Historiographic Reasoning

This Element argues that historiographic reasoning is sui generis, unique to the historical sciences.

Aviezer Tucker (Author)

9781009324502, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 30 January 2025

78 pages
22.8 x 15.1 x 0.5 cm, 0.13 kg

Historiographic reasoning from evidentiary inputs is sui generis. Historiography is neither empirical, nor self-knowledge, nor a genre of fiction or ideology. Historiographic reasoning is irreducible to general scientific or social science reasoning. The book applies Bayesian insights to explicate historiographic reasoning as probable. It distinguishes epistemic transmission of knowledge from evidence from the generation of detailed historiographic knowledge from multiple coherent and independent evidentiary inputs in three modular stages. A history of historiographic reasoning since the late 18th century demonstrates that there was a historiographic scientific revolution across the historical sciences in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The underdetermination of historiography by the evidence, counterfactual historiographic reasoning, and false reasoning and other fallacies are further explained and discussed in terms of the probabilistic relations between the evidence and historiography.

1. Historiographic reason: an introduction
2. 'Empiricist' historiography without reasoning
3. Historiography as self-knowledge without reason
4. Unreasonable historiography: fiction and ideology
5. Historiographic reasoning in unified science
6. Historiographic reasoning as social science
7. Bayesian foundations of historiographic reasoning
8. Transmission vs. Generation of historiographic knowledge
9. Generative historiographic reasoning in three stages
10. History of historiographic reasoning
11. Underdetermination: the limits of historiographic reasoning
12. Counterfactual historiographic reasoning
13. Historiographic reasoning in contexts
14. Invalid and false historiographic reasoning
15. Conclusion: the historical sciences
References.

Subject Areas: History: theory & methods [HBA]