Clark: History, Theory, Text (Ch 2)

Anglophone philosophers turned to language with the hope that they could, through precision, remove a number of the problems that philosophy of history had run into. Eventually, they move out of science and into the realm of narrative and its relationship with history. The appeal to "science" assumed a fairly uniform method throughout all sciences, which was far from what existed in actuality.

Popper posited that historians and natural scientists both attempted to use "prediction" to explain phenomenon and point to universal laws. History cannot be a science, though, because of the nature of its data: unique, unrepeatable events. Thus if those laws exist, they cannot be firmly found. Hempel attempts to push back against Popper's position that the laws are not extant, pushing back toward casual explanation as part of history. Hempel's disciples attempted some form of experimentation, but since history's events are unique by nature, this proved less than useful. Dray argued that Hempel's insistence on law be abandoned as it was not helpful.

Danto argues that simply because history's data is not directly observable does not make it any less scientific than, say, physics. History's meaning cannot be seen in the present of an event, but only from a point after the event (and its repercussions) have unfolded. In the end, the issue became that historians and philosophers were interested in different questions, so any discussion which might have occurred ended up not affecting the practice of historiography.

Most modern historians do not attempt to define their approach to historiography, despite however much this might be "best practice". Most fall into one of two camps: Putnum's pratical/internal realism or popular pragmatism (Rorty contra Pierce).

Putnum argues that there is no possible way to view history from a "God's eye view." That is, the omniscient narrator is an impossibility for a human author, despite the long history of attempts by historians to provide such a perspective. He argues for an "objectivity for us" with an admission that such a perspective will never attain the objectivity desired from the "God's eye view". But what we can attain is a "good enough" attempt which is internally consistent with itself, reason, and with the historian's [given] social-historical setting.

Rorty argues that Putnum's approach is uncontroversial. Further, he argues it is unnecessary. Histories are written for a specific audience, thus it is through use that a history provides meaning, not through some appeal to a hidden truth,

These theories are widely used, but often misunderstood. Rather than disavow the attempt at moving toward a pure objectivism, modern historians will often claim that these approaches allow them to be purely objective. This misses many of the positions that both Rorty and Putnum rejected.

Clark, Elizabeth A. History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA: 2004.