CRITICAL HISTORY

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CRITICAL HISTORY

• Major concern is methodology
• Particularly the crucial question of on what
  grounds can historians reasonably demonstrate
  that they know what they claim to know
• They investigate the question of the
  verifiability of historical knowledge
• They compare the logic, rigor, and techniques of
  history against the methodology of the natural
  sciences
• They look at the method of forming an explanation
• They look at what the meaning of causation is
• They look at the problems of being objective

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INVARIABLE RELATIONSHIPS

• Francis Bacon, René Descartes, and others tried
  to establish more reliable means for studying the
  natural world
• Favored mathematical formulations for testing and
  expressing their findings
• Major achievement was the assertion that whenever
  some combination of prior conditions existed in a
  particular instance, then a certain and
  predictable kind of outcome necessarily would
  follow
• Known as an invariable relationship

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SCIENTIFIC LAWS

• Formal logic connected the anterior or preceding
  conditions to the observable outcome by means of
  affirming a general, or empirical, law
• This law simply said that, after repeated
  verifications through experimentation, whenever
  those kinds of conditions came into being, the
  same outcome or consequences would take place
• General laws stated that, given the same causes,
  very similar effects almost surely reoccur

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SCHOLARLY DILEMMA

• Those disciplines that were less demanding in
  logical form or less mathematical in orientations
  were viewed as inferior forms of inquiry and
  dismissed as pseudosciences
• Such as history
• Serious students of human affairs therefore
  presented with two alternative courses of action
• Seek to emulate the natural sciences and seek to
  present their findings as general statements of
  invariable relationships
• Insist of the propriety and integrity of the
  traditional methods and techniques within their
  own fields and reject the need to adhere to the
  models of the natural sciences
• Argued that a subject like history was a class of
  learning unto itself, that it was distinct and
  unique and therefore had methods that were also
  distinct and unique

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POSITIVISM

• Primarily the work of Auguste Comte but
  subsequently embraced and elaborated by Henry
  Thomas Buckle and John Stuart Mill
• Sought to transform the study of human affairs
  into a more systematic form of enquiry by
  endorsing the techniques of the natural sciences
• Concentrated their attention on uniformities and
  similarities in the course of human affairs and
  then located the invariable relationships that
  linked the same kinds of experiences
• Presumed the existence of general laws governing
  the outcomes of human activity

John Stuart Mill
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AUGUSTE COMTE

• Ideas laid out in 6 volume Cours de philosophie
  positive and 4 volume Système de politique
  positive
• Provided foundation for the creation of the
  discipline of sociology

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BASIC ASSUMPTIONS

• Claimed that the human mind had developed
  historically through three stages
• Concentrated on the vanguard of the human race
• People of Italy, France, England, Germany, and
  Spain
• Preferred high level of abstraction
• Wished to employ history without the names of
  men, or even of nations
• Preferred the sciences and their development, not
  human events like wars and political affairs
• Ranked the sciences in a hierarchy, based on
  their difficulty
• Mathematics at the bottom, then astronomy,
  physics, chemistry, physiology (biology) and
  sociology at the top

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LAW OF THE THREE STAGES

• Theological stage
• Human beings saw the world as controlled by wills
  independent from their own but subject to being
  manipulated by either prayer or magic
• Methaphysical stage
• Abstract forces, such as the requirements of
  nature or the will of the people, governed all
  things
• Positivist stage
• An understanding of the invariable relationships
  among phenomena was used to explain reality

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HOLISTIC THINKING

• Comte thought in holistic terms, affirming that
  each mental stage corresponded with other kinds
  of intellectual and institutional developments
• Theological phase coexisted with military life
  and primitive slavery
• Metaphysical phase coexisted with lawyers and
  attempts at creating governments based on law
• Positivist phase coexisted with industrialization

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THE POSITIVIST PHASE

• No need to indulge in idle speculation over first
  or final causes in positivist phase
• Historians would concentrate their full attention
  on knowable subjects and the revelation of
  lawlike regularities that affirmed invariable
  relationships among phenomena
• These would not depend on theological or
  metaphysical presumptions but upon empirical
  observations of the real world
• This, in turn would result in a new human
  science, sociology
• Would lead to new kinds of understanding of the
  laws governing human behavior and, consequently,
  new certainties about how to best calculate the
  probable outcomes of deliberate human acts

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IDEALIST REACTION

• Wilhelm Dilthey
• Drew fundamental distinction between the natural
  sciences, on the one hand, and the human
  sciences, on the other
• The practice of each called by distinctive
  methodologies because the natural scientist dealt
  with regularities and uniformities in nature
  while the historian dealt with the unique,
  specific, and unrepeatable events outside of
  nature

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BENEDETTO CROCE

• Emphasized the all-important fact that historians
  existed in the present
• For the past to take on vitality and meaning,
  historians had to make it come alive by
  rethinking it in their own minds
• All history is contemporary history

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ROBIN COLLINGWOOD

• Published The Idea of History posthumously in
  1943
• Considered to be the most significant book on the
  philosophy of history ever written in English
• Described history as the science of human
  nature
• Aim was self-knowledge
• Proper object of historical study was the
  activities of the human mind
• Historians learned about the mind by
  understanding what the mind had done

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INSIDE/OUTSIDE

• Methods of natural sciences has no analogous
  relationship with the methods of the human
  sciences
• the historian, investigating any event in the
  past, makes a distinction between what may be
  called the outside and the inside of an event
• Outside an event
• everything belonging to it which can be
  described in terms of bodies and their movements
• Inside an event
• that which can only be described in terms of
  thought

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PURPOSE OF HISTORY

• The historian is never concerned with either of
  these (outside/inside) to the exclusion of the
  other.
• the work of the historian may begin by
  discovering the outside of an event, but it can
  never end there he must always remember that the
  event was an action, and that his main task is to
  think himself into this action, to discern the
  thought of his agent

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THESIS

• In the case of nature, this distinction between
  the outside and the inside of an event does not
  arise.
• the events of nature are merely events, not the
  acts of agents whose thought the scientist
  endeavors to trace
• To the scientist, nature is always, and merely,
  a phenomenon, a spectacle presented to his
  intelligent observation
• For the historian, in contrast, the events of
  history are never mere phenomena, never mere
  spectacles for contemplation, but things which
  the historian looks, not at, but through, to
  discern the thought within them.

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TO PUT IT ANOTHER WAY

• In seeking to penetrate to the inside of events
  and detecting the thought which they express, the
  historian is doing something which the scientist
  need not and cannot do.
• In terms of methodology (of how to do this)
• there is only one way in which it can be done
  by rethinking them in his own mind
• the history of thought, and therefore all
  history, is the reenactment of past thought in
  the historians own mind
• The creative and critical experience reveals to
  the historian the powers of his own mind, and
  hence all minds, resulting in a fuller
  appreciation of human nature as revealed by the
  mind while working on actual experience

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POSITIVIST CRITIQUE

• Positivists charged that idealist approach lacked
  methodological integrity and defied verifiability
  through the use of evidence or observation
• Idealist position was full of fantasy, mysticism,
  and self-deception
• Called for explanations based on the operation of
  an unobservable entity called the mind and
  required empathetic leaps into the heads of
  historical actors.
• All depended on faith, not science

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IDEALIST RESPONSE

• Insisted that they possessed methodological
  integrity, claiming that their approach, if done
  prudently and rigorously, did allow for
  verifiable insights into the workings of the mind
• Through the correct use of documentary evidence,
  the historian could make legitimate inferences
• Regarded the role of active, critical thought
  about the past as significant
• The only way to bring life into the past
• Had no use for the positivist emphasis upon the
  need for generalization