A Companion to the Philosophy ofHistory and Historiography

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A Companion to thePhilosophy of History

and HistoriographyEdited by

Aviezer Tucker

A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication

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This edition first published 2009© 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A companion to the philosophy of history and historiography / edited by Aviezer Tucker.p. cm. – (Blackwell companions to philosophy ; 41)

Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-1-4051-4908-2 (hbk. : alk. paper)

1. Historiography–Philosophy. 2. History–Philosophy. I. Tucker, Aviezer, 1965–

D13.C627 2008907.2–dc22

2008007601

A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

Set in 10/12.5pt Photinaby Graphicraft Limited, Hong KongPrinted and bound in Singaporeby Utopia Press Pte Ltd

01 2009

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Contents

List of Contributors ix

Acknowledgments xi

Glossary of Terms xii

1 Introduction 1Aviezer Tucker

Part I Major Fields 7

2 Philosophy of Historiography 9Peter Kosso

3 Philosophy of History 26ZdenFk VaSíCek

4 Philosophical Issues in Natural History and Its Historiography 44Carol E. Cleland

5 Historians and Philosophy of Historiography 63John Zammito

Part II Basic Problems 85

6 Historiographic Evidence and Confirmation 87Mark Day and Gregory Radick

7 Causation in Historiography 98Aviezer Tucker

8 Historiographic Counterfactuals 109Elazar Weinryb

9 Historical Necessity and Contingency 120Yemima Ben-Menahem

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contents

10 Explanation in Historiography 131Graham Macdonald and Cynthia Macdonald

11 Historiographic Understanding 142Giuseppina D’Oro

12 Colligation 152C. Behan McCullagh

13 The Laws of History 162Stephan Berry

14 Historiographic Objectivity 172Paul Newall

15 Realism about the Past 181Murray Murphey

16 Anti-realism about the Past 190Fabrice Pataut

17 Narrative and Interpretation 199F. R. Ankersmit

18 The Ontology of the Objects of Historiography 209Lars Udehn

19 Origins: Common Causes in Historiographic Reasoning 220Aviezer Tucker

20 Phylogenetic Inference 231Matt Haber

21 Historicism 243Robert D’Amico

22 Ethics and the Writing of Historiography 253Jonathan Gorman

23 Logical Fallacies of Historians 262Paul Newall

24 Historical Fallacies of Historians 274Carlos Spoerhase and Colin G. King

Part III Philosophy and Sub-fields of Historiography 285

25 Philosophy of History of Science 287Nicholas Jardine

26 Philosophies of Historiography and the Social Sciences 297Harold Kincaid

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27 The Philosophy of Evolutionary Theory 307Michael Ruse

28 The Philosophy of Geology 318Rob Inkpen

29 Philosophy of Archaeology 330Ben Jeffares

30 Reductionism: Historiography and Psychology 342Cynthia Macdonald and Graham Macdonald

31 Historiography and Myth 353Mary Lefkowitz

32 Historiography and Memory 362Marie-Claire Lavabre

33 Historiographic Schools 371Christopher Lloyd

Part IV Classical Schools and Philosophers of Historiography and History 381

34 Leopold Ranke 383Thomas Gil

35 Scientific Historiography 393Chris Lorenz

36 Darwin 404John S. Wilkins

37 Logical Empiricism and Logical Positivism 416Krzysztof Brzechczyn

38 Jewish and Christian Philosophy of History 427Samuel Moyn

39 Muslim Philosophy of History 437Zaid Ahmad

40 Vico 446Joseph Mali

41 Kant and Herder 457Sharon Anderson-Gold

42 Hegel 468Tom Rockmore

43 Neo-Kantianism 477Charles Bambach

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contents

44 Marx 488Tom Rockmore

45 Collingwood and Croce 498Stein Helgeby

46 Phenomenology 508David Weberman

47 Jan Patocka 518Ivan Chvatík

48 Hermeneutics 529Rudolf A. Makkreel

49 Postmodernism 540Beverley Southgate

50 Philosophy of History at the End of the Cold War 550Krishan Kumar

Index 561

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Contributors

Zaid Ahmad, Universiti Putra, Malaysia

Sharon Anderson-Gold, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

F. R. Ankersmit, University of Groningen, The Netherlands

Charles Bambach, University of Dallas, Texas

Yemima Ben-Menahem, Hebrew University

Stephan Berry, Berlin

Krzysztof Brzechczyn, Adam Mickiewitz University/Institute of National Remem-brance, Poland

Ivan Chvatik, Czech Academy of Science

Carol E. Cleland, University of Colorado, Boulder

Robert D’Amico, University of Florida

Mark Day, Nottingham–Trent University

Giuseppina D’Oro, Keele University

Thomas Gil, Technical University of Berlin

Jonathan Gorman, Queen’s University, Belfast

Matt Haber, University of Utah

Stein Helgeby, Melbourne, Australia

Rob Inkpen, University of Portsmouth

Nicholas Jardine, University of Cambridge

Ben Jeffares, Australia National University

Harold Kincaid, University of Alabama, Birmingham

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contributors

Colin G. King, Humboldt University of Berlin

Peter Kosso, Northern Arizona University

Krishnan Kumar, University of Virginia

Claire Lavabre, CNRS, France

Mary Lefkowitz, Wellesley College

Christopher Lloyd, University of New England

Chris Lorenz, VU University of Amsterdam

Cynthia Macdonald, Queen’s University, Belfast

Graham Macdonald, University of Canterbury, New Zealand

Rudolf A. Makkreel, Emory University

Joseph Mali, Tel Aviv University, Israel

C. Behan McCullagh, La Trobe University

Samuel Moyn, Columbia University

Murray Murphey, University of Pennsylvania

Paul Newall, British Royal Navy

Fabrice Pataut, Institut d’Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques,Paris

Gregory Radick, University of Leeds

Tom Rockmore, Duquesne University

Michael Ruse, Florida State University

Beverley Southgate, University of Hertfordshire

Carlos Spoerhase, Humboldt University of Berlin

Aviezer Tucker, Prague

Lars Udehn, Stockholm University

Zden\k Va]í[ek, Institute for Contemporary History, Prague

David Weberman, Central European University, Hungary

Elazar Weinryb, Open University of Israel

John S. Wilkins, University of Queensland, Australia

John Zammito, Rice University

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Acknowledgments

I wish to thank first and foremost the contributors to this Companion. This excel-lent group of scholars, from four continents, are typical of the heterogeneity,sophistication, and charm of philosophers of historiography and history. In additionto being at the top of their respective philosophic fields, the authors make significantcontributions to a dozen different academic areas, as well as excelling in otheractivities; in addition to academics, the contributors include novelists, a naval officer,independent scholars, and former dissidents. As the opera is only truly over when thefat lady sings, a Companion is complete only when the last contributor hands in thefinal essay. Therefore, I wish to thank, in particular, those contributors who obliginglystepped in at short notice to fill in and author a second entry, when that slot becameunexpectedly vacant, so that we were able to complete the Companion in a timely fashion:Paul Newall, Tom Rockmore, and especially, Graham Macdonald. I can hardlyimagine what they must have had to go through! I should like to thank Jeff Dean, thephilosophy editor at Blackwell, for working with me on this project for the last threeyears, since I proposed the Companion while I was an Australia Research Fellow at the Australian National University in Canberra. At the ANU I was inspired byRobert Goodin, who co-edited Blackwell’s Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy,and with whom I conducted research there. I did most of the editorial work while I was working at Queen’s University, Belfast. I benefited from the steady support ofJonathan Gorman, who also contributed an entry to this companion. Graeme Leonardmeticulously copy-edited the volume.

This Companion has lived with me for three years and has thus become quite a member of the family. As it is about to mature, leave home, and hopefully carve a nichefor itself on the shelves of the big wide world out there, it makes room for yet anothercompanion to join myself and my companion for life, Veronika, who has stood by methrough each one of my books, knowing it would never be the last. As for that otherlife-long companion, in the words of a poet of my generation:

Still in the earliest days of historyWhen the world existed only in theory . . .

Aviezer Tucker,Bangor, Co. Down,

April 2008

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Glossary of Terms

Historians People who write about past events. For example, Leopold Ranke.

Historical Of past events. For example, Latin was the historical language of the Romans.

Historiographers People who write about the history of historiography. Forexample, Georg Iggers.

Historiographic Of historiography, of written accounts of past events. Forexample, the theoretical assumptions historians make.

Historiographic narrative The final result of historiographic research written innarrative form. For example, textbooks.

Historiographic research The professional activities of historians. For example,searching the archives.

Historiography What historians write, about past events, about history. Forexample, Leopold Ranke’s History of the Popes.

History Past events, processes, etc. For example, the decline and fall of the RomanEmpire.

Natural historians or historians of nature People who write about naturalhistory. For example, Stephen J. Gould.

Natural historiography or historiography of nature Writings about naturalhistory by natural historians. For example, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.

Natural history The history of non-humans. For example, the universe, planetearth, the species.

Philosophy of historiography The philosophical examination, study, and the-orizing about historiography, about what historians write, and its relation to theevidence, the epistemology of historiography, the ontology of historiographicconcepts, etc.

Philosophy of history Philosophical examination, study, and theorizing about the past, including substantial/speculative philosophy of history but also issues likecontingency and necessity in history. For example, Hegel’s Philosophy of History.

Scientific historiography Historiography that offers scientific-grade probablebeliefs about history.

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1

1

Introduction

AVIEZER TUCKER

Editing is never simple, easy, or innocent. I had to make a number of choices at theoutset: like editors of other Companions in the series, I had to decide which topics tocover, which entries to include, and who are the best available scholars to present themto a popular readership. But the still fluid and contested state of the philosophies of historiography and history forced me to make fundamental editorial decisions aboutthe very nature of the philosophy of historiography that comparable editors werespared, most notably about what is the scope of this sub-field of philosophy and whichterminology is appropriate for analyzing its problems.

In comparison with other meta-disciplinary philosophies, the task of defining thephilosophies of historiography and history is particularly challenging. “What is the philosophy of science?” Asks W. H. Newton-Smith in his Introduction to A Companionto the Philosophy of Science (2000: 2). Dividing the question in half, Newton-Smith concluded that asking what is philosophy is one of the less fruitful philosophical occu-pations. Science, as well, has no essence, though philosophers tend to agree on coreexamples, “deciding just how far to extend the word ‘science’ will not be a substantialmatter” (2002). Newton-Smith suggested then looking at what people who call them-selves philosophers of science actually care about and do, acknowledging that “[t]hereis no hiding the fact that they are an eclectic lot who do a diverse range of things, someof them strange” (2002: 3). It was quite easy though for Newton-Smith to draw a general map of the terrain covered by people who consider themselves philosophers ofscience and set the scope and details of the companion he edited on that basis.

In the philosophy of historiography, who is a philosopher of historiography is notonly contested among philosophers of historiography who wish to exclude philosopherswith whom they disagree, as in other philosophic fields, but some philosophers of historiography do not recognize their own contributions to the field, their vocation, andcalling. Some philosophers of historiography consider themselves epistemologists, orphilosophers of science, or metaphysicians, or philosophers of literature. Even a few ofthe contributors to this companion had to be told they were philosophers of historio-graphy (who write prose), whether or not they were aware of it.

Still, by far, the greatest challenge was terminological. In the philosophy of sciencethe terminology is entrenched, widely accepted, clear, and distinct. Though philoso-phers dispute what are “philosophy” and “science,” they can usually agree on proper

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and improper use of the word “science.” They can communicate on the basis of sharedmeanings and mutual interpretations. Most fundamentally, they agree on the distinc-tion between the concepts of science and nature. By contrast, in the philosophies ofhistoriography and history there are no such wide agreements on the uses of wordsthat allow undistorted or at least minimally distorted communication. Even the basicdistinction between the events of the past and their representations is difficult toexpress and comprehend since often the same word, “history,” is used to mean boththe events of the past and the texts that historians write about them. In a philosoph-ical context, where we discuss issues concerning the relation between the past, our beliefsabout it, our knowledge of it, and how we represent and justify our beliefs and knowledge, using “history” to mean all of the above would have led inevitably to oneincredible mess! This is an even greater problem in the English language than, say, in German, which can create easily different new meanings through compounding existing words. In German, Geschichte is as ambiguous as history. But to distinguishclearly the representation of the past from the past proper, one simply writesGeschichtswissenschaft, the science or rigorous discipline of history. To distinguishresearch about the past from writing about the past in narrative form, one may resort to the distinction between Geschichtsforschung (historical research) performed by a Geschichtsforscher from Geschichtsschreibung (history writing) written by aGeschichtsschreiber. The only remaining ambiguity then for the German speaker is that of Geschichtsphilosophie that may involve the philosophical analysis ofGeschichtsforschung or of Geschichtsschreibung. To avoid an incredible mess and confu-sions heaped upon each other, my first task was to introduce a standardized terminology.I attempted, though, to keep terminological innovation to the necessary minimum.

I restricted the use of history to refer to past events and processes, thus using theword in a narrower sense than the vague English everyday use. By contrast, I use historiography to mean the results of inquiries about history, written accounts of thepast. This use of the word historiography preserves its standard English use. TheMerriam–Webster Unabridged Dictionary (3rd edn., 2003) defines historiography as “a. The writing of history; especially the writing of history based on the critical exam-ination of sources, the selection of particulars from the authentic materials, and thesynthesis of particulars into a narrative that will stand the test of the critical method.b. the principles, theory, and history of historical writing.” The Shorter Oxford EnglishDictionary (5th edn., 2002) defines historiography as “the writing of history; written history; the study of history writing.” In accordance with these already established usesof historiography I reserve its use here for writings about the past that result from historiographic research (Geschichtsforschung). The people who produce historiographyare historians. Historiographic narrative (Geschichtsschreibung) is the textbook result ofhistoriographic research.

Another common ambiguity in the ordinary uses of history and historiography is intheir scopes. In a narrow sense, the scope of history is that of literate human civiliza-tion and the scope of historiography is the study of documentary evidence generatedby such civilizations to infer descriptions of their past and evolution. This narrow senseis closely linked with the Rankean research program in historiography, the inferenceof historiography from documents. In a broader sense, the scope of history is all of the past: societies have a history, but so do rocks, languages, species, and indeed the

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introduction

universe. Historiography in this broader sense attempts then to infer descriptions of thehistories of everything.

There are two theoretical reasons for upholding the earlier narrower scope of theterms: First, according to the original Rankean research program, reliable historio-graphy, knowledge of the human past, can be inferred only from documents that werenot written for posterity, but have been preserved usually in archives. This limitationof the evidential base has become obsolete since historians developed methods for reliable inference of information about the past from material remains, artefacts,shapes of landscapes, genetic analysis of present and fossil DNA, works of art, and soon. Second, some philosophical approaches to historiography consider it special for having a human subject matter. Forms of description, understanding, and explanationin historiography are allegedly different because of this special subject matter. Fromthis perspective, history would refer then exclusively to the human past and historio-graphy would describe exclusively the human past, though it would not be limited tothe inference of descriptions of the past from documentary evidence. Historiographywould be limited only by the evidence available for historical forms of the human mind,usually documents and artefacts. Accepting such a limited scope for the terms “his-tory” and “historiography,” would have implied a commitment to the tenets of this par-ticular school of philosophy of historiography. Alternative philosophical approaches arguethat there are some common and unique features to all the sciences of the past, sciences that are concerned with the inference of unobservable token events from theirtraces in the present. To avoid commitment to one school or the other and encouragedebate and exchange between them, the terms history and historiography are used herein their broadest and most inclusive scope, as all the past and all that can be knownabout it respectively.

Sometimes, it is necessary in this philosophical context to distinguish particular realmsof history or sub-fields of historiography. On such occasions the terms history and his-toriography are compounded, as in natural history that refers exclusively to non-human history, and the historiography of nature that refers exclusively to descriptionsof natural history; similarly, social or cultural historiography describe social or culturalhistory and, and so on. Occasionally, authors refer to academic schools that include a social group of historians, the historiographic theoretical and methodologicalapproach that unites them, and the historical realm to which they apply their historio-graphic approaches. For example, “Social Science History” has an established use asreferring to a school of historians who attempt to use the methods and tools of the socialsciences such as statistics to produce a historiography that is quantitative and “scientific.”Terms that refer to a school of historians appear then either capitalized or in quotationmarks, or both.

Most significantly, and this is a distinction that does not quite exist in any naturallanguage or philosophic jargon, it was necessary to distinguish the philosophy of his-toriography from the philosophy of history. Existing philosophical jargon distinguishescritical or analytic philosophy of history from substantive or speculative philosophy of history. This terminology is unsatisfactory because it is too vague and value laden andreflects obsolete philosophical positions and distinctions, rather than the simple distinctionin subject matter between the past and knowledge or descriptions of it. The project of critical philosophy is closely connected with the Kantian project of examining the

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conditions of knowledge. While the philosophy of historiography is certainly interestedin the conditions of knowledge of history, there is much more to it than this Kantianproject. Likewise, analytic philosophy of history, the analysis of the language of his-toriography and the elucidation of the concepts historians use is certainly part of the philosophy of historiography. But the philosophy of historiography, like the philosophyof science, does much more than the analysis of language and concepts, it examinesthe epistemology of our knowledge of history, the relation between evidence and historiography, the reliability of the methods historians use to infer beliefs about thepast, and so on, beyond the analysis of language. Philosophers of historiography arearguably as synthetic as they are analytic. After Quine, the very distinction betweenanalytic and synthetic has collapsed. Substantive philosophy of history implies that its alternatives are ephemeral, while not saying much about what this substantialityactually means. Speculative philosophy is essentially a term of abuse.

Instead, philosophy of historiography is simply the philosophical examination of allthe aspects of our descriptions, beliefs, and knowledge of the past. The philosophy of historiography parallels other philosophical meta-disciplinary sub-fields such as thephilosophy of science or the philosophy of economics. By contrast, the philosophy ofhistory is the direct philosophical examination of history. The philosophy of history exam-ines questions about history such as whether it is necessary or contingent, whether it has a direction or whether it is coincidental, and if it has a direction, what it is, and how and why it is unfolding. The philosophy of history parallels then sub-fields of metaphysics that examine the ultimate constituent parts of everything, such as thephilosophy of nature. The distinction between the philosophy of historiography andthe philosophy of history is clearer than existing distinctions, descriptive rather thanvalue laden, and parallels terms that designate existing sub-fields of philosophy suchas the philosophies of science and nature.

As editor, I ensured that all the entries adhere to this unified terminology, and sothe reader can safely assume that terms in different entries have the same meanings.Obviously, I could not interfere with the terminology used by quoted sources. Quota-tions may use then the ambiguous existing terminology regarding “history,” “philosophyof history,” and so on, and may use the same words to convey different meanings. I hopethat the contexts of the quotations will help clarify their meanings. This is as good asolution to the terminological challenge that could be hoped for without violating thesanctity of quoted phrases.

Following the terminology, I had to select the scope of topics to be covered. The maindilemmas were how broad to conceive this field of philosophic research and whetherto concentrate exclusively on contemporary research or also pay attention to the his-tory of the field, its major historical traditions, and figures. My approach here has beento be the most inclusive and comprehensive. I interpreted the scope of philosophies of historiography and history most liberally to encompass all significant philosophictopics within the broadest scope of interpretation. The longer first four entries outlinethe major sub-fields that are covered. In addition to the obvious entries for philosophyof historiography and philosophy of history, there are entries for the philosophy of natural history and its historiography, stressing the inclusion of natural history andhistoriography within the scope of the philosophies of historiography and history. Sincethis Companion is intended for historians just as much as for philosophers, the fourth

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introduction

entry, by a historian, covers the philosophical issues that are particularly relevant forhistorians.

The second and longest part covers the main problems of the philosophies of historiography and history, evidence, confirmation, causation, counterfactuals, con-tingency and necessity, explanation and understanding, objectivity, realism, ethics, andnarrative. Though the entries are written by philosophers with diverse and indeed oppos-ing approaches to these problems, all the entries in the second part assume that thedistinct problems of the philosophy of historiography are deeply intertwined withother areas of philosophy. To borrow Arthur Danto’s vivid metaphor, the philosophyof historiography does not exist on some remote atoll where forlorn Second World Warsoldiers continue fighting an obsolete long extinguished war, oblivious of the resultsand indeed end of the war elsewhere. Rather, the major problems of the philosophy ofhistoriography from causation to evidence and confirmation to objectivity are connectedin their formulations, assumptions, and mooted solutions to similar problems in otherphilosophical fields, most notably though not exclusively, epistemology, philosophy ofscience, and metaphysics.

Further, since the philosophy of historiography is a constantly changing dynamicprogram of research, the entries in the second part of this Companion are strictly up-to-date presentations of the current state of research on the problems they cover. Thereis more, much more, to the philosophy of historiography than the old debates aboutthe covering law model or Verstehen. This Companion demonstrates the breadth as wellas the contemporary relevance of philosophy of historiography for other branches ofphilosophy and general philosophic discussions of causation, evidence, confirmation,origins, laws, explanation and so on. Such general discussions are parochial unless theyconsider the application of general theories to the special cases of historiography andhistory. Conversely, philosophies of historiography and history must consider generaldiscussions of the problems they consider to avoid intellectual provincialism, to benefitfrom the immense strides epistemology, philosophy of science, and metaphysics havemade in our understanding of philosophical problems and how to solve them.

The third part examines specific philosophic issues in particular sub-fields of historio-graphy and history such as the historiography and history of science or phylogeny.This part is particularly relevant for historians. The fourth and last part coversschools, traditions, and figures from the history of the philosophies of historiographyand history. True to the liberal broad scope of this companion, this part covers Darwinas well as Ranke, phenomenology as well as logical-positivism, Marx as well asFukuyama.

This companion was conceived with philosophers as well as historians (of nature aswell as of humanity) in mind. The entries do not assume prior familiarity with theirtopics. Students of philosophy and history would likewise find this Companion highlyaccessible. I hope that this companion will be most useful for spurring research in thephilosophies of historiography and history. Each one of the entries and their bibliographiescan serve as a springboard for research, for pushing forward the frontiers of know-ledge. This is particularly true of the entries where authors interpreted sometimes for the first time the implications of contemporary debated in philosophy in general,epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of science for the philosophies of historiography and history. The philosophies of historiography and history are still very

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much a philosophical terra incognita for research. I am certain that many of the seedsof successful programs of research can be found throughout this companion.

The significance and importance of the philosophies of historiography and historyfor philosophy and historiography cannot be overestimated. At the very least, the philo-sophy of historiography may assist historians and philosophers in avoiding making common mistakes. Historians, who read the entries in this companion, should be ableto avoid logical fallacies, confirm better their hypotheses using evidence, have a firmergrasp of the nature of causation and explanation in historiography, and be aware of possible uses of counterfactuals. In other words, historians could improve theirmethods, inferences, and assumption by becoming aware of best historiographic prac-tice elucidated philosophically. Conversely, philosophers could benefit from avoidingfalse generalizations and anachronisms by understanding the nature of history and historiography. Philosophers who have been quite innocent of historiography and history have been making patently false generalizations about causation, explanation,counterfactuals, laws, science, understanding, necessity and contingency, and so onthat could have been avoided had they taken them into account

We live in a civilization that too often either ignores the past, or takes it for granted.Either way, the result is temporal provincialism, the assumption that the past lookedpretty much like the present and so has nothing to teach us. Philosophers who are embed-ded in this culture compound ignoring the past in favor of false universal statementsthat are founded on a belief in the eternity of the present, with taking the past for granted,ignoring the epistemic issues involved in our knowledge of the past. Even whenphilosophers do read historiography and attempt to consider its philosophically relev-ant results, they too often take it for granted, almost as if it offered pure observationsentences of the past, unmarred by varying degrees of reliability, underdetermination,value ladenness, and narrative construction. Conversely, some philosophers dismiss his-toriography altogether as a source of knowledge, believing somehow that the only properscience for philosophers to study is physics, which of course has no history . . . Suchpresumptions can only be based on ignorance of the epistemology of historiographyand the history of physics. This companion would fulfil its proper role if it awakens bothgroups from their dogmatic slumber.

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Part I

Major Fields

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Philosophy of Historiography

PETER KOSSO

The philosophical issues in the analysis of historiography are almost entirely epi-stemological. Most of the core concerns of epistemology are present in the analysis ofdescribing and knowing the past. The emphasis, the wording, and the perspective aredistinctive, but the questions are basic: Can we know the past? More precisely, what kindsof things can we know and what kinds of things are beyond the limits of knowledge?How can we tell the difference between accurate descriptions of the past and inaccur-ate descriptions? What distinguishes a justified interpretation from speculation or inven-tion? In other words, how do we know that what we say happened really happened?

Of course, there are issues unique to historiography and its particular challenges,but we will do well to begin with the more general epistemological situation. In histo-riography as in life and in science, there is a gap between the information that is avail-able and the object of our interest. The epistemic challenge is very general. In the studyof history, we are interested in people in the past, their actions, ideas, and accouter-ments. All we have to go on as evidence are their textual and material remains.Claiming to know about the human past is thus claiming to know about more than isimmediately perceived, and this raises questions of accuracy. These questions can onlybe addressed following a model of epistemic justification.

Crossing the gap between available evidence and the historical objects of inquiryencounters two distinct difficulties. One is that the things we want to know about arein the past; they are dead, gone, and unobservable. The other difficulty is that manyof the objects were people. They were willful and idiosyncratic, and they were not ofour own culture, so understanding them is bound to be even more difficult thanunderstanding our neighbors and compatriots.

The first half of the challenge, the unobservability of the past, invites a comparisonto the challenge of natural science in dealing with things like atoms and black holes.In contrast, the second part of the challenge discourages this comparison, since persons, unlike electrons, are not all alike. People, unlike planets, are expressive andcreative. This ambivalence in the comparison of the study of historiography to sciencefuels one of the main debates of analytic philosophy of historiography: Is historiographya science? Better, in what ways if any are the method and structure of justification the same in historiography and science? This is a recurring theme in what follows: questions about the nature of historiographic facts, evidence, and explanations.

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The comparison of historiography to science does not have to yield a yes-or-no result.Nor does it have to be viewed as a way of evaluating historiography (or science). It canbe simply a way of understanding historiographic methods by comparing them to some-thing else. The philosophy of science is relatively well developed, and methodologicalissues of science have been described in detail. We might as well take advantage of thisas a source of comparison. We will learn more about historiography in this way, andwe will probably learn more about science in the process.

The challenge of the accuracy of knowledge of history raises the question of the struc-ture of justification. Is knowledge of history built on foundations, or is credibility morea matter of coherence among claims with no bottom line of basic beliefs? This generalepistemological question is at work in analytic philosophy of historiography, but notin these terms. It is presented in terms of the status of facts and evidence, whether thesethings are discovered or invented in the inevitable act of interpretation. If facts are thereto be discovered, they may serve as the epistemic given and supply the foundations fora bottom-up model of justification. If, on the other hand, facts are constructed, thereis an unavoidable influence of established beliefs on new evidence, suggesting a web-like, top-down model.

The basic epistemological issues are often filtered through the role and status of inter-pretation. Interpretation is important to historians, and it is a way to address issues ofrelativism, realism, skepticism, and positivism. It sounds extreme to say that historio-graphic descriptions are nothing but collections of interpretations, but understandingand evaluating this claim requires understanding what is meant by “interpretation”and figuring out how deep it reaches into historiographic representations of the historical process. Is interpretation contrary or even an obstacle to accuracy? If someinterpretations are true but others false, objectively true or false, then thoroughgoinginterpretation and realism are compatible. If there are recognizable and universalstandards of distinguishing the true from the false, or at least the likely-to-be-true fromthe unlikely, then pervasive interpretation is no ally to relativism or skepticism.

Related concerns are about historiographic objectivity and subjectivity. Humans study-ing and describing other humans risk imposing their own ideas and sensibilities on theothers. Considering that the people in the past lived in cultures somewhat different frompresent ones, describing them in terms and concepts appropriate to our own time maybe at least inaccurate. Describing the past in ways that make sense to us may amountto just describing ourselves in different circumstances. But subjectivity might beunavoidable, since we have to describe the past in ways that make sense to us and onour own terms. As Benedetto Croce put it, “The practical requirements which under-lie every historical judgment give to all history the character of ‘contemporary history’”(Croce 1941: 19).

This indelible subjectivity is sometimes seen to be more than an epistemic concern;it’s a moral issue as well. In the extreme it is “intellectual colonialism” (Hodder 1991:110) to force our ideas and values on the description of people in the past. One way toavoid this is to embrace subjectivity and explicitly renounce all claims to accuracy ofdescription. Historiographies in this view, are about the present, and the primary con-cern is that they be used responsibly, not, for example, as tools of power or manipula-tion. Since the story of the past is so fully under our control, it must be used wisely andfairly. But this complete subjectivism is just one position on the role of interpretation,

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and its consequence is described here only to show the importance of the question aboutobjectivity and subjectivity. Concerns about objectivity, like concerns about inter-pretation, show up throughout the philosophy of historiography, in analyses of facts, evidence, justification, and explanation.

The big questions are epistemological, but a little metaphysics shows up as well. Usuallythe metaphysical questions arise insofar as they are unavoidable for working on theepistemology. You have to know something about the nature of the thing and whatinfluences it has on us in order to assess how we are able to know about it. So thereare issues regarding the nature of human beings, the object of historical knowledge.Human beings, for example, are essentially social. The epistemological implication isthat individuals in the past can only be understood in their cultural context. Accuracyof description of individual actions, and hence the structure of justification of know-ledge of history, must acknowledge the influence of the society on the individual. Butindividual human action is not determined by the cultural or physical circumstances.There is room for agency and spontaneity. This too has epistemological implications,primarily in the nature of historiographic explanation and understanding. Explana-tions in science usually invoke laws of nature, and understanding is a matter of generalization. But human free will and idiosyncratic actions seem to preclude therebeing laws of human nature and block all but the most trivial generalizations. The particular nature of the object of interest in history may force a different, distinctly nonscientific, kind of explanation.

Sometimes metaphysical issues follow from the epistemology, rather than the otherway around. For example, if interpretation is seen to reach not only the finished historiography, what Goldstein called “the superstructure,” but all the way down to the evidence and the facts themselves, then there is a sense in which every part ofhistoriography is constructed. The past itself, history, exists only as it is described. Inthis way, a kind of metaphysical anti-realism about the human past might follow fromthe constructivist epistemology.

Clarity and plausibility on any of these issues, whether epistemology or meta-physics, demands precision in describing and relating the key components of historio-graphy and knowledge of the past. To facilitate this, we will start with the basics, facts.

Facts

The F-word. What is there to say about facts? You would think that facts just are. Butseveral key issues in the philosophy of historiography pivot on the status of historio-graphic facts. It is a multifaceted concept and meanings of the term vary in unclearand unannounced ways. Consider the variety of dichotomies in which facts appear:We must distinguish between fact and value, between fact and theory, and betweenfact and interpretation. These are not identical distinctions, indicating that there is avariety of concerns about facts.

Consider as well some of the extreme attitudes about historiographic facts, from positivism to relativism. Perhaps the historian’s attitude and aspiration should be toemulate Thomas Gradgrind in Dickens’ Hard Times. “In this life, we want nothing butFacts, sir; nothing but Facts!” But according to Carl Becker, “the facts of history do not

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exist for any historian till he creates them” (Becker 1910: 528). This contrast betweenthe status and use of facts, independent and there to be discovered on the one hand,created by us on the other, may be illusive if the two positions are using “facts” in twodifferent ways. Unless we are each of us clear on what we mean by “facts,” conflictsmay be at cross-purposes. Perhaps historiographic facts are importantly independentof historians and historiographic facts are created by historians; it’s just that these claimsuse different meanings of “facts.”

It is important to distinguish between facts as real situations and facts as truedescriptions of situations. In the context of history and historiography respectively, factsas situations would exist in the past, while facts as true descriptions exist in the pre-sent. The confusion between these two meanings of “historical/historiographic fact” is facilitated by two common meanings of the word “history.” Sometimes “history” means the events, the people, and objects in the past, what happened, what was there,who did what. At other times, “history” refers to the discipline and what it does, namelydescribe the human past, which we call in this companion historiography. If you cameacross a book entitled, Women in History, you might rightly wonder whether it wasabout women in the past or about women historians. This ambivalence in the word“history” affects the concept of historical/historiographic facts. Are facts things (andpeople and ideas) in the past, or are they descriptions of these things, descriptions inthe present?

If the facts are the actual events and people in the past, then not a single book con-tains a single fact. But historiography books are full of accurate descriptions of histor-ical facts. Furthermore, if facts are events, then talk of a fact/theory distinction ismisleading. It contrasts a thing with a description. To say of some idea, that it is a theory not a fact, is a confusion of categories, a comparison of apples and oranges. Factsare; theories describe. This distinction is an ongoing challenge for evolutionary biologists. They must confront the confusion in the claim that evolution is a theorynot a fact. The appropriate response is that there is both a fact of evolution, the eventsin the past, and a theory of evolution, the description of those events.

If the facts are the actual events and people in the past, then facts are not properlysaid to be true (or false). “True fact” is not redundant; it is confused. Facts in this senseare not true or false; they simply are. It is descriptions of the past that are true or false,the true ones being those that accurately describe the facts. So the case the evolutionarybiologist has to make is that there is adequate reason to think the theory of evolutionis true. Similarly for the historian, the challenge is to show that there is reason to thinkparticular historiographic descriptions match the facts.

On the alternative use of “facts,” as descriptions of the past rather than as actualthings in the past, the issues and the appropriate way of talking about them are dif-ferent. Now facts are part of historiography, part of the discipline and the descriptionsin the present. And they are a special part, in that facts are distinguished as the truebits of description. Books may indeed be full of facts in this sense, or they might not be.But now, if there are no facts in the books, or fewer than we thought, it is of seriousconcern. The phrase “true fact” now does make sense, although it verges on being redund-ant. And now a contrast between fact and theory is potentially meaningful, althoughit still needs a clear account of the role of both facts and theories in historiographicdescription.

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The clear account begins by asking whether facts as bits of description are epistem-ically foundational. Do factual descriptions speak for themselves? Do they consist of directinformation from the past, clearly accurate without further proof? Are the facts givento us, or are they collected or constructed? Even if the facts are collected, discoveredrather than invented, the assemblage, the facts we choose and the way we put themtogether, might be contrived. The inevitable process of selection, description, andarrangement in terms of relevance will be done under the influence of our existing beliefsabout the past. In this way, even if the facts are individually independent of our pre-sent ideas, they collectively form a picture that is a matter of interpretation.

The ramifications of the need to select historiographic facts pose one of the most widelydiscussed issues of analytic philosophy of historiography. It applies to either sense ofthe concept of facts, as the events in the past or as descriptions of the events. We aresimply not interested in everything that happened in the past. Whether Columbus sneezedan even or odd number of times during his first crossing of the Atlantic is of no consequence and no concern. There is a fact of the matter but not a significant fact.We cannot tell the entire story of the past, in all its detail, and so there is always theconcern that the parts that are told are lopsided or misleading in some important way.

This concern could be minimized or even ignored if the facts were self-selecting in away that the patterns of importance and relevance were explicit and natural. But theconcern is real if arrays of facts do not separate themselves into the important and theunimportant, and that task is left to the historian. What to make of the selective natureof the facts, in other words, depends on the details of the selection mechanism.

Some mechanisms for selecting facts are indeed beyond our control. Some recordsof the past survive; some do not. Some documents are lost or destroyed, and the his-torical facts they describe are selected out of the record. Stone, metal, and ceramics lastmuch longer than wood, or cloth, or paper, so we have a somewhat skewed record ofactivities involving lots of evidence of the former but less of the latter. The record offacts is lopsided, but it seems wrong to say this makes it biased, since there is no inten-tional influence by a person, neither in the past nor in the present. The historical recordis selective in the same way the fossil record is selective. Some organisms, like fishesand ferns, leave long-lasting fossil records. Others, like jellyfish, do not. This mannerof natural selection of what information is preserved must be factored into interpreta-tion of the assemblage of facts.

Another mechanism of selection of facts depends on what people in the past choseto write about and what they chose to ignore. Facts are selected by the original historical sources. They are often written by the victors and a priori must be writtenby the literate. These and other constraints pick out only certain kinds of facts, and sothe record is biased in favor of information on the powerful, the wealthy, and otherpast elites, most notably religious ones. Unique and special events were considered note-worthy, while the everyday and mundane were not, and so facts about commonersand the commonplace are missing from the record. Nobody thought to record the precise number of Columbus’ sneezes. This manner of selection of the facts does makethe record not only lopsided but biased, as the selection process is, at least potentially,intentional. This bias can be an obstacle to getting an accurate description of the past,but it can be beneficial as well. By paying attention to the sorts of things the people inthe past thought worthy of writing down, as well as to how they wrote them down,

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the historian can gain insight into what they valued. In other words, historians todaycan exploit the subjectivity in the selection process and use it to learn more about whatwas on the minds of people in the past.

It is worth noting that the selective nature of the historical record can be comple-mented to some degree by archaeological remains. A lot of archaeological evidence isin the form of garbage and ruins, the mindlessly left behind. This record is not inten-tional, nor is it just about the unique and noteworthy. Potsherds, building remains,and tools are leftovers from daily life. The mundane facts, usually overlooked by thewritten record, often show up in the physical.

There is a third mechanism for selecting facts, and this is the one that initially raisedthe concern of bias. The facts must be selected by historians in the present. Even if therewere records on how many times Columbus sneezed, odd or even, that historical factwould be ignored. It’s irrelevant. That is, it is irrelevant to our interests in the past, asjudged by what we already believe. But the judgment of relevance is influenced by ourown times, by our culture, by our professional training and theoretical perspectives,and even by our individual quirks. This manner of selection is intentional and, despitesome denials, unavoidable. The best way to deal with it, that is, the best way to arriveat an accurate description of the past in spite of this selection process, is to recognizeits inevitability and to be explicit on the criteria of selection. E. H. Carr lists it as thefirst of two important truths: “You cannot fully understand or appreciate the work ofthe historian unless you have first grasped the standpoint from which he himselfapproached it” (Carr 1961: 48). In other words, know your historian. And, Socratesmight add, know thyself.

In general, the worry about the selective nature of factual historiography is that eachhistoriographic fact could be individually true together with other such facts it couldcollectively add to a misleading or inaccurate picture of the past. To use a mosaic analogy, if we have only a few of the tiles, then even if each is in its proper place wemay misinterpret the picture. Choose all blue tiles, for example, and you have evidenceof a predominately blue mosaic, perhaps the sea. The sampling is not random, and weare likely to end up with the picture we want or suspected, since we have put it togetherusing only what we judge to be the important, relevant tiles.

The distinction between facts and values is a significantly different issue than eitherthe fact/theory or fact/interpretation distinction. It is not about our values, as they mightaffect the interpretation or theorizing about the past. It’s about their values, the valuesheld by people in the past. Human history is composed of human beings, as individualsand in social groups; it is not made of stones or wood. There is much more to the humanpast than the physical facts, the things you would have experienced had you been thereon the scene. There is also the mental situation, that is, the ideas, intentions, motives,and values of the participants in historical events. These are things you could not experi-ence directly, even if you were there. The contrast between fact and value is much likethis contrast between the physical and the mental aspects of the past.

This is not about a distinction between “is” and “ought.” It is not separating claimsabout what did happen from those about what ought to have happened. Valuesinclude more than moral principles; they include as well what a person or society regardas important, as desirable (sometimes the opposite of what is right), what is beautiful,and so on. Values, in this broad sense, are often the reasons for action, and as such

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they are a necessary component of our understanding other people. It might even beargued that value judgments are such an integral part of human actions that there isno separating the facts of what people did from their mental decisions. “All history isthe history of thought” according to R. G. Collingwood (1946: 215).

The epistemological question is whether matters of fact are known in different waysthan matters of value. Is the structure of justification different for claims about histor-ical facts than for claims about historical values? Or perhaps one of these can beknown while the other cannot. Contrary to Collingwood, perhaps we can know whatpeople did in the past, but we cannot know why.

A clearer way to frame this issue is in terms of the physical past and the mental past rather than explicitly in terms of facts and values. From an epistemological perspective, there is nothing nonsensical or contradictory in talking about the fact ofthe matter regarding values. For example, “In fact, Socrates valued intellectual and moralintegrity more than wealth.” The epistemological question is how, or even whether,we can know this. The important contrast is not so much between facts and values asbetween physical and mental events in the past.

The epistemological concerns lead directly to issues of historical evidence, that is,the informational remains from the past and what we make of it in the present.Talking about the facts is about the people and events themselves. Next we must consider our access to information about these things, the evidence.

Evidence

Talk of evidence encourages a comparison with science. According to the scientificmethod, evidence is the source of theorizing and, more importantly, the basis for test-ing a theory once it has been proposed. Talk of evidence might also suggest a comparisonbetween history and a courtroom trial. This legal analogy is appropriate and helpful.The challenge for a jury is to determine the accurate description of some past event,that is, to figure out who did what. This concerns the physical past. The jury must alsoconsider the mental aspects of events when questions of motive or premeditation areat issue.

The comparison between history and a courtroom trial continues by noting that thereare two forms of evidence in both cases. To render an informed verdict, the jury mustconsider both testimony of witnesses and material evidence. Similarly, evidence of thehuman past is both in the form of the words of witnesses and material remains.Linguistic evidence is textual, it comes in a variety of forms, including purposeful narrative, journals, letters, literature, bills of trade, and so on. Material, non-linguisticevidence is in the form of buildings, ruined or intact, potsherds, worked stone, art, andthe like. The difference in using textual rather than material evidence is often taken asthe disciplinary divide between historiography and archaeology. Historians study thepast through words; archaeologists study the past through objects.

The distinction between textual and material evidence does not correspond with thatbetween the mental and physical past. Textual evidence may report on physical eventsin the past, and material evidence can provide insights into what people thought andvalued. But perhaps the two kinds of evidence have different strengths, a difference that

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is linked to the mental/physical difference. Texts, for example, can be literal andexplicit statements of what someone was thinking. They might explain outright whatwas of value or why something was done. On the other hand, texts are produced inten-tionally and hence are more susceptible to deceit, misrepresentation, and the sort ofselectivity that is controlled by the writer. Material remains are often more candid andmore egalitarian in their representation. But material remains require more interpre-tation to elicit their meaning.

We will focus on the textual remains, since our primary interest is the philosophyof historiography, not archaeology. The comparison to science can still be helpful. Naturalsciences are required to be empirical in the sense that conclusions must be based onobservations. In what sense is historiography empirical? Scientists have real objects andphenomena to look at and manipulate. What do historians have to point to or touch?As Marc Bloch put the challenge, “No Egyptologist has ever seen Ramses” (Bloch 1953:48), but physicists routinely see the tangible tracks of elementary particles, as paleonto-logists pick up and inspect fossils.

The comparison between the historian’s inability to see Ramses and the paleonto-logist’s ability to see fossils is misleading. It is a confusion of object and evidence, a confusion that needs to be cleared up in order to understand the empirical status ofhistoriography. No paleontologist has ever seen a dinosaur, and that, like Ramses tothe historian, is the object of interest. The fossils are evidence, an informational meansto knowledge of the unobservable thing we hope to accurately describe. In historio-graphy, the evidence, and hence the appropriate comparison to the fossils or even thetracks in particle detectors, is in the textual remains, which historians routinely see.Just as in the sciences, the important epistemic step is to link the evidence at hand tothe object of interest.

The pivotal epistemological concern about evidence is accuracy. In historiography,this concern has two facets, authenticity and meaning. Authenticity of historical evid-ence is an issue of a document being genuine, written when, where, and by whom itclaims. It is also about the author telling the truth and being a reliable witness to theevents being described. Meaning, by contrast, is about what the evidence says, and this will depend on our own interpretive influences. The meaning in the evidence is itsinformational content.

There is a similar pair of concerns with scientific evidence, though the terminologyis different. Authenticity corresponds with the reliability of evidence. Galileo had sometrouble convincing some of his contemporaries that the telescope was a reliable toolfor viewing the heavens. The question was whether the image was caused by the objectsin the sky, and was not an artefact produced by the device itself. That is a question ofauthenticity. Once authenticity has been established, there is the question of meaning.What does pink litmus paper mean about the liquid into which it has been dipped? Whatis the pink color evidence of? Pink means acid, as Doppler red-shifts of distant galaxiesmean the universe is expanding. Authenticity and meaning are necessary componentsof any kind of evidence, in science as in historiography.

Authenticity comes first, as there is no point in interpreting the meaning of bogusor bungled evidence. Hitler’s diaries would be an invaluable insight into the mind ofthe man and the values of Nazi Germany, but only if the documents are genuine andwere really written by Hitler.

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David Hume suggested a simple correlation between credibility of historical evidenceand the number of years and information transfers, person to person, between the eventsand the present (Hume 1975 [1740]: book I, part III, xiii). The closer in time we areto what’s being described, and the fewer times the information has changed hands, themore likely is the evidence to be accurate. There is something to this, but there is a lotmore as well to determining authenticity.

The number of steps in the flow of information is probably not as important as thequality of each. To judge the authenticity of evidence, modern historians need to knowwho recorded the evidence, how they would know about what they were describing,what their reason for writing was, their special interests, and so on. M. I. Finley sum-marizes with a few methodological guidelines, one of which advises, “The first ques-tions to be asked of any written source are, why was it written? why was it‘published’?” (Finley 1987: 105). Assessing authenticity, in other words, requiresknowing some basic things about the source. And this highlights a more general epistemological point. Even the most basic data require an appeal to backgroundknowledge, in this case an understanding of the source, if the data are to serve as evidence. Arthur Danto put it in more picturesque terms by saying, “One does not gonaked into the archives” (Danto 1965: 101). This, the appeal to background know-ledge, not the nakedness, will be important to the issue of the structure of justificationof knowledge of history. Are there foundations of justification? If even the basic evidence is not foundational in the sense of being epistemically self-sufficient, then what is?

Hume’s suggestion for evaluating historical evidence is naïve in focusing on quan-tity rather than quality of informational transfer. It is also too simple in failing to recog-nize that in some ways, distance from events can increase the accuracy of reporting.Journalists lose credibility when they become part of their own story or when they becometoo close, emotionally or intellectually, to their subject. They begin to report more onthemselves and their reactions than on the events. Their selection and interpretationof data take over, whether they are aware of it or not. Distance from events, as happens by the passage of time, can alleviate this involvement. It also allows more datato appear and a more dispassionate, disengaged perspective to arise. So, distance fromevents has both a negative epistemic effect, the further (in time) the hazier the view,and a positive epistemic effect, the less involved the more objective. This is further indication that the evaluation of historical evidence is complicated.

The best evidence, in the sense of being the most candid and insightful, may be indirect and implicit evidence. By asking what sorts of assumptions and values the original author must have had in order to write the things he or she did, the present-day historian gets some insight into the social structure, ethical, and aesthetic stand-ards, and even metaphysical presuppositions in the past. This is information that theoriginal author did not intend to share, and may even have been unaware of. It is thekind of information that makes myths and literature rich sources of historical evidence.These sources may be explicitly fiction, but they are implicitly rich in facts about cultural values.

All of these details about historical evidence, these ways of assessing and finessingcredibility and information, are similar to what the jury must do in a courtroom trial.But there is an important difference; the jury is of peers, people who should share a

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cultural context with the defendant and the witnesses. The jurors are implicitly using their own context to assess and interpret the words of a witness and apply themto deciding what the defendant did. Historians implicitly use their own context to assessthe words of sources and to decide what happened, but the historians are not peers of the people in the past. This raises the concern and the epistemological issue of judging the evidence out of context and hence misjudging it. It is an issue again of accuracy.

The influence of the historian’s cultural preconceptions is more an issue in interpreta-tion of evidence than in assessing authenticity. What did the original author mean in writing this text? And of course, the text must be meaningful to us if it is to func-tion as evidence. It must bear information of something of interest, otherwise it is just a useless (meaningless) observation. This requirement of meaning is as importantin science as it is in historiography. A fuzzy, curved streak in a particle detector meansthat an electrically charged particle has passed through. Without the theoreticalwherewithal to interpret the datum as a charged particle, it’s just an insignificant fuzzy streak.

Interpretation of data, the epistemic promotion from sensation to evidence, must be done within some conceptual, theoretical framework. In science, we appeal toestablished theories, the things found in textbooks, to understand what the basicobservations mean. Look it up and you will find out how the electrically charged particle precipitates the formation of vapor that is visible as the track, and how the magnetic field of the detector causes a curved trajectory. What we already know aboutnature is always being called on to learn new things. Similarly in historiography; whatwe already know about the past has an important and inescapable role to play in findingout more about the past. In historiography, it is not so straightforward or as explicitas looking in a textbook for causal laws that link the data to the objects of interest. Theinfluences are various and sometimes subtle.

This raises an important issue about objectivity. Historical evidence must be mean-ingful to us. It must be interpreted by us. Yet it is supposed to be information from thepast. In order to get information from the past we must add some information fromthe present, and this seems to compromise the objective quality of the evidence.Understanding and dealing with this tension between the need to add information to get information are key issues in the philosophy of historiography. Pure, objectiveinformation from the past, passively given to us in the present, seems to be impossible.

One of the ways that the context of the present influences the interpretation of evidence from the past is simply the use of language. The language in the evidence,and the language in our own historiographic descriptions, are each acts of categoriz-ing and conceptualizing. To read of some activity that it is religious, for example, putsit into a category that for us includes faith, authority, and spirituality. But the conceptof religion could have been slightly or radically different at the time the evidence waswritten. To describe some structure as a fortification, to take another example, has adifferent meaning and makes connections to different ideas than to call it a wall or amound. The point is simply that the nature of historical evidence (it is in words) andthe nature of historiographic descriptions (in words) puts both aspects of the his-torical process under the sometimes subtle influence of the language and culture of their times.

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