What do I know?
The promised posts about cavalry charges are coming up this week, but first I need to do some intellectual throat-clearing. This post is about epistemology: what can we know about the past and how can we know it?
Epistemology has become an increasingly controversial issue in history since the adoption of critical theory became fashionable. In some ways, the outbreak of the theory wars actually made it more difficult to discuss epistemology as there is a minority of entrenched extremists on both sides who see the issues in binary terms of “us and them”, where “them” is a crude stereotype (at least this proves that Othering is not just an abstract theory: you can see it happening in academia!): the naive Rankeans who believe that the objective truth of what actually happened in the past springs unproblematically from archival documents provided that the historian remembers to leave his (because this stereotype is usually white and male) bias in the cloakroom, and the trendy vacuous postmodernists who hide their woolly thinking behind impenetrable jargon and believe that every point of view, even holocaust denial, is equally valid. I’ve never encountered anyone who conforms to either of those stereotypes. I don’t identify with either of them, and I don’t feel threatened by people who have different opinions from me. However, I think it is both possible and necessary to ask big questions about what we can know. For a long time, I’ve believed that the job of academic historians is to question everything. We should regard everything with Nietzschean suspicion, especially ourselves.
My position used to be what is known as “empirical”. Strictly speaking, that’s a misuse of the word, because in most cases truly empirical history isn’t possible. The past doesn’t exist any more, so we can’t observe it in an empirical fashion, let alone carry out controlled experiments on it. In this sense, the only truly empirical history is autobiography, but empiricists tend to be rightly suspicious of anecdotes based on distant memories. The point of “empirical” history (I’m going to have to keep calling it that for want of a better word) is that it’s based on using documents to find out about what happened in the past. In spite of the stereotypes, this is far from a naive approach. Even the most traditional historians are very sceptical and critical of their sources, but this scepticism only goes so far. Structuralist and post-structuralist theory have gone much further in questioning the relationship between language and reality. I don’t need to go into those here. It’s just necessary to acknowledge that there are serious philosophical challenges to the foundations of historical knowledge, and that it’s possible (but by no means certain) that the whole of empirical history might be rendered obsolete and worthless. The jury is still out, and might stay out forever.
During my “stuckist” phase in the late 1990s, I was firmly within the empiricist paradigm, although my idiosyncratic dogma placed me outside the mainstream. I got bored with that, but I still have a lot of respect for methodical empirical research and believe (justifiably or not) that I’m particularly good at it. Getting interested in Nietzsche, Saussure, and their intellectual descendants hasn’t turned me into a solipsist who believes that nothing is real (it was Camus and Beckett who did that. Then I got off the bus). Skills such as archival research, source criticism, and record linkage are more relevant than ever now that large bodies of documents are being digitised and put online. Projects of that kind are going to need people to work on them for years to come.
One of the many potential benefits of putting original sources on the web is that everyone will have equal access (except for those sources under the tyranny of the ATHENS password, which I hope will become a minority) and will be able to make their own decisions about how to use them and how far to trust them. Everything from quantitative analysis to Derridean deconstruction will be possible without even having to go back to the archives. Are the documents windows on reality or free floating texts whose meanings are made by the reader? Only you can decide.
And in that spirit, I invite everyone to make their own decisions about what this weblog really means. There are posts like this one which openly discuss theoretical problems, but it’s impractical to set out all the caveats every time I write that document x suggests that y happened. I’m quite happy to slip back into the empirical paradigm when I feel like it, even though I now acknowledge that it might not have any foundations.
When empiricism is defined in the narrow sense of inductive observation, its exact opposite is rationalism, based on logical deduction. Rational deduction starts with a premise, and tells you what conclusion logically follows if you accept this premise (there is also a broader sense of “rational” which is an ideological position rather than a philosophical methodology, but that’s definitely not what I mean here). Whether you accept that premise is your decision and has to based on some criteria outside rationalism. You might be able to derive the truth of a premise from another deduction, but that’s just displacing the problem. Sooner or later you’ll either run out of road or end up with a circular argument. For this reason, I see rationalism (in a strict philosophical sense) as inherently contingent and anti-foundational: it always begins with if (for anyone interested in computer programming, the if block is a good analogy here).
Any posts in which I make claims about the reality of the past should be taken as rational deductions, in which the epistemological claims of traditional empiricism are the premise (unless I state otherwise). You don’t have to accept that premise, but if you do accept it you will still need to approach my writing critically. I include empirical apparatus such as references in order to encourage criticism rather than deflect it. If you believe something just because of a footnote or the reputation of the author, you aren’t being suspicious enough. Couldn’t it be suggested that readers rather than authors are responsible for the truth effect?
Sooner or later I’ll be writing more posts describing some of the problems of knowledge and meaning in more detail (and perhaps making some batshit crazy speculations about how those problems might be overcome in the future). For now, I’ve said enough to be able to go back to writing about interesting things that (might have) happened in the past.
