Pragmatism has affected American historical writing since the early twentieth century. Such contemporaries and students of Peirce, James, and Dewey as Frederick Jackson Turner, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Harvey Robinson, Charles Beard, Mary Beard, and Carl Becker drew on pragmatism when they fashioned what was called the “new history.” They wanted to topple inherited assumptions about the past and replace positivist historical methods with the pragmatists' model of a community of inquiry. Such widely read mid-twentieth-century historians as Merle (...) Curti, Henry Steele Commager, and Richard Hofstadter embraced the perspectivalism, fallibilism, and instrumentalism of the pragmatists, thereby helping to sustain the tradition during its nadir in American philosophy departments. Many historians have been drawn to the study of pragmatism during its recent renaissance; others have advanced pragmatist-inspired philosophies of history. Through such prominent contemporary historians as Thomas Haskell, David Hollinger, and Joyce Appleby, the ideas of Pierce, James, and Dewey continue to influence the historical profession. (shrink)

In her influential article published in 2016, Alexandra Walsham, Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge, coined the metaphor that ‘Archives are the factories and laboratories of the historian’. Traditionally viewed as neutral storehouses of official records passively awaiting historians’ scrutiny, conceptions of archives have expanded in recent decades. Archives are now understood as complex social and cultural entities that actively participate in shaping understandings of the past. This paper examines shifting perspectives on the nature and functions of (...) archives through a critical analysis of key debates. Specifically, this paper adopts a hermeneutic lens to critically engage Walsham’s metaphor and move beyond its potential limitations through situated analysis and interpretation. This paper explores how archives are actively implicated in knowledge construction through their contents, organisational frameworks, and interactions with historians. Recognising archives as fragmented, culturally contingent remnants that mediate engagement with the past, the paper calls for collaborative, reflective approaches between archivists and historians. The paper also acknowledges historians’ subjective interpretive roles while advocating consultation of archivists’ contextual expertise. Ultimately, it advances methodological discussions on writing history through a nuanced appreciation of archives as dynamic mediators within historical research, not transparent conduits neutrally supplying facts. (shrink)

This essay critically examines contemporary discussions of pragmatism in history. First of all, as for the ‘practice before knowledge’ argument, I point out that historical inquiry cannot be properly explained by the argument whose validity is grounded in the instinct nature of practice because historical research is a contingent, intellectual behavior. About the ‘self-correcting’ argument, I maintain that historical inquiry cannot be rendered self-correcting by the pragmatic test of truth that is, in nature, future-oriented and consequentialist given that the main (...) goal of history is to produce, not predictions or plans of action, but retrospective beliefs, which makes the mechanism of verification through action inapplicable to history. My view on the ‘disciplinary consensus’ argument is that showing how historical beliefs are produced and confirmed within the discipline does not necessarily amount to an explanation of why we should go through the whole process. (shrink)

This paper provides examples drawn from the author’s experience that support the conclusion that errors and deceptions in archival science are often not easily or quickly corrected. The difficulty in correcting errors and deceptions needs wider recognition if it is to be overcome. In addition, the paper discusses how subtle abuses introduce errors into the archival literature.

This paper offers a commentary on the contemporary situation of the teacher in western societies. The impact of some aspects of Post Modernism and of New Right political projects is considered and the teacher urged to ground his or her conduct in a belief in the enduring validity of the liberal-rationalist tradition.

A seemingly unitary appeal to history might evoke today two incompatible operations of historicization that yield contradictory results. This article attempts to understand two co-existing senses of historicity as conflicting ideas of historical change and rival practices of temporal comparison: historicism and constructionism. At their respective births, both claimed to make sense of the world and ourselves as changing over time. Historicism, dominating nineteenth-century Western thought and overseeing the professionalization of historical studies, advocated an understanding of the present condition of (...) the human world as developing out of past conditions. Constructionism, dominating the second half of the twentieth century, understood the present condition as the recent invention of certain ‘historical’ environments, without prior existence. As competing ideas of historical change, they both entail a comparison between past and present conditions of their investigated subjects, but their practices of temporal comparison are irreconcilable and represent two distinct ways of historicization. (shrink)

“Historicism” has become a ubiquitous and equivocal term. A classification is given here of five separate uses of the term currently in vogue, each provided with a unique qualifying adjective to help keep them distinct. I then offer a few objections to some of the more radical conclusions which have been drawn by proponents of a specific version of historicism, one associated with “postmodernism “. The positions of Rorty and Putnam are contrasted as examples of strong and weak degrees of (...) historicism, respectively. (shrink)

Two prominent approaches to the history of empires and nation-states are comparative imperial history [CIH] and transnational history [TNH]. Each group of historians has actively promoted their perspective, but the two have had little interaction. Furthermore, in the history of East Asia, nationalist perspectives have dominated over transnational approaches until very recent times. This article points to new studies that examine Chinese imperial and national history from transnational and comparative perspectives, and encourages further work, including an ecological and environmental viewpoint, (...) that will foster this trend. (shrink)

Gotthard Deutsch (1859–1921) taught at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati from 1891 until his death, where he produced a card index of 70,000 ‘facts’ of Jewish history. This article explores the biography of this artefact of research and poses the following question: Does Deutsch’s index constitute a great unwritten work of history, as some have claimed, or are the cards ultimately useless ‘chips from his workshop’? It may seem a curious relic of positivistic history, but closer examination allows us to (...) interrogate the materiality of scholarly labor. The catalogue constitutes a total archive and highlights memory’s multiple registers, as both a prosthesis for personal recall and a symbol of a ‘human encyclopedia’. The article argues that this mostly forgotten scholar’s work had surprising repercussions: Deutsch’s student Jacob Rader Marcus (1896–1995) brought his teacher’s emphasis on facticity to the field of American Jewish history that he pioneered, catapulting a 19th-century positivism to the threshold of the 21st century. Deutsch’s index was at an inflection point of knowledge production, created as historians were shifting away from ‘facts’ but just before new technologies (also based on cards) enabled ‘big data’ on a larger scale. The article thus excavates a vision of monumentality but proposes we look past these objects as monuments to ‘heroic’ scholarship. Indeed, Deutsch’s index is massive but middling, especially when placed alongside those of Niklas Luhmann, Paul Otlet, or Gershom Scholem. It thus presents a necessary corrective to anointing such indexes as predecessors to the Internet and big data because we must keep their problematic positivism in perspective. (shrink)

This essay explores the ways that the specter of deconstruction has been haunting history over the past thirty years, in particular this specter's effects on the revision of intellectual and cultural history. The essay uses the terms "specter" and "haunting" to express the fact that while deconstruction is repeatedly targeted in attacks against the dangers of postmodernism, poststructuralism, or the linguistic turn, very few historians actively use deconstruction as a historical methodology; in this regard the target has always been a (...) phantom. However, some historians have employed the methods of deconstruction, and by examining their work as well as the attacks on it the essay attempts to explain the historiographical reasons behind these attacks. The goal of the essay is ultimately to indicate some of the ways that deconstruction is useful for the historian, as evidenced in the project of historical revision. (shrink)

This paper provides examples drawn from the author’s experience that support the conclusion that errors and deceptions in archival science are often not easily or quickly corrected. The difficulty in correcting errors and deceptions needs wider recognition if it is to be overcome. In addition, the paper discusses how subtle abuses introduce errors into the archival literature.

Las primeras historias sobre el origen de las revoluciones y emancipaciones hispanoamericanas fueron gestadas y publicadas antes de que las guerras de independencia hubieran terminado. Algunas de estas obras lo fueron en Estados Unidos. Por otro lado, historias de la revolución editadas en América española fueron reseñadas en revistas literarias estadounidenses de amplia difusión. En este artículo se estudiará entonces el papel que cumplieron los estadounidenses en la fabricación y la difusión de esta naciente historiografía hispanoamericana. El propósito es destacar (...) el protagonismo de Estados Unidos en el doble proceso del nacimiento de estos estados modernos y de sus historiografías. (shrink)

As conceived by founders Matthew Lipman and Ann Margaret Sharp, Philosophy for Children is a humanistic practice with roots in the Hellenistic tradition of philosophy as a way of life given to the search for meaning, in American pragmatism with its emphasis on qualitative experience, collaborative inquiry and democratic society, and in American and Soviet social learning theory. The programme has attracted overlapping and conflicting criticism from religious and social conservatives who don’t want children to question traditional values, from educational (...) psychologists who believe certain kinds of thinking are beyond children of certain ages, from philosophers who define their discipline as theoretical and exegetical, from critical theorists who see the programme as politically compliant, and from postmodernists who see it as scientistic and imperialist. The paper is written as a dialogue in order to illustrate the complex interactions among these normative positions. Rather than respond to particular criticisms in depth, I indicate the general nature of my position regarding them and provide references to published material where they have been made and responded to over the past 40 years. (shrink)

The article presents the findings from a survey of over 400 young people in metropolitan areas in the Netherlands and England concerning their views on identity and school history. The research explored pupils' ideas about which facets of history were of interest to them, what history they believed should be taught in schools, and their views on the purposes of school history and history in general. The coding of the data made it possible to delineate between those from different ethnic (...) minority backgrounds, boys and girls, age and level of education and first or second generation of migration. The study revealed significant differences between young people's ideas about history and identity, and those advanced by politicians and policy makers in the Netherlands, England and elsewhere. The concluding section of the paper considers the implications of the findings for policy makers in the field of history education in schools. (shrink)

The historical imagination, as Hayden White has reminded us, is not singular;\nit is manifest in many forms (White, 1973). Not surprisingly, this diversity\nis reflected within the pages of History of the Human Sciences and in the four papers that follow. Indeed, from its inception, the journal has sought to\npromote a variety of styles of writing, representing the many voices that have\nan interest in the human sciences and their history.\nIn the opening article, Roger Smith suggests that a distinctive feature of the\nhistorical (...) imagination is the priority given to an engagement with primary\nsources. The historical imagination, on the other hand, is to be seen in its\nmany forms as the practical realization of that engagement through the constitution\nof the historical ‘record’ as a record and the activity of explaining to\noneself and others how it has come about. For Smith, an important value of\nprimary sources is their representation of ‘otherness’, providing ‘the possibility\nof an engagement with what is foreign to, outside, what we for most\npurposes take to be our selves and our world’. And the historical imagination,\nlike imagination in general, centrally involves a preoccupation with context\nand the provision of a vantage point that is different from the one that is originally\ngiven. Smith ends his paper with some remarks about the connections\nbetween imagination and narrative.\nIn the following article, Graham Richards focuses his reflections early in\nthe 20th century, in the period between the two world wars. Through a discussion\nof some of his recent work on the popularization of Psychoanalysis\nduring those two decades, he introduces an interesting counterfactual question:\n‘How then did it feel to be living without Freud and encountering\npsychoanalytic ideas and language for the first time?’2 Richards goes on to\noutline a number of imperatives (transcendental, presentist, narrative) that he\nsees as part of the historical imagination. In considering the implications of\nhis remarks, Richards – like Smith – highlights the importance of a sound\n‘evidential’ base in the stimulation of the historical imagination and he raises\nan important issue concerning the historian’s sense of time – ‘our feel for how\nthings unfold in real time in real biographies and collective experience’. (shrink)

Most historians today have abandoned the aspiration to a kind of scientific objectivity in their work—pace their postmodernist critics. Yet we cling nonetheless, with a touch perhaps of hypocrisy, to the closely related standard of strict impartiality, or moral neutrality, in all that we do. This article argues that the latter is as obsolete, now, as the former—if only because of the distinctive though largely implicit moral character of almost all published history, all but the most technically specialized. The issue (...) is not one of professional ethics, narrowly construed; obviously some such code must be maintained if history itself is to thrive. Rather historians are urged both to clarify the basic moral values that inevitably inform their work and to make more explicit, and thus intelligible, their ensuant moral judgments. They are also urged to discharge the task in a way that is commensurate with the pluralist, indeed global, challenges of our time. The implicit morality of conventional historical practice, in short, is no longer good enough. (shrink)

Moral relativism is a tragedy and cognitive relativism is a farce – so Gellner argues. First the tragedy: moral relativism is consistent and compelling given moral diversity and contention worldwide. Then the farce: cognitive relativism is self-contradictory and logically false; it is also absurd in view of hard science, which gets testable, cumulative, applicable results that yield high tech; and it is insidious – where logical consistency and empirical accuracy are a dead letter, mummery rules.

The current debates in social sciences show that the paradox of observing—the embeddedness of observer in the process of observing—is at the heart of the controversy about their cognitive status and future. Although the problem of observing has been addressed in numerous theoretical perspectives—some of which (Habermas, Leydesdorff, Maturana, and Luhmann) are examined in this article—the prospects for resolving this paradox remain problematic. Locating a point that allows reflection on the process of autopoiesis in general, not just the operation of (...) a particular autopoietic system, may be one condition for resolving this paradox. Such point will offer reflection on all autopoietic systems, including the observer. The dynamic balance between equilibrium and disequilibrium is the mechanism which regulates the process of autopoiesis. Since the function of regulation is essentially a reflective function, this equilibrium between equilibrium and disequilibrium, which can be identified with the concept of homeorhesis introduced by Conrad Waddington, may offer a possibility to reflect on the process of observing. (shrink)

According to one large family of views, scientific explanations explain a phenomenon (such as an event or a regularity) by subsuming it under a general representation, model, prototype, or schema (see Bechtel, W., & Abrahamsen, A. (2005). Explanation: A mechanist alternative. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 36(2), 421–441; Churchland, P. M. (1989). A neurocomputational perspective: The nature of mind and the structure of science. Cambridge: MIT Press; Darden (2006); Hempel, C. G. (1965). Aspects of scientific (...) explanation. In C. G. Hempel (Ed.), Aspects of scientific explanation (pp. 331–496). New York: Free Press; Kitcher (1989); Machamer, P., Darden, L., & Craver, C. F. (2000). Thinking about mechanisms. Philosophy of Science, 67(1), 1–25). My concern is with the minimal suggestion that an adequate philosophical theory of scientific explanation can limit its attention to the format or structure with which theories are represented. The representational subsumption view is a plausible hypothesis about the psychology of understanding. It is also a plausible claim about how scientists present their knowledge to the world. However, one cannot address the central questions for a philosophical theory of scientific explanation without turning one’s attention from the structure of representations to the basic commitments about the worldly structures that plausibly count as explanatory. A philosophical theory of scientific explanation should achieve two goals. The first is explanatory demarcation. It should show how explanation relates with other scientific achievements, such as control, description, measurement, prediction, and taxonomy. The second is explanatory normativity. It should say when putative explanations succeed and fail. One cannot achieve these goals without undertaking commitments about the kinds of ontic structures that plausibly count as explanatory. Representations convey explanatory information about a phenomenon when and only when they describe the ontic explanations for those phenomena. (shrink)

This thesis situates recent tensions in debates about history over epistemology within their historical and social contexts. It explores the possibilities for developing historical understanding across epistemologies by considering the role ideas of justice can play in contemporary historical praxis. By considering historical praxis in relation to ideas of justice I have identified a nexus in which to explore different ways of knowing the past that is at once responsive to difference whilst also situating the ethical as an essential regulator (...) in determining meaningful, responsible and valid representations of the past. (shrink)

This thesis identifies the early Irish Ulster Cycle of tales as a rich source of information relating to the nature and significance of sport-like activity in the ancient world. Taking the tales of the Ulster Cycle as its data, this thesis adopts a method of analysis which combines aspects of historical and postmodern philosophical processes. The relationships between and among sport, history, truth and fiction are investigated in determining the contribution that the early Irish Ulster Cycle of tales might offer (...) the historian of sport. Central to this notion is the idea that an examination of the role and significance that sport-like activity plays in the Ulster tales might help produce useful and interesting descriptions and understandings of sport in general and sport history in particular. This thesis addresses several aspects of the role of sport-like activity in the tales, namely: the role of sport-like activity in the development of the Celtic „hero‟; the connection between sport-like activity and combat; the use of sport-like activity in gaining and maintaining social status; and, the role of women in the physical development of the hero. This thesis asserts some important conclusions regarding sport and games in the Ulster tales and their contribution to sport history. The Ulster tales do indeed contain salient references to sport-like activity. Sport-like activity plays a critical role in the definition and status of a warrior. The tales provide evidence of specialised warrior training and an identifiable pattern of martial education of which sport-like activity is a central component. Several women are trained in martial arts and play a primary role in the latter stages of the physical and martial education of warriors. Finally, the sport-like activity in the tales can be seen to contain evidence of an early sport ethic. In essence, this thesis offers a fresh contribution to the understanding of sport in the ancient world by way of an examination of the sport-like activity in the early Irish Ulster tales. (shrink)