The Idea of History

by R.G. Collingwood

Not the least of the errors contained in the science of human nature is its claim to establish a framework to which all future history must conform,

See Popper, the myth of the framework

Historical thought studies mind as acting in certain determinate ways in certain determinate situations.

Mind is indeterminate because knowedge creation is indeterminate

But any study of mind is a study of its activities;

The mind is a machine, a universal Turing machine, a classical computer

Perception is part of the empirical testing, not the theory formation part of science.

historical knowledge is not perception, it is the discerning of the thought which is the inner side

Science is not perception either.

The historian, when he is ready to hand over such a fact to the mental scientist as a datum for generalization,

That is induction and therefore invalid

The behaviour-patterns characteristic of a feudal baron were no doubt fairly constant so long as there were feudal barons living in a feudal society.

There would be no knowledge creation or progress if the behavior was determined completely

would follow that the ways of thinking characteristic of any given historical period are ways in which people must think then, but in which others, cast at different times in a different mental mould, cannot think at all.

Living organisms exist tbat are living fossils alongside highly adapted distant relatives

that were the case, there would be no such thing as truth: according to the inference correctly drawn by Herbert Spencer, what we take for knowledge is merely the fashion of present-day thought, not true but at the most useful in our struggle for existence.

Some knowledge is closer to tge truth than other knowledge

The body of human thought or mental activity is a corporate possession, and almost all the operations which our minds perform are operations which we learned to perform from others who have performed them already.

Wevgain most of our knowledge fromreading books

The idea that man, apart from his self-conscious historical life, is different from the rest of creation in being a rational animal is a mere superstition.

Another animal,perhaps okn asnother planet, possessing universal knowledge creation behaviour wouldx be a person, but the onlyg examples we haved are the one, homo sapiens

The self-knowledge of reason is not an accident; it belongs to its essence.

Aristotelian essentialism

a priori imagination

Statements from the imagination are not purely analytic, they have content

since it does not now exist,

The past exists as much as the present from the perspective of physics

so there are properly speaking no data.

No, it is all data

But there is only one historical world, and everything in it must stand in some relation to everything else, even if that relation is only topographical and chronological.

The many worlds theory of quantum mechanics did not exist

what we mean by asking whether an historical statement is true is whether it can be justified by an appeal to the evidence: for a truth unable to be so justified is to the historian a thing of no interest.

Positivism

A meteorologist studies one cyclone in order to compare it with others; and by studying a number of them he hopes to find out what features in them are constant, that is, to find out what cyclones as such are like.

That would be induction

Take away Christian theology, and the scientist has no longer any motive for doing what inductive thought gives him permission to do.

So is Christian theology the justification for.inductive reasoning.

It had been a commonplace ever since Bacon that a natural science began by collecting facts, and then went on to construct theories, that is, to extrapolate the patterns discernible in the facts already collected.

That's bad inductive science

To ask questions which you see no prospect of answering is the fundamental sin in science,

Science begins with such questions

Anything is evidence which enables you to answer your question

That is not science, fitting the evidence to a question it can answer

‘Study problems, not periods’.

Good

A mind is not a machine with various functions,

That is exactly what it is

To reject this conclusion means denying that we’ have any right to speak of acts of thought at all, except such as take place in our own minds,

Not even then

so that what he calls thought is in fact just one kind of immediate experience,

He seems to be identifying thought solely as thed activity of the verbal reasoning taking place in the brain

does it follow that the past which can be thus knowingly re-enacted is any past but my own?

Research suggests people are unreliable recllingv even their own memmries accurately

The historian says that these are the facts because that is the way in which he has been taught to think.

Not necessarily, devils are an objectively bad explanation.

he cannot help believing in the devils.

We would all still believe in devils if that was tge case.

that too is only a belief he has accepted in precisely the same way.

No, that belief is the result of critical reflection.

Each is trying to be itself.

No, Aristotle was wrong

an inherent tendency towards the realization of this absolute value: in other words, ‘progress is a law of nature’.

Historicism, Aristotle

by which an average fisherman could catch ten fish on an average day instead of five, this would be called an example of progress.

Human progress would be the development of tge fish trade

But progress is not the replacement of the bad by the good, but of the good by the better.

It is both

shows progress as compared with its predecessor, generates illusions of an easily recognizable type.

It isn't difficult at all

The problem of being comfortable in a medieval cottage is so different from the problem of being comfortable in a modern slum that there is no comparing them;

Not so

The course of our moral life is conditioned by the succession of our desires;

No it isn't

Similarly with any other progress. If we want to abolish capitalism or war, and in doing so not only to destroy them but to bring into existence something better, we must begin by understanding them: seeing what the problems are which our economic or international system succeeds in solving, and how the solution of these is related to the other problems which it fails to solve.

Good, progess is problem solving and it is a ratchet leveragjngv on past problem resolution.