Truth and Fact in History Reconsidered

At the outset of my Introduction to Philosophy of History, first published in 1951, I listed a number of problems which, I said, should undoubtedly be recognized as genuine by philosophers who approach the discipline of history from a critical point of view. The implication was that these problems would constitute the main repertoire of critical or analytic philosophers of history. It may be of some interest to others besides myself to see to what extent this program, or prophecy, has been borne out by events. One of my main topics, the nature of historical explanation, was already a subject of lively controversy at the time I wrote and has been debated extensively ever since, so much so that it is now widely recognized as among the central questions of philosophy generally. Another, the question of the extent to which historians can be expected to offer objective accounts of what happened in the past, has attracted continuing if less vigorous interest, if only because of its connections with the wider question of the extent to which statements about human affairs can be value-free. A third problem I distinguished, about the logical level of historical discourse and the relation of history to other forms of knowledge, has also attracted some attention, though not perhaps in the form in which it originally interested me: it has turned, in effect, into the much-debated question of the relations of history and the social sciences. Only the fourth of my problem areas, which concerned truth and fact in history, has until now been largely neglected. 1 What philosophical problems are there about truth and fact in history? At the time I wrote my book I thought that the main problem was posed by the fact that historians purport to tell us what happened in the past, and yet have no direct access to it. They cannot directly verify any conclusions they come to, nor can they claim them to be true because borne out by testimony which is unimpeachable. As Collingwood had made clear, historians recognize no such testimony: they treat statements from the most reliable of witnesses as no more than evidence, and for them all evidence

Epistemology · History · Philosophy · Philosophy, History, and Historiography

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