1 HIS 601 – Week 3 THEORY AND METHOD OF HISTORYTHEORY OF KNOWLEDGE: EPISTEMOLOGY
2 What is epistemology? Epistemology is the branch of philosophyEpistemology addresses the nature, theory and foundations of any area of knowledge production. the theory of knowledge, esp. with regard to its methods, validity, and scope. Epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from mere opinion.
3 What is epistemology? From the Greek epistêmê (“knowledge”) and logos (“explanation”), the core area of philosophy that studies the nature of knowledge, justification, evidence, and related concepts. The central questions addressed by epistemology are: 1- What is the nature of knowledge and justification? (‘What can we know, and how do we know it?’) 2- What necessary and sufficient conditions must be met for a belief to be justified or qualify as knowledge? 3- What are the limits of knowledge and justified belief?
4 Historical epistemologyWhat is the historical method? How do we know it is valid? Are there ‘right answers’ to historical questions? Or only different interpretations? How can historians claim to know what happened in the past?
5 Historical epistemology:History quizzes and multiple-choice tests are based on the assumption that some statements about the past can be regarded as right and others as wrong, and that we have ways of telling the ones from the others. For example, If we were asked who was the Fijian Chief who offered Fiji to Britain in 1874 and we answered “Ratu Sukuna” this would be considered “wrong”. Because the ‘right’ historical answer is Cakobau.
6 Historical epistemology:We can use different types of texts (reference books, historical accounts, primary sources) to help us decide whether a particular proposition about the past is right or wrong, true or false. Separating right from wrong statements about the past at this level of knowledge is usually a simple procedure. However, sometimes even apparently straightforward, corroborated factual claims can turn out to be problematic, especially if we try to interpret them... For example, it is a much harder task to decide if offering Fiji to Britain was a good thing for Fijians…Or if Cakobau was should be remembered as clumsy ruler or a political genius!
7 Historical epistemology:Contemporary history students are being taught that historiographical knowledge is far from “neutral” and purely “objective”; Rather, it is always a contested, provisional and constructed account that depends on the historian’s theoretical approach and worldviews. So, asking a question that can be answered only in one possible way is insufficiently difficult for a degree course . But this take us back to an epistemological question: if there are many perspectives on the past, what it is that historians can know about the past?
8 Historical epistemology:Historians can make justified, rational, evidence-based, even brilliant attempts to explain why something once happened. But of course this is a long way short of stating that they might one day arrive at the ‘right’ answer!
9 Historical epistemology:For example, historians still debate “Why was there revolution in France in 1789?” Different historians will always have their preferred causal factors to try to explain this…. Some will prefer class-conflict (Marxist) explanations (the rise of the French bourgeoisie, the failure of the aristocracy to make political or economic concessions to this rising class). Others will focus on the importance of ideas (Enlightenment rationalism, modern political ideologies).
10 Historical epistemology:In the end, a historian’s choice about how/why/when to begin their explanation of why revolution occurred will always be a matter of personal preference. this shaped of course by reading and rational thinking, but still a personal account…
11 Historical epistemology:Different from 19th Century historians, contemporary Theorists argue that no one can provide a wholly satisfactory account of why something happened. They tell us that historians can give us only 1- ‘provisional answers’, 2- ‘tentative conclusions’ and 3- ‘plausible hypotheses They say that historians provide only ‘indirect confirmation’ about the past, which cannot be absolutely proved.
12 Historical epistemology:All of this raises an obvious difficulty for historians (both professional and students). If professional historians are unable to provide ‘right’ answers to questions about their specialist subjects, what are students meant to do when faced with those same questions?
13 Historical epistemology:A good start is to understand that there are right ways to answer historical questions rather than “right “ answers as such. Effective answers to any historical the questions (including, essay, exams etc.), involves a historiographical discussion; that is, an assessment of the available historical interpretations. It is a good habit for historians (professionals and students) to identify several of the most important interpretations in the field and then to read these accounts critically.
14 Historical epistemology:It is not enough simply to summarise the various interpretations – ‘historian X argued this, but historian Y argued that’. Historians need to make a judgment about the merits of the different accounts they read. This might involve reading academic reviews of the works in question (usually found in journals); it will certainly involve thinking about the ways in which the account has made use of an evidence base (particularly primary sources, but also secondary sources) Also, the reasoning behind its line of argument.
15 Historical epistemology:It will involve considering how the historian imposed a shape on their account, and what kind of perspective they brought to their work. This kind of critical reading enables one to go beyond making a straightforward summary of how a particular collection of historians have explained or interpreted something in the past. Rather, it allows one to justify why they think that certain answers to the question at hand are more persuasive (but not necessarily more ‘right’) than others.
16 Can historians be objective?Enlightenment thinkers thought that the physical scientist should be regarded as a model of the intellectual. Science – with Isaac Newton as its ideal practitioner – was prized because it seemingly provided objective access to the Laws of nature; When history still aspired to be a “scientific” form of enquiry, historians believed that they had a professional duty to write about the past using a similarly objective method
17 Can historians be objective?In order for them to be able to think like this, they had to make a key theoretical assumption. They had to believe that there was a complete separation between themselves and what they were studying. This separation created the “conditions” in which a historian might look at the past as a kind of “impartial” observer.
18 Can historians be objective?if the past existed as an object that was whole, intact and independent of the historian’s organising thoughts… then a historian could at least attempt to describe that past more or less on its own terms. Ideally, historians were expected to make every effort to ensure that their knowledge (their writing) corresponded with the “reality” of this past. Writing history according to this model was like an exercise in accurate transcription or mimesis.
19 Can historians be objective?In this model of historiography, historians were expected to be able to “switch off” their worldviews and personal beliefs during their working hours. They had to prevent their own present-day values and preferences from contaminating their research and writing about the past. Additionally, historians believed they had a method for excluding unreliable witnesses or sources from intruding into their histories. This supposed detachment was what separated professional historians from amateurs, advocates, propagandists, publicists and general audiences…
20 Can historians be objective?The quest for ‘objectivity’ has been central epistemological debate to historians for a long time; It had emotional and moral implications, as well as philosophical ones. Some historians held on (hold on) to the ideal of objectivity because it guarantees their knowledge-claims, to put some things beyond dispute… It was (and still is) an attractive working concept for those who cherished certainties. Importantly, it counteracted skeptics, from Friedrich Nietzsche onwards, who argued that all historians’ claims about the past have always been positioned, partial and value laden.
21 traditional understanding of historiographical objectivity:1- Theory of correspondence (narratives about the past are the same as the past itself) 2- a sharp separation between knower and known; 2- between fact and value; 3- Above all, between history and fiction. 4- Historical facts are seen as prior to and independent of interpretation.
22 traditional understanding of historiographical objectivity:5- the value of an interpretation is judged by how well it accounts for the facts (if it is contradicted by the facts, it must be abandoned) 6- Truth is one, not perspectival 7- Whatever patterns exist in history are ‘found’, not ‘made’...
23 Contemporary understanding of historiographical objectivity:1- contemporary historians are neither ‘for’ nor ‘against’ objectivity. 2- what present-day historians argue is that we are better served by abandoning the concept as a guiding aspiration in their work. 3- the quest for historical objectivity was itself bounded by time and culture (19th Century “Enlightenment”). 4- a time when professional historians were a largely homogenous community: bourgeois, white, ‘western’ and predominantly male.
24 Contemporary understanding of historiographical objectivity:5- These white-male-European scholars could at least agreed about what, for them, constituted ‘proper’ history (what were legitimate sources and how they should write their accounts); 6- They defined a history model that was Eurocentric, Linear, “Scientific”; while non-Europeans had a “pre-historical” life; 7- This narrow ad traditional understanding of history shared understandings of what historians should study – broke apart from the 1960s onwards. 8- Academic historians collectively became more diversified in terms of their gender, ethnic and social class identities.
25 Contemporary understanding of historiographical objectivity:5 - The number of subjects that they wrote about, and the perspectives that historians brought to their writing, proliferated; 6- ‘history from below’, ‘black’ history, feminist history, postcolonial history, postmodern history; de-colonial history; gay history, queer history, global history and more… 7- because of this diversity, the notion of a “neutral” and “objective” historiography no longer made sense. 8 – ‘Objectivity ’ was seen as an attempt to pass off 19th C historians’ own particular western, andro-centric values, agenda and world-view as universal.
26 Contemporary understanding objectivity in other disciplines:1 – the notion of “objective” knowledge was challenged across all disciplines, not just history. 2- This included the natural sciences from which historians in the nineteenth century had derived their ideals of objectivity in the first place. 3- Example: Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
27 Thomas Kuhn (epistemologist of science):1 – he argued against the long-held assumption that scientists were “objective”, impartial observers of the natural world; 2- According to Kuhn, the condition that made a scientific claim true rested on its acceptance by leading practitioners within the relevant scientific community; 3- Scientific knowledge, in other words, was a form of social or institutionalised knowledge, not the accurate reflection of an “objective” world.
28 Thomas Kuhn (epistemologist of science):5- ultimately, what underwrote scientific “truths” were professional protocols: a) rules of play; b) shared discourses; c) agreed vocabularies; d) common professional initiation… 6- These protocols were far from natural, timeless and “objective”; 7- Rather, they depended on the place and historical period that scientists belonged to…
29 Contemporary understanding of historiographical objectivity:history is always written from a particular perspective; That is, it always serves a particular agenda – personal, professional, political, aesthetic, religious, moral or some other… So, any thing is valid? No History, like other areas of knowledge, also has its professional, shared protocols (which have to be observed) History is an erudite discipline (it requires initiation, as well as approval from our professional peers…)
30 Contemporary understanding of historiographical objectivity:Instead of “objectivity”, contemporary historians are searching for plausible, responsible and fresh interpretations of the past; Not the “past as it really happened” (Ranke), but as “a version of what probably happened”;
31 But many contemporary historians:Still believe in “objectivity”! Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991, begins by stating that his book’s aim is to “explain why things turned out the way that they did” in the world between the beginning of the Great War and the end of the Soviet era.
32 But many contemporary historians:In Telling the Truth about History (1994), famous historians Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob state that they believe in the reality of the past; in humans’ ability to make contact with this reality; and in historians’ ability to establish at least provisional truths about the past;
33 But many contemporary historians:similar points can be found in books such as such as: 1-Richard Evans’s In Defence of History, 1997. 2-Arthur Marwick’s The New Nature of History: Knowledge, Evidence, Language, 2001. 3-John Tosh and Seán Lang’s The Pursuit of History, 2006.
34 But many contemporary historians:The belief that historians can study and therefore “objectively” know the past is related to a scientific approach called empiricism; EMPIRICISM. From the Greek empeiria (“experience”); Empiricism is a broad school of thought according to which experience is crucial for knowledge or justified true belief;
35 Empiricism In the history of science, Empiricism is usually opposed to Rationalism Empiricism generally includes a skeptical attitude toward a faculty of intuition by which truths might be known. For Empiricists, ideas or concepts (and any scientific knowledge), are acquired by means of the senses (not in the mind of scientists).
36 Empirical historians believe:the idea that the past can be “truly” observed or accessed via the traces (or sources) it left behind; the “objectivity” of any written history can be checked by comparing it to the “real” past that it supposedly represents (correspondence theory);
37 Empiricism and historiographyMost people accept the claim that historians have a firmly grounded knowledge of the past… how else are we to explain the popularity of history as a subject over the years in schools and universities? Or the numbers of history books published annually? or the regular appearances of historians in the media as the authorities on the past? What else are historians for, the question might be asked, if not to tell us how things “really” used to be?
38 Contemporary historical epistemologyFew, if any, historians claim to know the truth about any aspect of the past. Discovering information about a past that is ‘out there’ remains historians’ collective motivating goal; However, most concede that the ideal of describing the past ‘as it really was’ always remains beyond reach. Instead, it is common now for historians to refer to their knowledge of what happened in the past To admit that their interpretation of the past is not “complete” or “objective”, but is the most plausible, sophisticate that s/he has for the time being…