Conditions of Truth of Historical Narratives

The problem to be discussed here is this: is the classical conception of truth applicable to historical narratives? Certain difficulties connected with answering this question have been mentioned in my Methodology of History.' The discussion that followed the appearance of that book was confined to the issue of whether the correspondence theory of truth, which may be considered as part of the classical conception of truth, is adequate to the nature of historical cognition. The adequacy of another part of the classical conception of truth, namely the adequacy of the rules for the truth of sequences of statements for predicating truth of historical narratives, was not discussed. The former problem if we simplify matters reduces to answering the question whether the historian is entitled to use the category of the past in the sense of the reality to which he compares the narrative he produces (and which he intends to be a scientific reconstruction of that reality). It involves subtle philosophical considerations which are, however, of remote significance for the practical activity of the historian. On the other hand, the latter problem, that is, reflection on the conditions of truth of historical narratives, seems to be much closer to his activity. Suppose we reject the category of the past as objective reality and assume, as has recently been done by L. J. Goldstein,2 that there is no difference between an historical fact and a description of that fact by an historian, for it is the historian who constitutes historical facts while describing them; this automatically eliminates the need for studying the truth of historical narratives. In that interpretation, an analysis of the validity of narratives whether a given narrative (and the ways in which the historian has arrived at it) agrees with the prevailing commonly accepted methods of research procedureremains the only criterion of evaluation of results of research. Yet it seems that for a professional historian that threshold of validity (in the sense explained above) is merely the preliminary criterion which

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