Review of Jonathan Gorman, Historical Judgement: The Limits of Historiographical Choice (original) (raw)

Postmodernism and The Nature of History

I focus in this paper on some recent exchanges between postmodern and empirical historians and argue that the significance of the debate has been misunderstood. In particular, I attempt to show that although there are real differences between them -not least in the importance accorded to values in the creation of historical knowledge -both sides nevertheless share a common epistemological base and that this calls into question the radicality of the postmodern challenge to mainstream historiography.

The Poverty of Anti-Realism. Critical Perspectives on Postmodernist Philosophy of History

Due to the influence of postmodernism, historical anti-realism has come to exercise a massive influence in contemporary philosophy of history. Edited by Tor Egil Førland and Branko Mitrović, The Povery of Anti-realism: Critical Perspectives on Postmodernist Philosophy of History presents perspectives that oppose anti-realist understanding of historians' work. The first part of the book gives an overview of contemporary anti-realist philosophy of history and shows that its claims are either so wide-ranging that they apply to all scientific knowledge, or pertain only to a select part of historians’ work. In the second part, the authors criticize major anti-realist tenets. These include: the assertion that the colligatory concepts historians use are without reference in the past; the idea that historical facts are theory-dependent and therefore unable to upend prevailing theories; Paul Roth’s application of Nelson Goodman’s “irrealist” theory of worldmaking to suggest a plurality of pasts; and the belief that multiple describability prevents historians from providing true and testable accounts of the past. The third and final part shows that the political implications of anti-realism are often other than left-leaning anti-realists think. Their reactions when confronted with the consequences of their theories indicate the inconsistency and untenability of postmodernist philosophy of history. The open access for this book was funded by the University of Oslo. Open Access content has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) license.

A New Philosophy of History? Reflections on Postmodern Historicizing

History and Theory, 1997

It may be just as unfair to judge a book by its title as by its cover, but A New Philosophy of History raises expectations which the editors of this collection of essays cannot, and perhaps never intended to fulfill. The editorial introduction by Hans Kellner ("Describing Redescriptions") modestly redefines the content and purpose of the volume as a taking stock of the "redescriptions" of reflection on history (historical theory) and writing about history (historiography), that have occurred in the past quarter century within the Anglo-American academic world. These redescriptions, he suggests, involved a wideranging shift in focus. Evaluations of historical writings according to scientific models which emphasized the empirical verifiability of specific statements and the logical viability of explanations (arguments of cause and effect), and in which language was perceived "as something to be looked through," were replaced by models drawn from rhetoric and poetics. The latter models emphasized the linguistic/textual density of historical works, in which language was "something to be looked at," and which presented issues of authority or credibility in terms of genre conventions and the subjective "expectations and be-

Postmodernist Approach to the Discipline of History

The postmodernist approach to history is one of the least known modes of historical writing among historians and history educators. Aiming to enhance historians' and history educators' understanding of the postmodern challenge to the discipline of history, this article first presents an overview of the basic features of history and its historical trajectory as a discipline. It then explains postmodernist historiography's conceptual underpinnings, methods, principal concepts, and ideological positions. It also maps out the key debates, criticisms, and arguments that historians of different historical orientations engaged in.

Post-Modernism in History

What have postmodernist writings added to the study of history? "Language, culture, ritual, politics". Has postmodernism discovered less that is new about the past than its advocates suggest? This essay will seek to analyse to which extent postmodern thought has influenced and changed our concept of history and historiography. Its philosophical and methodological tenets seem to have given new forms to the work of the historian. The very conceptualisation of history has slowly shifted from an objective, empirical science to a discipline as flexible as language and culture are, inextricably subdued to them and, for this reason, thoroughly pluralistic and subjective. This work will analyse and list the main themes that have contributed to such a radical change in the historical vision of what we call 'reality': from the well-known incredulity towards metanarratives to the renewed importance of text, the influence of the relation between power and knowledge on history, the belief in microhistory and the metahistorical emplotment, the conception of time and, ultimately, the new urge for an interdisciplinary approach.

Whither history? Encounters with historicism, postmodernism, postcolonialism

Futures, 2002

Postmodernist questioning of historians' claims to historical truth has created a sense of crisis in historical consciousness. The essay argues that the crisis is not a crisis in the writing of history, as most historians still continue with business as usual, but a crisis in the cultural meaning of history. While this crisis has been associated with the so-called "linguistic turn" which was to result in a paradigm shift in historiography in the 1970s, it has other important dimensions; including Third World questionings of EuroAmerican understandings of the past and, perhaps even more importantly, the intrusion into the representations of the past of the new media. The essay argues that new kinds of history that have appeared since the 1970s from women's history to the history of social movements to "microhistory" have themselves contributed to the complication of our understanding of the past, and what might be called postmodernity's histories. It suggests that historians have always assumed the tentativeness and contingency of claims to historical truth, and argues against a premature panic concerning the status of history. Constructivism is here to stay, but that does not necessarily point to the disappearance of history, only to more complicated ways of grasping the past.  2001 (A. Dirlik). 0016-3287/01/$ -see front matter  2001 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. PII: S 0 0 1 6 -3 2 8 7 ( 01 )0 0 0 3 6 -2 1 These challenges, their implications for history, and the methodological questions they raise, have been discussed in a number of excellent collections. For prominent examples, see, [2-5]. Novick provides interesting discussions of the impact of the new developments on historians on the US [6]. References 7 and 8 offer important discussions of the relationship between post-structuralism and history. The most extensive, if only partially successful, defense of history against postmodernisms is to be found in [9].

Postnarrativist Philosophy of Historiography

Postnarrativist Philosophy of Historiography argues that narrativism has made important contributions to the theory and philosophy of historiography but that it is now time to move beyond it to postnarrativism. Much of the theorizing of historiography has focused on defending either absolutist historical realism or relativist postmodernism. Kuukkanen shows how it is possible to reject the truth-functional evaluation of interpretations and yet accept that historiography can be assessed by rational standards. The postnarrativist view maintains that studies of history are informal arguments for theses about the past and that they are always located somewhere between subjectivity and objectivity.