5 - The room for judgement
Summary
Narrative truth
Historians create large structures of meaning with respect to which matters are more complex than so far discussed. Recalling our earlier quotations, Bentley remarks of historiography's identity that it is “a distinctive way of organizing and representing knowledge”, while, of the father of history, Shotwell writes:
Herodotus was as much an investigator and an explorer as a reciter of narrative, and his life-long investigation was “history” in his Ionian speech. Yet Herodotus himself hints that the word may also be applied to the story which the research has made possible, … to a narrative such as he and his soberly inquisitive fellows could tell.
The argument of the previous section used short sentences for its examples, but historiographical writing is characteristically a lengthy affair. Characteristically historiographical is the view, going back to Herodotus, that it is the historical account or narrative that is factual. The historiographical account characteristically presents facts in a unified way, and, in so far as that unification is factually appropriate, it is, as a whole, in consequence factual itself. The nature of that “in consequence”, however, is a complex matter.
Herodotus “succeeded in putting together a trustworthy account of events he was too young to have witnessed and of countries whose languages he did not understand”. Associated with the historical account's claimed status as factual description is the view that it ought, in some way still to be understood, to be factually complete.
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- Historical JudgementThe Limits of Historiographical Choice, pp. 165 - 212Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2007