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The Objectivity of History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Virgil Hinshaw Jr.
Virgil Hinshaw Jr.*
Affiliation:
The Ohio State University
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Extract

Can history be objective? Is history a science or humanistic discipline? What is its subject-matter? These three questions are variations on a single theme—the objectivity of history—which I want to explore. Faced with the welter of claims and counter-claims regarding objectivity in history, there is need to be explicit about one's approach to these claims. My prime endeavor in this paper is to reformulate these questions from my scheme of reference. I want to consider the objectivity of historical knowledge from a framework that does justice both to philosophic and methological issues and to historical knowledge-claims themselves. How this philosophic framework be labeled is immaterial. What is alone important is that it does distinguish philosophy proper from both science and its methodological analysis. Confusion between the three, I believe, frequently generates problems out of whole cloth. The result is that obfuscation of issues present in much recent literature concerning history.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , January 1958 , pp. 51 - 58
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1958

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Footnotes

1

Paper contributed to a symposium on “Philosophy of History” at the meeting of the Western Division of the American Philosophical Association, University of Chicago, May 3, 1957.

References

2 Elsewhere I have attempted to sketch differences between philosophic and methodological analysis and scientific inquiry by reference to a meaning criterion. See “Levels of analysis,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 11: 213–220 (1950).

3 Compare Bergmann's parallel statement, from which I borrow, regarding the obligation of any philosophic position to “square itself” with the results of the methodology of physical science, in his “Frequencies, probabilities, and positivism,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 6: 26–44 (1945).

4 Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, vol. III, 2nd edition (London: Oxford, 1935), p. 476.

5 “The Epistemological relevance of Mannheim's sociology of knowledge,” Journal of Philosophy, 40: 57–72 (1943); “Epistemological relativism and the sociology of knowledge,” this journal, 15: 4–10 (1948).

6 Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936), p. 69.

7 Ibid., p. 256.

8 W. Stark, “Towards a theory of social knowledge,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 4: 287–308 (1950), p. 290.

9 Paul Kecskemeti (ed.), Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Oxford, 1952), p. 310.

10 Ibid., p. 93.

11 Quoted by Arthur O. Lovejoy, “Present standpoints and past history,” Journal of Philosophy, 36: 477–489 (1939), p. 478.

12 George H. Mead, The Philosophy of the Present (Chicago: Open Court, 1932), p. 2.

13 Lovejoy, op. cit., pp. 485–6.

14 Ibid., p. 487.

15 Edward W. Strong, “The materials of historical knowledge,” Ch. 8, esp. pp. 157–8; p. 171, in Y. H. Krikorian (ed.), Naturalism and the Human Spirit (New York: Columbia, 1944).

16 Robert K. Merton, “Karl Mannheim and the sociology of knowledge,” Journal of Liberal Religion, 2: 125–147 (1941), p. 144.

17 Compare Felix Kaufmann, Methodology of the Social Sciences (New York: Oxford, 1944), p. 211.

18 See Strong, “Fact and understanding in history,” Journal of Philosophy, 44: 617–625 (1947), esp. p. 624.

19 Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1955), esp. the Introduction, “The history of art as a humanistic discipline.”

20 Arthur Child, “History as imitation,” Philosophical Quarterly, 2: 193–207 (1952), esp. pp. 193–4.

21 Maurice Mandelbaum, “Some neglected philosophic problems regarding history,” Journal of Philosophy, 49: 317–329 (1952), p. 328.

22 “Societal facts,” British Journal of Sociology, 6: 305–317 (1955), p. 307.

23 Ibid., p. 306.

24 “Some neglected philosophic problems regarding history,” p. 329.

25 For a perspicuous discussion of reduction in science, see Ch. 3, “Configurations and reduction,” in Bergmann's recent. Philosophy of Science (Madison: Wisconsin, 1957).