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is just that lack of peculiar spatio-temporal location that makes them knowable.
I don't think so.
the truths which science discovers are known to be true by being found through observation and experiment exemplified in what we actually perceive,
Not at all, they are conjectured truths like those of history
This is not a mere conjecture. We can see the thing happening. The man in whom it happened was Thucydides.
Question begging. How do we know?
‘scissors-and-paste’ historical method.
Cut and paste would be the phrase to use now.
The historian’s business is to know the past, not to know the future; and whenever historians claim to be able to determine the future in advance of its happening, we may know with certainty that something has gone wrong with their fundamental conception of history.
Surprised that this Author rejects historicusm…·
If it could be remembered, there would be no need of historians.
Memory is not reliablr
History is a kind of knowledge in which questions about ideas and questions about facts are not distinguishable;
Why would we not concern ourselves with historical truth rather than beliefs about history?
he showed that these similar periods tended to recur in the same order.
There is no such historical cycle
In history, the word ‘fact’ bears a very different meaning.
Not at all scientific knowledge is entirely conjectual and is never deducible from mere direct perception.
The great merit of studying our subject historically is that it enables us to make this distinction with certainty.
How can one know anything with certainty?
‘Critical history’, then, ‘must have a criterion’; and it is clear that the criterion can only be the historian himself.
That would be a compmetely arbitrary criterion. The correct criterion would be a methodological rule or principle.
we should think ourselves entitled to believe in its reality only when we had verified it by ‘the most careful examination often repeated’.
We should reject all verificationalism and reject the false principle of induction.
for if so, his judgement cannot be to me the same as my own;
What makes yourcown judgment free of cognitive bias?
history, which is the mind’s knowledge of itself, is ruled out as impossible. This
History is part of the objectivecreal world, not vthe mind's knowledge of itself.
When one searches its literature for any discussion, however slight, of the problems of history, the result is astonishing in its meagreness.
Echoed in the title of Popper's book, the poverty of historicism
is therefore about as useful to the modern reader as would be a discussion of physics in which no mention was made of relativity.
Or a discussuon of historicism without mentioning Popper
He cannot answer this question, for he sees that it is a philosophical one and realizes that it lies, therefore, outside his competence.
An appeal to authority? Why is philosophy a xistinct area of thought inccesible to universal reason?
because a knowledge where the knower can never say ‘I know’ is not knowledge at all)
Knowledge does not requkre a knower
Philosophy is the attempt to conceive reality not in any particular way, but just to conceive it.
Yes, i agree
History is not a series but a world: which means that its various parts bear upon one another, criticize one another, make one another intelligible.
Our history is a particular history in the multiverse
like all real ideas
Real ideas?
but by transforming the old ideas in the light of the new.
History is the search for better explanations of the past
There is no past, except for a person involved in the historical mode of experience;
That is a step too far
The only question that matters about a philosophy is whether it is right or wrong.
Yes
To quote Oakeshott again, the word ‘truth’ has no meaning for the historian unless it means ‘what the evidence obliges us to believe’.
Truth has nothing to do with beliefs but about whether a statement corresponds to to reality
Croce puts this by saying that art in general, in the wide sense, represents or narrates the possible; history represents or narrates that which has really happened.
The possible and the real are the same thing.
art as the narration of the possible.
Why does art need to concern nitself witg the possible
In other words, all reality is history and all knowledge is historical knowledge.
That is an absurdity
natural science is not knowledge at all, but action. He
On the contrary, science is the wellspring of most of our knowledge
Science is a cutting-up and rearranging of materials which must be given to it at the start;
That is positivism
For history is not contained in books or documents;
That is where we find most historical knowledge.
There were also great sculptors; but this we do not merely believe, we know it; for we possess their works and can make them part of our own present aesthetic
Yes, but we don't know for certain, we don't know anything for certain.
they are going beyond what the evidence proves and
That is positivism
all it permits the historian to assert is what the evidence before him obliges him to assert.
Extreme positivism.
we begin by getting acquainted with the particular things and particular events that exist and go on there; then we proceed to understand them, by seeing how they fall into general types and how these general types are interrelated. These
No that is inductivism. We begin with conjecture.
the collection of observed facts and their arrangement in classificatory schemes. His
Inductivism
its ‘only solid foundation’, he wrote, ‘must be laid on experience and observation’. Reid,
The mistake of empiricism
so among ourselves the success of history has led some people to suggest that its methods are applicable to all the problems of knowledge, in other words, that all reality is historical.
As opposed to physical?
I shall contend that the work which was to be done by the science of human nature is actually done, and can only be done, by history:
The human mind is a product of the natural history of pur species, the subject of evolutionary history.
When Hegel said that nature has no history, he meant that whereas the specific forms of human organization change as time goes on, the forms of natural organization do not.
Evolution?
but this development is only a logical one, not a temporal, and in time all the ‘strata’ of nature exist simultaneously.
Primitive tribes exist contemporaneously with western liberal democracies.
When he knows what happened, he already knows why it happened.
Why wod that be true? Like thee scientist, the historian is looking for the correct explanation.
This at least is certain: that, so far as our scientific and historical knowledge goes, the processes of events which constitute the world of nature are altogether different in kind from the processes of thought which constitute the world of history.
Nothing is certain, but particularly not that.
This is an eternal object because it can be apprehended by historical thought at any time; time makes no difference to it in this respect,
Neither the historical fact nor the triangle are necessary. There are worlds in which Rome did not develop in that way.
it is an activity of thought, which can be known only in so far as the knowing mind re-enacts it and knows itself as so doing. To the historian, the activities whose history
We cannot theorize about the mental events of individuals living in the past without a universifiable theory of human mental life.
whenever he finds certain historical matters unintelligible, he has discovered a limitation of his own mind;
No, a problem with a current theory, not a limitation of human reason which has no limit.
Certain historians, sometimes whole generations of historians, find in certain periods of history nothing intelligible, and call them dark ages;
They are right. A dark ahe is when thed growth in human knowledge has stalled.
It is only by historical thinking that I can discover what I thought ten years ago, by reading what I then wrote, or what I thought five minutes ago, by reflecting on an action that I then did, which surprised me when I realized what I had done.
Split brain research showss that we are not always aware ourselves why we reason a certain way.
The mental scientist, believing in the universal and therefore unalterable truth of his conclusions, thinks that the account he gives of mind holds good of all future stages in mind’s history:
Yes, the human mind is a universal explanation machine and universal simulator
The historian has no gift of prophecy, and knows it;
It isn't prophecy. It is a conjecture about the properties of people
