Allan Megill, Historical Knowledge, Historical Error.

A Contemporary Guide to
Practice. xvi + 288 pp., index. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007. $25
(paper).

Aviezer Tucker

This book presents a commonsensical defence of the practices of professional

historians and what they write against sceptical criticisms and relativist interpretations
of historiography. Megill confronts the reduction of knowledge to power, the claim
that historiography reflects power relations in the present rather than events in the
past. Megill engages historiography’s traditional theoretical critics from a
commonsensical historiographic perspective. He acknowledges the presence of
philosophic responses to the relativistic challenge from epistemology, the philosophy
of science and the philosophy of historiography, but he mentions rather than joins in
the philosophic debate, taking little advantage of the technical and conceptual
sophistication of contemporary philosophy.
Megill recognizes that the absence of interdisciplinary dialogue between
philosophers and historians creates intellectual provincialisms. (161, 166) He
acknowledges that middle of the twentieth century positivist philosophy of
historiography advocated simplistic and impossible ideals of objectivity and
explanation. Yet, instead of endorsing or developing some of the post-positivist
alternatives, Megill presents in the first half of the book a systematic but simple
version of historiographic commonsense, what many historians would conclude about
their activities, if they thought of them carefully and systematically. Consequently,
this is a book directed mostly at other historians, stronger in its pragmatic replies to
relativist challenges than in debating them on their own abstract philosophic level.
Sometimes, lacunae in the philosophic background become apparent, for example, in
asserting a counterfactual account of historiographic causal explanation, but ignoring
much of the relevant literature on causation, most notably how overdetermination
prevents counterfactuals from picking up causes that were not necessary conditions.
The first couple of chapters attempt to distinguish historiography from
memory. Indeed, the Rankean paradigm in historiography was established by the
rejection of memoirs and the adoption of contemporary documents as highly reliable
information preserving forms of evidence, primary sources. Megill argues that the
conflation of historiography with memory reflects piety and tradition, affirming an
identity that precedes the constructed collective memories. Historiography, by
contrast, is critical and founded on the analysis of traces of the past and testimonies.
Megill uses an illuminating as well as entertaining example to illustrate the
distinction, reinterpreting Collingwood’s famous “John Doe” murder investigation.
Collingwood used this detective story plot to illustrate the inference of historiographic
hypotheses from evidence; Megill adds a psychological dimension, analysing the
likely traumatic mental effects of the murder and the extortion that preceded it on the
memories of the protagonists
A more difficult conceptual conflation to disentangle is between
historiography and narrative: Some narratives are historiographic and some of the
final results of historiography are in narrative form. Only some philosophers of
historiography who analysed it as a narrative conflated it with fiction, but all those
who do not distinguish historiography from fiction consider it a form of narrative.
Megill holds that narrative has a cognitive value on a holistic level where even
Braudel can be interpreted as having written narratives, though empirical
historiography has little use for narratives. In my opinion, Leon Goldstein’s
distinction between the superstructure and base of historiography, or the German
distinction between historiography-writing Geschichtsschreibung and historiographic-
research Geschichtsforschung would have been useful here, as historiographic
research has no narrative components, while historiographic writing is often in
narrative form.
Lack of attention to the dimension of historiographic research leads Megill to
analyze textbooks, the cardinal mistake of the old history and philosophy of science
according to Kuhn, concluding that the task of historians is to describe, explain,
justify their descriptions and explanations, and interpret history, in this order. But
historiographic research is the inference of descriptions from evidence. Theory and
evidence must precede then description and explanation. Further, rather than debate
what historians actually do, how do they explain for example, Megill debates what
some historians think of what they are doing, their professional ideology. The same
goes for objectivity. Megill distinguished four senses of objectivity in historiography,
absolute, dialectical, disciplinary and procedural. He acknowledges the existence of a
philosophic discussion of objectivity but no more. He pays greater attention to what
historians think of what they do than to what they actually practice.
Chapter six (co-authored with Steven Shepard and Philip Honenberger) shifts
the focus from textbooks to research. A case study of the relations of the evidence to
hypotheses about the relations between Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally
Hemings concludes that “all historians ought to have a commitment to seeking the
best way of accounting for the totality of the historical evidence, found or findable,
relevant to the particular issue in question, as well as a commitment to conveying to
their readers some sense of the limits of this evidence…. The degree of certainty
attributable to a set of beliefs about the past corresponds to the degree to which
adopting those beliefs would serve to make sense of the totality of the historical
record…” (128) This successful application of the abductive model of reasoning to
historiography makes this the best part of the book, a fruitful application of Paul
Thagard’s criteria for comparing competing explanations, consilience and simplicity.
The last part of the book discusses in vary broad, even vague, terms grand
narratives and “coherence.” Whether there is a single coherent historiography/grand
narrative, and whether it can be known? This discussion does not distinguish
historiographic research from textbooks, interpretation from inference from evidence,
schools (which are most discussed, especially the transition from social to cultural
historiography within Annales) from the general Rankean paradigm.
Historians possess what Polanyi called “tacit knowledge,” like other
professionals they can practice well without quite knowing consciously what they are
doing. This book displays far more intellectual self-knowledge than most theoretical
reflections by historians on their profession, and many philosophical tracts that
display neither tacit nor explicit knowledge of historiography. But to produce an
innovative and fruitful and true theoretical understanding of historiography, of the
kind offered in chapter six, a better familiarity with the conceptual tools, technical
skills, and methods of contemporary philosophy is necessary.