The Logical Structure in the Writing of History

Abstract

This essay consists of three main parts. (1) The first one deals with the problem of the materials of historical knowledge, i.e. reliable documents and artifacts, which are established by a strict historical-critical method. (2) The second part treats how historical knowledge is reconstructed. a) Historical documents serve as data of history, but they themselves are not verified with their original happenings, which are perished at present. b) In writing history, one uses reconstructed statements which are inferred from given documents. If this inference means to find a mere consistent relation between data, then it does not follow that this relation has any means to confirm itself in its correspondence to the original happenings. c) In order to prevent these reconstructed statements from falling into speculative suppositions which have no means of empirical equivalence, one should appeal, at the same time, to the present human knowledge as well as experience, using some laws, generalizations, regularities, ideal types, patterns, which hold to be true. It is natural, however, that to have an empirical equivalence does not mean to have an empirical correspondence to the past original events. (3) The last part has an aim to make some analysis of the reconstruction of past continuities or series of events or the continuant persistence of both parts and partial attributes of an event, because the writing of history has its unique aim to reconstruct not only factual statements of past but also statements concerning continuant past. In short, this essay is merely a partial sketch of “The Logic of Historical Knowledge, ” which I have long pursued.