Category: Historical Methods and Historiography

In the previous post I spoke of the historian’s absolute confidence — of their certainty, of no room for doubt — in the basic events of the past. I don’t know how anyone can seriously think there might be even the slightest room for doubt that Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and overran Singapore shortly afterwards, for example. But historians are not interested in simply documenting past events. That’s not chiefly what they do. Not most of the time. Or certainly not all that they do.

There are many ways to write history but I will be speaking about the approach well known to us all — the narrative or story approach to describing past events.

It is not the facticity of the events that is in question

It is at this narrative level where problems and disagreements, doubts and uncertainties, among historians arise.

Consider the difference in the following statements about event of Japan bombing Pearl Harbor:

1. In a “Day of Infamy” Japan launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, dragging the U.S. into war.
2. The US suddenly cut off nearly all of Japan’s oil supply, thus compelling Japan to take the oil fields in Borneo; but first it needed to make a preventive strike on the fleet at Pearl Harbor.

In both statements the raw events are the same. There is no dispute about any of the specific events mentioned. The “facts” themselves are certain. No probability analysis is required to determine how “probably true” any of the details are. But we have two very different stories, two very different histories, all because of the way the events have been selected from the masses of other details that could have been added to both stories, and because of the way those selected events are woven together and the innuendo in which they are embedded.

That’s where the debates of historians centre. That’s where historians, for all the pains they endure sifting through the masses of data, selecting particular items they think to be most relevant, and trying to weave them into a story that they hope will be worthwhile for others to read — that’s where the real historical work happens. It is not about assessing the probabilities that this or that event actually happened. The groundwork of getting the clearly established “facts” or events is a given. (I am speaking generally, not about those special occasions where new documents are discovered and in need of verification or where some isolated point is in dispute.)

Witness the History Wars

Last time I referred to History Wars. When one side launches a salvo about, say, the good intentions of most of the pioneers and cites specific incidents to argue that very few indigenous people were mistreated directly or deliberately by white settlers, the historians on the other side might grant some of those points but pull out more newspaper stories and police records and archival material to supply the factual evidence that they expect to win the other side of the debate. The debates are about the meaning and interpretations of those recorded events. They may supply evidence to demonstrate that some of the details are exaggerated or down-played. But very rarely, as far as I am aware, do historians spend time trying to assess the probability that X or Y happened in the first place.

Undeniability of certain events

Richard Carrier does acknowledge that some of our knowledge is undeniable and not subject to any shadow of room for any doubt:

The only exception would be immediate experiences that at their most basic level are undeniable (e.g., that you see words in front of you at this very moment, or that “Caesar was immortal and Brutus killed him” is logically impossible). . . . Therefore, because we only have finite knowledge and are not infallible, apart from obviously undeniable things, some probability always remains that we are mistaken or misinformed or misled.

and

. . . . apart from the undeniables of immediate experience, all facts are theoretical . . .

Of course “historical facts” do include direct uninterpreted experience . . . .

(Carrier 25, 298, 302. My comment: Few historians would say that even direct experience is ever “uninterpreted” or that all knowledge that does not come to us from direct experience is necessarily “theoretical”.)

The war memorials, the war cemeteries, the plaques with honour rolls of the dead in countless school and club halls around the nation, the photographs, the memorabilia passed down through generations, — all of these and more tell us that the twentieth century world wars were not at any level (not even at an infinitesimally low level) “theoretical”. Those wars are not known by “immediate experience” to most people today. But those wars are “facts of history” that are undeniable. (Again, I am speaking generally. Of course we may discuss historical events as theoretical events for other reasons and in other contexts, but I am addressing more fundamental bread and butter issues here.)

When we examine why those wars are undeniable, we find certain kinds of evidence that gives us certainty. The same applies to other events in other times. The difference will be that the further back we travel, generally speaking, the more scarce various types of evidence become. But historians still look for the same kinds of evidence about the remote past as they find for more recent events. Naturally questions of authenticity arise for different types of sources. But that even applies in modern times. One famous historian who specialized in the study of Hitler, Hugh Trevor-Roper, was initially deceived by the discovery of the Hitler Diaries that turned out to be forgeries. Historians are well aware of the possibility of fraud and the difference between fact and fiction when examining different kinds of evidence. But that doesn’t reduce all their knowledge of “what events happened” to a “theoretical” status along with some sense that they think they could be “possibly, even if only very very slightly, mistaken”).

So when Richard Carrier writes . . .

Most of what we can say, especially about ancient history, is “maybe” or “probably”—not “definitely.” There is obviously more than one degree of certainty. Some things we are more sure of than others, and some things we are only barely sure of at all. Hence, especially in history, and even more so in ancient history, confidence must often be measured in relative degrees of certainty, and not in black-and-white terms of only “true” and “false.”

(Carrier 23)

. . . I might be wrong, but I suspect that not even Richard Carrier entertains for a moment even the slightest theoretical possibility that there was no Roman empire in existence two thousand years ago.

Not even postmodernists view historical events as “theoretically probable”

One might expect theoretical doubts about “facts” of specific events in the past among postmodernist historians. But no, not even postmodernist historians go as far as Carrier does in the above quotations. In the words of a Professor of Religious and Cultural History at the University of Dundee, Callum Brown,

Any postmodernist historian is not being a postmodernist all of the time. Like every historian, the postmodernist must conduct empirical research, establishing that events occurred and the order of them, checking sources that verify the facts of the case, and making decisions of judgement (balance of probabilities may be the best term) where absolute certainty is not possible. . . .

Historians are probably the least likely academics to preface their books with theoretical explanation.

(Brown, 10f. My comment: note the role of probability applies to exceptional cases.)

Here is how Brown presents “a good historian”:

To be a good historian, it is thought you have to be good in empiricist method, and be seen to have a full grasp of facts. This involves the application of scholarship skills to a series of questions. These occur on different levels. On the upper level are the big questions of: What happened, when did it happen, and why did it happen? At the second level of scholarship, the historian answers these questions by asking: What is the existing state of historical knowledge? And what hypotheses best fit the known facts? At the third level, the historian tests the existing state of knowledge by locating new documents and other sources, or re -evaluating already known ones, checking their date and place of origin, their authorship, their destiny and circulation, and how these discoveries alter the existing state of understanding. Next and last, the historian writes a report or a narrative of the issue, replete with edited evidence and how to interpret it, properly sourced with footnotes, and publishes this in book or article form to be checked by peer review by other historians. If after being read by other historians the published account alters in some degree the existing state of knowledge, it acquires a degree of acceptance that other scholars then come along to challenge and re-assess, in turn to repeat the process of investigation in an endless cycle of moving knowledge forward.

This method of doing History is broadly what all academic and professional historians aspire to the world over.

(Brown 21f)

A time to be certain, a time to doubt

There is a difference between establishing facts beyond doubt on the one hand and interpreting those facts and weaving them into a bigger narrative on the other. So there is a place for doubt and debate among historians but it is rarely over whether or not a particular event at some level actually happened. Again, keeping with  postmodernists (persons many would assume to “doubt everything, even facts”), we see that even they hew to “getting the basic facts right”, leaving no room for doubt in that area:

The postmodernist critic distinguishes three different aspects of empiri­cism. These are empiricism as an event, empiricism as a method, and empiricism as a philosophy of knowledge. To each of these, the postmod­ernist has different attitudes.

Empiricism as an event is the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is an event in the History of ideas within which empiricist method and empiricism as a philosophy of knowledge originated. . . .

Empiricism as a method is the second aspect distinguished by the post­ modernist. This is the method by which empiricism defines knowledge. Empiricism argues that knowledge is acquired through an apparatus of human observation, experience, testing of authenticity, verification, cor­roboration and presentation for judgement (or peer review) by others in a value-free form. Even if the consequences of empiricism are challenged, postmodernists most certainly do not reject empiricist methods. Like all historians, the postmodernist needs empiricist method for the essential skills, and any student of History must learn and deploy them.

The postmodernist distinguishes a third aspect of empiricism, however – empiricism as a philosophy of knowledge. And this is seen as being full of problems. In the work of many academics across science and non­ science disciplines, there is an implicit notion that empiricism constitutes all that is necessary to knowledge – that it is a complete system of knowl­edge with no other connections. This notion is that human knowledge acquisition is nothing more than empiricism, and needs nothing more than this for the advancement of each discipline. In the case of History, the writing of the past has been seen by some empiricists as being satisfactorily embraced by empiricist method.

(Brown 21-25)

Historians who go beyond “getting the facts right beyond doubt” and view all their historical work as “getting even the narratives right” are not in fashion today:

One such empiricist historian was Geoffrey Elton, a leading right-wing historian, who regarded empiricism as the only worthwhile basis of pro­fessional training in the History discipline. . . . His purist empiricist position brought him to dispute with other historians over decades – including non-postmodernists.

(Brown 25)

Callum Brown discusses the difference between undoubted (we can say “undoubtable”) events and the way historians put them together to tell a story. What we are calling an “historical event” (I prefer the term “event” to “fact”) in this post (e.g. the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor) is “something that happened . . . the event occurred . . .” Where historians differ is how they put those events together to each tell their own distinctive account.

Once an event of the past is described, it becomes something else — it becomes a narrative. . . . There is never any neutrality in a story.

(Brown 28f)

Brown concludes his discussion by leaving the reader in no doubt about the absolute certainty of the past events investigated by the historian:

Empiricism is the basic method in all scholarship. It bears endless repeti­tion that the empiricist skills of verification, close textual attention, proper and rational sourcing, referencing and so on, remain absolutely central to all that historical scholarship does, whether postmodernist or not. In this regard, the Enlightenment created the method of the modern historian.

But empirical method is one thing. The other is the empiricist philosophy of knowledge, or modernism, and that most certainly is challenged . Empiricism gives the illusion of delivering fact, truth and reality, by slipping from the event to a human narrative that describes the event.

(Brown 30)

But does not certainty breed arrogance?

But doesn’t certainty breed arrogance? Is not there an admirable and necessary humility in doubt? Yes, but no one can be arrogant by claiming to know the world is round. The kind of certainty that engenders arrogance is the certainty of opinion and moral perspective — of conviction of holding “The Truth”. Brown calls upon the words of Friedrich Nietzsche to make the point that doubt belongs in the way we tell stories, in the ways we interpret and understand the events of the past. It is not about the two world wars of the twentieth century or the ancient Roman empire to some theoretical status of which we can only be 99.99% certain.

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation, and decoration, and which, after they have been in use for a long time, strike a people as firmly established, canonical, and binding: truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour, coins which, having lost their stamp, are now regarded as metal and no longer as coins. (Nietzsche, 1873)

Certainty emerges as a linguistic construction which, Nietzsche went on, ‘prompts a moral impulse’ to doubt the denier of certainty, to see in doubt the very basis of immorality. This is a massive irony. Nietzsche says doubt itself becomes superior to fact and moral certainty. This seems like craziness. It seems to be completely absurd and inverted in logic. It over­ turns everything we are trained to believe as students at school and in college. It may be difficult to grasp that doubt is superior to certainty. This is why postmodernism is truly revolutionary as a philosophical system of thought.

(Brown 30f)

Was the gingerbread vendor really kicked to death?

There are occasions, however, when historians do actually disagree over the factual status of an asserted event of the past. The historian Edward Carr once argued that a past event known to have happened only becomes a “historical event” when it is used by historians in their narratives.

At Stalybridge Wakes in 1850, a vendor of gingerbread, as the result of some petty dispute, was deliberately kicked to death by an angry mob. Is this a fact of history? A year ago I should unhesitatingly have said ‘no’. It was recorded by an eye-witness in some little known memoirs; but I had never seen it judged worthy of mention by any historian. A year ago Dr Kitson Clark cited it in his Ford lectures in Oxford. Does this make it into a historical fact? Not, I think, yet. Its present status, I suggest, is that it has been proposed for membership of the select club of historical facts. It now awaits a seconder and sponsors. It may be that in the course of the next few years we shall see this fact appearing first in footnotes, then in the text, of articles and books about nineteenth-century England, and that in twenty or thirty years’ time it may be a well-established historical fact. Alternatively, nobody may take it up, in which case it will relapse into the limbo of unhistorical facts about the past from which Dr Kitson Clark has gallantly attempted to rescue it. What will decide which of these two things will happen? It will depend, I think, on whether the thesis or interpretation in support of which Dr Kitson Clark cited this incident is accepted by other historians as valid and significant. Its status as a historical fact will turn on a question of interpretation. This element of interpretation enters into every fact of history.

(Carr 12)

Notice that Carr understood the event to have been factual because it was found in an eye-witness’s memoirs. He was discussing what he understood to be a real event, not a theoretical one. But another historian checked the source and raised doubts:

The likelihood of the gingerbread salesman’s unfortunate death being a historical fact in this sense is moderately but not over­whelmingly high because the reference Kitson Clark used for it was not a contemporary one, but a set of memoirs written long after the event, and memoirs are sometimes unreliable even where they are giving eyewitness accounts of happenings in the past. If I had been Kitson Clark, I should have looked for a contemporary document to verify my claim. It is for this reason, I think, not because it has not been widely quoted elsewhere (except in discussions of Carr’s What Is History?) that the status as a historical fact of the gingerbread sales­ man’s murder in 1850 must be regarded as still provisional, to say the least.

(Evans 66f)

Richard Evans is far from being a postmodernist historian. Note the kind of source he prefers to use to help establish the historicity of a person or event. It is a contemporary one. Not even a late memoir of recording personal reminiscences is considered as secure as a contemporary reference to the event. Let those who rely upon Josephus as a slam-dunk verification of the existence of Jesus take note of how historical research is undertaken in “non-biblical departments”.

Where probability lurks in history

Notice also that Evans did acknowledge a role probability (and its attendant humility) in historical studies:

No historians really believe in the absolute truth of what they are writ­ing, simply in its probable truth, which they have done their utmost to establish by following the usual rules of evidence.

But that sentence should not be ripped from its context. Evans was specifically addressing the narratives historians write, the way they interpret the established events. Here is the context:

In similar vein to David Harlan, Ellen Somekawa and Elizabeth Smith argue that because “within whatever rules historians can artic­ulate, all interpretations are equally valid,” it is necessary for historians to “shift the grounds for the assessment of integrity from the absolute or objective truth to the moral or political. That is,” they continue, “rather than believe in the absolute truth of what we are writing, we must believe in the moral or political position we are taking with it.” They add that they “reject the assumption that if we abandon our claim to objective truth we must be writing in bad faith (writing propaganda in the most pejorative sense of the word),” but they offer no reason to suppose why this should not be the case. In fact, of course, in classic postmodernist fashion they are caricaturing the position they are attacking by pushing it out to an extreme. No historians really believe in the absolute truth of what they are writ­ing, simply in its probable truth, which they have done their utmost to establish by following the usual rules of evidence. In the end it simply isn’t true that two historical arguments which contradict each other are equally valid, that there is no means of deciding between them as history because they are necessarily based on different polit­ical and historical philosophies.

(Evans 188f)

Evans is disagreeing with claims that interpretations or understandings of historical events are all equally valid and the accusation that historians necessarily believe that those interpretations are “absolute truth”. Note further that Evans began his book with the following quotation, even comparing the fact-finding methods of historians to the work of astronomers, a comparison used by Carrier though with a quite different perspective (Proving History, p. 105). In what follows I cannot detect any sense that the “raw events” of the past are to be understood as theoretical knowledge with a minimum of some room for doubt about their historicity. Quite the opposite, in fact.

However much they might have agreed on the need for accuracy and truthfulness, historians down the ages have held widely differing views on the purposes to which these things were to be put and the way in which the facts they presented were to be explained. . . .

. . . Ranke introduced into the study of modern history the methods that had recently been devel­oped by philologists in the study of ancient and medieval literature to determine whether a text, say, of a Shakespeare play or of a medieval legend like the Nibelungenlied was true or corrupted by later interpo­lations, whether it was written by the author it was supposed to have been written by, and which of the available versions was the most reli­able. Historians, argued Ranke, had to root out forgeries and falsifica­tions from the record.They had to test documents on the basis of their internal consistency and their consistency with other documents originating at the same period. They had to stick to “primary sources,” eyewitness reports and what Ranke called the “purest, most immediate documents” which could be shown to have originated at the time under investigation, and avoid reliance on “secondary sources,” such as memoirs or later histories generated after the event. . . .

Ranke’s principles still form the basis for much historical research and teaching today. . . .

Whatever the means they use, historians still have to engage in the basic Rankean spadework of investigating the provenance of documents, of inquiring about the motives of those who wrote them, the circumstances in which they were written, and the ways in which they relate to other documents on the same subject. The perils which await them should they fail to do this are only too obvious. All these things have belonged to the basic training of historians since the nineteenth century, and rightly so. . . .

Skeptics who point to the fact that all sources are “biased” and conclude from this that historians are bound to be misled by them are as wide of the mark as politicians who imagine that future histo­rians will take their memoirs on trust. Nor is there anything unusu­al in the fact that a modern discipline places such heavy reliance on principles developed more than a century and a half before: Chemistry, for example, still uses the periodic table of elements, while medical research continues to employ the mid-nineteenth­ century device of “Koch’s postulates” to prove that a microorganism is the carrier of a particular disease. These analogies with scientific method point up the fact that when source criticism was introduced into historical study, it, too, was regarded as a “scientific” technique. Its use legitimated history as an independent profession. . . . 

The understanding of science which these claims implied was basically inductive. Out there, in the documents, lay the facts, waiting to be discovered by historians, just as the stars shone out there in the heav­ens, waiting to be discovered by astronomers; all historians had to do was apply the proper scientific method, eliminate their own person­ality from the investigation, and the facts would come to light. The object of research was thus to “fill in the gaps” in knowledge—a rationale that is still given as the basis for the vast majority of Ph.D. theses in history today.

(Evans 13-17)

Evans goes on to point out that even the pioneer of modern history himself, Leopold von Ranke, failed to produce a genuinely “objective history” despite his claims to be attempting to do so. Ranke failed to understand the subjectivity that enters when we seek to understand and use data in a narrative. For that reason his approach to historical knowledge (not his methods), known as historical positivism, has long since been discarded by most historians today. But as Evans reminds us, the spadework required to establish facts as certain remains with historians today. (Here we are entering another misconception I very often find among biblical historians: they all too frequently tend to equate discarded positivism with the methods of positivism!)

History is not the same as science

Contrast Carrier’s comparison of historical research with the historical method:

Geology and paleontology, for instance, are largely occupied with determining the past history of life on earth and of the earth itself, just as cosmology is mainly concerned with the past history of the universe as a whole. . . . 

For example, we can document our testimony to seeing highly compressed rock on a mountaintop with extinct seashells embedded within it. But this information is only useful to us if we can infer from such observations (and others like it) that that rock used to be under the sea and thus has moved from where it once was, and that this rock has been under vast pressures over a great duration after those shells were deposited in it. . . . A particular pattern and sequence of layers in a rock formation can even confirm to us specific historical facts, such as exactly when a volcano erupted, a valley flooded, or a meteorite struck the earth thousands of miles away. . . . 

History is the same. The historian looks at all the evidence that exists now and asks what could have brought that evidence into existence.

(Carrier, 46f)

I have to disagree with Carrier here. No, history is not the same. The geologist is interpreting the rocks through a knowledge of physical laws and seeing how those laws have acted out in the past to shape our earth today. History is not the same.

Historians study human actions and few historians would agree today that the persons or events they study follow predictable laws. There was once a time when a good number of historians hoped or believed they could find laws at work in historical processes but generally speaking those days are gone. The one example of historical processes following laws that most of us have at least heard about is Marxism: the view that historical events were all manifestations of class struggle. (Another “history follows laws” approach that I was introduced to at high school was Toynbee’s “challenge and response” model of historical events.)

The reason history cannot predict the future is because “it”, or human societies are all different, events are never repeated, they are never the same. They are not governed by the (theoretical) laws of science as is the physical matter of the cosmos. We can predict outcomes only at the most general level and at that level it tells us nothing more than we already know about human behaviour.

In principle the methods of the historian may be the same as the bulk of those of a scientist and for that reason history is sometimes called a science or scientific, but few historians are trying to understand theoretical laws to explain events.

Continuing in the next post…..

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Brown, Callum G. Postmodernism for Historians. Routledge, 2005.

Carr, Edward Hallet. What Is History? Vintage, 1967.

Carrier, Richard. Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus. Prometheus Books, 2012.

Evans, Richard J. In Defence of History. Norton, 1997.

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