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Collingwood and Historical Testimony

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

C. A. J. Coady
C. A. J. Coady
Affiliation:
University of Melbourne
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Extract

Although there are many different philosophical hares that could be started by the use of the term ‘historical fact’ I am interested in pursuing one that is related to the historian's attitude to testimony. By way of preliminary, however, I should say something about my use of the word ‘fact’. A contrast that sets off my use best is probably that between fact and theory. This distinction is at once methodological and epistemological in that it concerns the structure of inquiry as well as the structure of secure belief. As far as inquiry is concerned it is plausible to suppose that an investigation begins with a problem or a puzzle, the delineation of which requires certain data in the form of propositions that are known to be true, or are taken for granted or commonly agreed upon as sufficiently secure to provide a grounding for the inquiry. It is to cover such data that I am using the word ‘fact’ and hence it will not refer to just any true proposition. Theories however stand as the outcome of inquiry and involve generality and inference and classification in a way that facts do not. It is interesting that the term ‘datum’ came into use in English at the same time (the middle of the seventeenth century) that the word ‘fact’, which had meant ‘a deed or action’, acquired the sort of meaning that interests me here.

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Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 50 , Issue 194 , October 1975, pp. 409 - 424
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1975

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References

1 Collingwood, R. G., The Idea of History, The Clarendon Press (Oxford, 1970), pp. 234–35Google Scholar. Page references to this work will be bracketed in the text and accompanied by the initials IH.

2 Vansina, J., Oral Tradition (Penguin Books, Middlesex, 1973), p. 89.Google Scholar

3 Vansina, , op. cit., p. 98.Google Scholar

4 Although there are rare moments when his rejection is somewhat muted, cf. p. 276, IH.

5 Collingwood thinks that this will also provide a way of differentiating history from natural science and hence a link between the individual's autonomy and the autonomy of the discipline.

6 This would then make two instances of failure to realize his hero's reliance on the testimony of servants from which we may well learn something about the social life of an Oxford college.

7 The others are not very plausible and I will not consider them here.

8 It may be that some remarks about the idea of the past as an innate idea are meant to tell us more about the ‘peculiar relation’ and if so then the relation between present evidence and picture of the past is determined by our mental constitution and not solely by the practices or mental constitutions of historians. There are many problems raised by talk of an innate idea of the past and its relation to historical practice, but I cannot discuss them here.

9 Carr, E. H., What Is History? (Penguin Books, Middlesex, 1964), p. 12.Google Scholar

10 Op. cit., p. 12.Google Scholar

11 Ibid. Carr believes that nothing can be an historical fact unless elected into ‘the select club of historical facts’ by historians. The franchise may strike the reader as somewhat restrictive.

12 A point stressed by Passmore, John in ‘The Objectivity of History’, Philosophy, 33 (125), 04 1958, pp. 100–101.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 I do not say that there are no interesting differences between testimony from the past and testimony from the present. With regard to methods of assessing particular testimonies there are at least three areas of difference: (a) the possibility of interrogation of a witness, (b) the possibility of checking by personal observation, and (c) the possibility of checking with other witnesses. One can exaggerate the availability of these resources in the case of current testimony but (a) and (b) are not available at all with historical testimony, except for the most recent past, and (c) is much more restricted than with contemporary testimony. The historian may, of course, use analogues to (a) and (b) such as the reports of interrogations and the checks provided by archaeology. There are important issues here but further investigation is beyond the scope of this article and does not seem likely to affect its main contentions.