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  • Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of Historiography
  • Raymond Grew
Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of Historiography. By Aviezar Tucker (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2004) 291 pp. $75.00

Is the study of history a science? The question itself seems oddly old-fashioned in a postmodern era. Yet in this sophisticated dissection of historical method, Tucker not only confronts the question directly but answers it with a qualified "yes." The answers come slowly, however, in a carefully developed argument that begins with an assessment of the modern discipline's roots in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philology, biblical criticism, and classical studies.

That discussion, rich with erudite examples, becomes the foundation for a complex and systematic analysis extended, step by step, throughout the book. These early, mainly German, scholars, Tucker argues, achieved a consensus that was revolutionary because it constituted historical knowledge. This argument, like the others that follow, is sustained with surprising precision, and the aesthetic pleasures of this book lie in its logic rather than its prose. Historical consensus is defined with the awkward clarity familiar to philosophers as an understanding achieved by "a uniquely heterogeneous, large, and uncoerced group of historians." That standard, at the institutional center of the historical discipline, rejects "therapeutic" history (mythic accounts serving ideological and instrumental purposes) in favor of histories focused on evidence (39). From these practices, Leopold Ranke established modern historiography by dint of his emphasis on archival evidence. Scientific history, Tucker insists throughout, is the study not of the history of events but rather of the history of evidence. Hypotheses and evidence emerge reciprocally. Admittedly, connecting theory to evidence may often require pedantry, but "the achievements and success of scientific historiography are comparable to those of Darwinian biology in offering scientific knowledge of the past" (84).

Tucker assesses a wide-ranging array of historical work (from Ranke to the Annales school and current scholars) in order to explore how historians operate in practice, and he writes sympathetically of their predilection for common sense. He reinforces this analysis with valuable incisive criticisms of many major works on historical method (from Gianbattista Vico to R. G. Collingwood and Hayden White). Michel Foucault is not mentioned, and historical relativism of every sort is quietly but firmly dismissed. Tucker acknowledges that historians reflect the interests and methods of their own era, but that means only that the historical context within which a work was written must be taken into account, not that all history is relative. Tucker's scalpel slices with equal sharpness at idealist and phenomenological philosophies of history, and his own position moves far from any simple positivism. He rejects as a misreading of scientific method the positivist insistence that propositions must have a covering law or that predictability is an essential test of theory, and he challenges assertions that the complexity of history prohibits engaging it scientifically. [End Page 423]

Borrowing from linguistics and biology as well as historical studies, devoting a whole chapter to Bayesian logic (complete with its notation and formulae, which he concedes is unfamiliar to most historians), Tucker builds his independent case for proper historical method. After insisting on the importance of theory and historians' application of it, he confronts a considerable limitation: Historical studies inherently tend to teeter between theories too vague to be tested and generalizations too narrowly specific to have broad theoretical application. Furthermore, historiography tends to fragment into competing schools of thought that emphasize particular factors and methods, and their penchant for giving the same words different meaning makes communication among historians difficult. Nonetheless, they do make use of each other's work (provided that their loyalties to schools and ideologies are subordinate to their disciplinary commitment); historians have an infinite capacity to incorporate others' insights, even when those emerge from approaches with which they disagree.

Although such constraints might appear to leave history a fairly faint science, cumulatively Tucker's case is powerful, and the distinctions that he draws have lasting value. By systematically removing familiar barriers raised in conventional discussions of historical methods, he clears the way to an acceptance of historiography as a form of scientific knowledge. That achievement will undoubtedly be received by many...

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