteristics we describe it as having. If it does have those characteristics, then we say it ‘corresponds’ to our description of it. Strictly speaking, its having those characteristics warrants our description of it and our assertion that it exists. (A correspondence theory of truth.)

4. It follows from 1, 2 and 3 that historians can sense and know what evidence of the past is before them, and can describe it truly.

5. There are forms of inference, such as statistical inferences and arguments to the best explanation, which allow historians to draw true conclusions about the past from the evidence available to them. To say that the historical descriptions are true means that the things described really did exist and that they really had the characteristics they are described as having.

This is an empiricist theory because it bases historians’ knowledge of the world upon their sensory experiences of the evidence available to them. It is a naïve theory because it takes no account of the criticisms which have been levelled against it.

Criticisms of naïve empiricism

1. We have no uninterpreted access to the world. Even our simplest sensations are structured according to concepts we possess: for example we see people and trees, not just shapes and colours. The concepts we use to structure our perceptions are provided by our culture: we are taught to perceive things in terms of them.

Furthermore, we are prone to exaggerate slightly the characteristics of things that interest us and to ignore things that do not.

Consequently, it is wrong to say that the world is simply as we sense and perceive it.

2. We interpret our experiences linguistically, and our knowledge of the world is constituted by our descriptions of it. So our knowledge of the world is not something we discover, but something we create.

3. Our knowledge of the world is something we construct, on the basis of our concepts and according to our language. We have no way of knowing what the world is ‘really’ like, independent of our culturally determined perceptions and descriptions of it.

4. Consequently, the correspondence theory of truth is useless, since we can never know whether there are things in the world with precisely the characteristics we perceive them to have and describe them as having.

Critics of the naïve correspondence theory often argue that there is no good reason for believing any descriptions of the world to be true. Common reasons for their scepticism are as follows:

5. The only sense in which we can show a description of the world to be true is a coherence sense, in that we can show it coheres well with other beliefs commonly held about the world.

6. There are common forms of argument for drawing inferences about the past from descriptions of evidence, but there is absolutely no way of proving that the conclusions reached by means of them are true, as we have no independent access to the world to check their truth. The forms of inference are taught by the culture and accepted as standards of rationality within it.

7. Consequently, there is no good reason to suppose that historical knowledge reached by means of such inferences is true or correct. The most one can say about historical knowledge is that it conforms to current standards of rationality.
There are further reasons for being sceptical about historical knowledge:

8. The meaning of words and sentences cannot be fixed and, consequently, their truth cannot be ascertained. Words and sentences acquire their meaning by their relations with other words and sentences. Words and sentences are defined by their implications, synonyms and contrasts, and also by their associations.
There is no known limit to these. So the meaning of words is found in other words; and that meaning is, as they say, constantly deferred and consequently quite imprecise. Therefore one cannot be quite sure what historical descriptions are affirming.

9. It is impossible to capture the complexity of any historical event adequately.
This became most obvious when historians tried to represent the Holocaust. The life and death of every victim of the Holocaust was a story of tragic misfortune worth telling. And what of each of those who killed them and those who facilitated their deaths? Their deeds should be exposed as well. Even if the history of every individual involved could be told, no words could accurately capture their emotions and attitudes. As Max Silverman writes: ‘Auschwitz becomes the present absence, that which lies behind all human discourse, whose traces (for that is all we have) we are obliged to interrogate’ (Silverman, 1999, p. 25). Historians should stop attempting the impossible and simply point to places where events took place, name them and do no more.

10. Whenever historians explain the causes of past events, or find patterns of significance among them, the account they present reflects their theoretical preconceptions and interests. Their interests direct their attention to some matters rather than others; and their preconceptions determine what causes and effects of events they notice and describe. Consequently historical interpretations and explanations do not truly represent the past, but are constructions which reflect the historian’s culture.

These criticisms leave us with the impression that historians do not discover facts about the past; rather they create them. Written history is the product of historians’ perceptions, beliefs, interests and assumptions together with a big dose of imagination; and we have no way of knowing what relationship it has to events in the past. Consequently we have no reason to declare any historical description true in a correspondence sense. The most we can claim is that our beliefs about the past cohere well with other beliefs we hold about the nature of the world. It is now easier to understand why Jenkins was inclined to deny the possibility of knowing the truth of history. ‘[W]e might as well forget history’, he writes, ‘and live in the ample imaginaries provided by postmodern type theorists’ (ibid., p. 12).

In dismissing historical knowledge so lightly, Jenkins and other sceptics fail to appreciate the value of history as the source of our understanding of culture and society. How could we judge the value of our laws and institutions if we did not know why they were created and how they had functioned in the past? Imagination is not reliable enough to guide us. Historical knowledge is a precious source of wisdom and essential to the efficient formulation of social, economic, political and military policy. Indeed everyone in the community who votes for parliamentary parties will draw upon historical knowledge to judge the value of the parties’ programmes. Historical knowledge is much too important to be lightly lost. The question is, can it be rendered intelligible again, and is there any way its credibility can be restored?

We cannot simply ignore the critics and assert naïve empiricism once again. We need a new, more sophisticated theory of historical knowledge to inspire us. I propose that it be called ‘a critical theory of truth’. This name highlights the fact that credible history is history which has survived criticism and is rationally justifiable, not merely the product of an historian’s imagination. The theory is also a kind of critique, a critical analysis of historical judgement. (It is not, however, a critique of social processes, such as is associated with critical social theories, for example those of Marx, the Frankfurt School and Habermas (see Held, 1980).)

A critical theory of truth

1. According to our best theories of perception, our perceptions are a product of the things in the world which cause them, as well as of the preconceptions which frame them and the interests which direct them. That is why we say they are perceptions of whatever we have reason to think caused them.

Our experience of the things we perceive, their shape and colour for instance, is partly given and partly constructed. It is certainly not purely a product of our imagination. We know it might not perfectly mirror reality, but we also know that attributing it to reality in normal circumstances produces reliable beliefs about the world. Consequently we form the belief that the world is more or less as we perceive it. We hold this belief for practical reasons: we need a picture of the world in order to survive and flourish in it, and this is a good enough picture for our everyday purposes.

We cannot compare the world to our perceptions of it: all we have to go on are our perceptions. But we normally accord our perceptions, made in reliable conditions, more credibility than other beliefs about the world because they are generally more reliable. To say they are reliable means that other experiences implied by assuming them to be true are borne out in practice. It is because we accord our perceptions more reliability than other beliefs that we use them to check and correct our other beliefs about the world.

Sometimes perceptions occur, even in normally reliable conditions, which are mistaken. For example, it is easy to mistake plastic or cloth flowers for real ones, even under a bright light. Further tests, such as touching the flowers to determine their texture, reveal the mistake. So it is not the case that all perceptions made under normally reliable conditions are true. However, generally it is much more probable that they prove more reliable than other kinds of beliefs.

2. There are two important problems with the traditional correspondence theory of truth. The first is that it is unintelligible. The theory is that to say a description of something in the world is true means the thing is correctly picked out by the subject of the sentence and the predicate really applies to it. What are unintelligible are the concepts of ‘correctly picked out’ and ‘really applies’. Suppose I said: ‘There is a computer in my room’. For this to be true according to the correspondence theory, the thing I am referring to must really be a computer and it must really be in my room. What do correspondence theorists mean by saying there really is a computer in my room? Perhaps they mean there exists something which regularly appears to me to be (i.e. causes me to perceive) a computer in my room. But appearances can be deceptive. What appears to be a computer could be just the shell of a computer; or it could be a hologram, or a mirror image of a computer. Perhaps they mean that there is something that appears to God to be a computer in my room, assuming that God is never mistaken and that he knows the rules of our language.

The second problem with the traditional correspondence theory follows from the first: the theory is useless, for it follows from that theory that we can never know that any description of the world is true, since none of us is divine, nor have we certain knowledge of the mind of God.

3. To overcome these problems, I propose we adopt a theory rather like one produced by Charles Peirce. He said that a description of the world is true if it is part of an ideal theory which explains all possible observations of the world, and I would add that for an ideal theory of the world to be true there must exist in reality something which could cause all those perceptions, were people in a position to make them. This is not what people normally mean when they call a description true, but it states the conditions under which it is reasonable to believe a description true. This theory does not tie truth to an unintelligible, unknowable correspondence. And it explains our method of deciding the truth of descriptions of the world remarkably well. You recall how we test our perceptions by checking out their implications: if something which looks like a natural flower does not also feel like a natural flower, then we judge that our perception of it was mistaken. This is the process of testing an explanation of one perception by checking it against another. Historians interpret the evidence available to them very largely by constructing plausible explanations of it, thereby building up an account of what happened in the past. Scientists also develop laws and theories to account for their observations of the world, thereby enlarging our ideas about what exists.

If the truth about the world resides in an ideal explanation of all possible observations of it, then the truth would seem to be unknowable, since we have no such ideal explanation at hand. Still, we might reasonably claim to know parts of it when we know some descriptions of the world which explain such a large amount and variety of perceived evidence that we have good reason to believe they would be part of an ideal theory if we had it. Certainly our knowledge is fallible and the most we can justify is the credibility of those descriptions of the world which provide excellent explanations of a large range of observations. We are never in a position to prove their truth beyond all possibility of error. Nevertheless, the truth is a goal which all serious inquiry about the world is trying to attain.

As things stand, part of the best explanation of our experiences is that they are caused by things outside us, things in the world which we say we perceive. We have no idea what those things in the world are like independent of our beliefs about them. We cannot make sense of the notion of a correspondence between our beliefs about them and their intrinsic nature without appeal to the view of a relatively unknowable God. All we can intelligibly assert, it seems, is that there are things in the world which help to produce the perceptions we experience.

For an ideal theory to predict human perceptions, it would have to include a hypothesis about the nature of the external world, together with a hypothesis about the state of the perceiver – the perceiver’s sense organs, language, preconceptions, interests and values and so on – as all these contribute to any perceptual experience. Of course the state of the perceiver is a fact about the world just as much as the state of trees and houses. The concept of perception will have vague limits, because it is not always clear what is perceived and what is inferred from a perception. ‘I can see you are frowning’ reports a perception of a physical state; may one also say ‘I can see you are angry’? I think so, though you might want to say ‘I infer you are angry’. When we say that our knowledge of the world is designed to account for perceptions, however, it is the perceptions of physical states which are given priority. It might be that the person who is frowning is not angry but just worried; but it is certain that he or she is frowning. The perceptions of physical states are given priority because they provide us with the most reliable hypotheses about the state of the world.

If an ideal theory is designed to account for all possible perceptions of the world, you might ask are they part of the ideal theory,...