Chapter 4 - What Kinds of Problems Do Historians Solve?

Summary

This chapter addresses some of the classic problems of historical analysis, focusing on the ways in which the intellectual options that the complex history of the discipline can help historians address the challenges those problems pose. It presents a discussion of the problems of objectivity, bias, and judgment in history. It focuses on historians’ necessarily paradoxical yet coherent conception of their own relationship to history – of which they are, according to the logic of the discipline itself, both students and products. It suggests that postmodern theory about the nature of historical knowledge both recapitulates and deepens this fundamental historicist position. It discusses the standards of evidentiary support and of logical argumentation that historians use to evaluate the plausibility and productivity of historical interpretations. Finally, this chapter explores once again the unique pedagogical usefulness of History as a discipline that is irreducibly and necessarily perspectival, interpretive, and focused on standards of inquiry rather than on the production of actionable outcomes.