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ONE ThE EThics Of fiNdiNg aNd MakiNg ThE PasT discOvEriNg ThE PasT: ThE EPisTEMOlOgical EThics Of sciENTific hisTOriOgraPhy Background: The Birth of Scientific Historiography In the wake of the rise of nation-states and remarkable technological advances, scientific historiography was born—propelled by the view that “what really happened” is a viable object of investigation.1 By freeing professional academic historians from the need to please autocrats and aligning their investigative practices with those techniques that had led to great progress in the natural sciences, hope that events in the real historical past could be truly known was fed. Such sanguinity was relatively unheard of until the nineteenth century, when the scientific study of the past took hold. While a few historians, like Jean Mabillon in France and David Hume somewhat later in England, developed standards for assessing the reliability and authenticity of sources, there was little consensus among scholars that knowledge of past events could be satisfactorily attained. Prior to the establishing of the first European chair in History and Morals at the College de France in 1769 (and long after this event as well), information concerning the past—as compared to what could be known of the natural world present at hand—was often considered not only difficult but impossible to come by. This view was articulated by the followers of Descartes and La Mothe le Vayer. According to these skeptics the reality of the past, the measure against which all claims to historical truth are supposedly advanced, lay irretrievably beyond the reach of the researcher. Such doubt, as is evident in the adoption of Cartesian ideas by Jesuits in France, was not incompatible with the common practice of deriving historical knowledge from purportedly faithful, 1 2 JOHN DEWEY AND THE ETHICS OF HISTORICAL BELIEF longstanding intra-traditional sources. As noted by George Huppert and Paul Veyne in their assessments of popular reaction to the early juridical-style use of footnotes as confirmation by Estienne Pasquier in the sixteenth century, most critics objected to this encumbering of the text because it attempted to secure legitimation and authorization to knowledge of the past that could only be bestowed by time itself. Historical truth, as Veyne wrote, at this time was still primarily the product of “tradition and vulgate.”2 Scientific historiography in nineteenth-century Europe takes two chief forms, one encountered in the work of early German historicists and the other in the work of French and British positivists. The latter held that human activity could be explained causally, like other phenomena in the natural world, in terms of generalizing laws. The former famously denied that this was possible, instead arguing that human actions could only be “understood” through altogether different means—that is, by attending to the specific historical and cultural circumstances which lend meaning to human sayings and doings. While there do exist important differences between the two schools and within them, there is much that is shared— including a generally undeveloped theory of meaning.3 This is important to note, as oftentimes the polemic between the advocates of these opposing camps has led commentators to emphasize incompatibilities between the members of these traditions. The practice of labeling one’s beliefs about the past “true” because they were based on evidence obtained through following rigorous methods which supposedly limited eisogetical contamination was widespread—adopted not only by positivist historians but many historicists as well!4 While positivist historians like Henry Thomas Buckle were clearly impressed and influenced by Auguste Comte’s attempt to discover scientific laws guiding the progress of history—in keeping with the recent arguments of Eckhardt Fuchs—they were no less inspired by the work of German scientific historiographers. Rather than viewing, for example, Buckle’s concern to establish a nomothetical model for historical research as a challenge to that of German historiographers—which is how Buckle’s detractors in Germany often characterized it—Fuchs shows that this nineteenth-century English historian understood his work to be a supplement.5 Comte, Buckle, and other positivist historians’ efforts to discover historical laws through inductive generalizations—which might aid in not only understanding events in the past but direct action in the present and future—depended upon the data produced by the work of other professional historians who deployed painstaking methods for objectively securing knowledge of what happened in the past. Beliefs about the past were true, for positivists and— as I will show in detail—some early German historicists like Leopold von Ranke only if...

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