6. WHY WE NEED TO MOVE FROM TRUTH‐FUNCTIONALITY TO PERFORMATIVITY IN HISTORIOGRAPHY

The central challenge of the philosophy of history and historiography is to find a principled way to rank different interpretations of the past without assuming their truth in terms of correspondence. The narrativist insight of the narrative philosophy of historiography was to correctly question historical realism. It analyzed texts and showed that they cannot reflect the past as it is. However, the rejection of the truth‐functional evaluation threatens to lead to an “anything goes” approach in terms of cognitive evaluation of historiography. In any case, no adequate theory of evaluation has so far been developed, although clearly not all historiographical interpretations are acceptable. Postnarrativist philosophy of historiography suggests that any history book includes a content‐synthesizing unit, but that it is problematic to think that it is “narrative” that structures texts. It is better to think of historiography texts as presenting reasoning for views and theses about the past. Arguments for these theses should be considered not as being true but as more or less appropriate, fitting, or warranted. The historian aims to produce as highly rationally warranted and compelling a thesis of the past as possible; its rational appropriateness depends on three dimensions of cognitive evaluation: the epistemic, the rhetorical, and the discursive.     

历史事实:史学家建构过去的图景

中外历史哲学界对“历史事实”存在严重的争论,主要问题是关于历史事实的应用范围与含义上的分歧。其实,“历史事实”只能限制在历史认识论的范围内才有意义,而历史事实与史料中的事实也不能等同。从历史学家与“历史事实”的关系来看,历史事实依历史学家的存在而存在,“历史事实”是史学家建立的关于过去的图景,是一个关于过去历史实际的知识体系。     

20世纪西方分析或批判的历史哲学

分析或批判的历史哲学的兴起,一方面批判了思辨的历史哲学,另一方面将历史哲学研究的重点从解释历史的性质转移到解释历史知识的性质上来。这极大地推进了史学理论的发展,也为历史学确立了更为稳固的根基。德国历史哲学家狄尔泰、文德尔班、李凯尔特继承德国历史主义传统,从文化科学与自然科学相异的角度来分析历史知识的性质;克罗齐、柯林武德也遵循了这个传统。分析学派罗素、波普尔、亨佩尔等人,则从语言逻辑的角度来分析理解历史的方式和历史知识的可能性。这两个方向共同构成了20世纪西方历史哲学的主流,进一步深化了人们对自我的认识。     

HARTOG,KOSELLECK, AND RICOEUR: HISTORICAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE CRISIS OF THE PRESENT

I enquire here into whether historical anthropology may serve to orient the critique of modes of temporalization under the conditions specific to what François Hartog designates as the contemporary regime of historicity. To this end, I bring Hartog into conversation with Paul Ricoeur: both arrive at a diagnosis of the crisis of the present on the basis of a parallel interiorization of the metahistorical categories of Reinhart Koselleck. Sharing a common interlocutor, the diagnoses at which they arrive are nevertheless quite different in nature, a result of the way in which these categories are inflected alternatively toward the anthropological perspective of fundamental temporalization and the semantic perspective of articulation at the level of “orders of time.” I suggest that the crisis of the present eludes the grasp of both and, with a view to gaining a more secure critical purchase over this crisis, propose a framework for bringing them into conversation.     

RESEARCH,NARRATIVE, AND REPRESENTATION: A POSTNARRATIVE APPROACH

Narrativism or representationalism is founded on the idea that historical narratives and representations are 1) true and indivisible wholes, whereof 2) the truth needs to be maintained, although a narrativist or representationalist whole cannot be confirmed or disconfirmed, and wherein 3) the past is represented in a figurative sense. These fundamental aspects of narrativism have had a positive impact on historiography, but they are also the three reasons why narrativism has neglected historical research and argumentation. To remedy these problems postnarrativism has been evoked. It opts for presentation instead of representation, cutting through all the links between the past and the historiographical product. The product is not a narrative or a representation but a thesis, a proposal to see the past in a special way. The only element postnarrativism wants to retain of narrativism is colligation because it has an argumentative structure based on epistemic values. Postnarrativism leads to knowledge, built on the practice of warranted assertions instead of truth. My postnarrativism chooses a middle course between a strong narrativism and what I would like to call a “weak,” presentational postnarrativism. I agree with postnarrativists that more attention must be paid to argumentation and research. Moreover, I consider time a neglected issue in narrativism. Nevertheless, I don't want to give up the three above‐mentioned fundamental aspects of it. In my view the assumption of truth with regard to (figurative) representation needs to be maintained, but in a pragmatic, provisional form: a historical narrative or representation can be considered as true as long as it has not been replaced by a better one. Retaining truth and holism, but wanting more room for investigation and argumentation, requires that narrativism's role in historical research and history‐writing be revised. This implies the replacement of the usual research phase by a preparation phase, wherein, next to research, space must be reserved for so‐called writing activities. Preparation means the conversion of a germinal narrative or representation into an accomplished whole. Holism occurs in two representational forms: a narrative and a representation. In both forms, research concepts and the associated temporalities become visible under the surface of the narrativist or representational superstructure.     

HISTORY AND THE MANIFEST IMAGE: HAYDEN WHITE AS A PHILOSOPHER OF HISTORY1

To claim that Hayden White has yet to be read seriously as a philosopher of history might seem false on the face of it. But do tropes and the rest provide any epistemic rationale for differing representations of historical events found in histories? As an explanation of White's influence on philosophy of history, such a proffered emphasis only generates a puzzle with regard to taking White seriously, and not an answer to the question of why his efforts should be worthy of any philosophical attention at all. For what makes his emphasis on narrative structure and its associated tropes of philosophical relevance? What, it may well be asked, did (or could) any theory that draws its categories from a stock provided by literary criticism contribute to explicating problems with regard to the warranting of claims about knowledge, explanation, or causation that represent those concerns that philosophy typically brings to this field? Robert Doran's anthologizing of previously uncollected pieces, ranging as they do over a literal half‐century of White's published work, offers an opportunity to identify explicitly those philosophical themes and arguments that regularly and prominently feature there. Moreover, White's essays in this volume demonstrate a credible knowledge of and interest in mainstream analytic philosophers of his era and also reveal White as deeply influenced by or well acquainted with other important philosophers of history. White thus invites a reading of his work as philosophy, and this volume presents the opportunity for accepting it as such.     

1. DECOLONIZING HISTORIES IN THEORY AND PRACTICE: AN INTRODUCTION

This is a reflection on the close relations of the writing of postcolonial histories and recent decolonial critiques, and on the tensions between them. Postcolonial historical analysis often has been preoccupied with hybridity and mixture, conjugation and adaptation, exchange and interaction—with subversions of sovereignty in contact zones, borderlands, and on the beach. As a structuralist formulation, decolonial historical binarism in contrast echoes Indigenous politics of self-determination, even suggesting at times an ontological decoupling of settler and Indigenous histories and practices. Stringent decolonization of historical inquiry—implying the sabotage and superseding of settler colonial linguistic, narrative, and temporal conventions and the disturbing of standardized assumptions about evidence, agency, and authorship—would give us an epistemic assemblage perhaps not recognizable as “history.” Even if desirable, is that imaginable now except as metaphor or ideal?     

1. TIMES OF THE EVENT: AN INTRODUCTION

This introduction sets the stage for the following contributions by outlining the current state of research on the two fundamental categories that this forum brings together: the event and time. In a brief survey, we discuss the ways in which the temporality of events has been theorized across disciplines. We also present our core argument for understanding the event as a temporal focal point. In dialogue with existing approaches, we seek to develop a theoretically enriched and empirically fruitful conceptualization of the event, thus offering new perspectives to the academic historiography of events as well as to historical culture at large.     

4. THE GADAMERIAN APPROACH TO THE RELATION BETWEEN EXPERIENCE AND LANGUAGE

Narrativism as a theory of historical depiction intuitively opens the question: what is left of reality when it is poured through the filter of language structures? And, extended a little bit further, questions arise: What is responsible for the final shape of a historical depiction? Is it experience or language? What is affecting what? Narrativism typically accuses language units of transforming experience in a specific way. However, even in asking these questions, the problem of the separation of experience from language and language from experience remains. In this article, I address this issue using Gadamer's hermeneutical frame. Wherever philosophical tradition insists on the separation of certain positions, Gadamer tries to show their ontological connections. For Gadamer, understanding is a basic ontological structure, within which both sides of a dialogue affect and constitute each other. In Gadamerian hermeneutical ontology, there is no “starting point” or first responsible position. In the understanding, dialogue has the permanently moving character of a play, where separate positions are erased. This Gadamerian view can also be applied to the question of language and experience and their mutual connection in depicting any experience via language. In Gadamer's example of the work of art, the original subject matter (Urbild) is articulated through its depiction. The subject matter dictates possible ways of depicting, which in turn dictate the final shape of depiction. In this article, I discuss Gadamer's term “articulation of the world,” by which he means a function of language. Articulation is simply a transformation of shapeless matter into a shape, and in our case it is a transformation of an experience into a language depiction. I show that the Gadamerian approach to language and experience can offer an interesting perspective on the issues discussed in reaction to narrativist philosophy of history.     

1. INTRODUCTION: MULTIPLE TIMES AND THE WORK OF SYNCHRONIZATION

In this essay, which introduces the History and Theory forum on Multiple Temporalities, I want to discuss how the existence of a plurality or a multiplicity of times has been conceptualized in the historiographical tradition, partly by entering into a dialogue with recent writers, historians, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, and literary scholars, partly by returning to the eighteenth century, to the origin of “the modern regime of historicity” (Hartog). In these theoretical and historical investigations I aim to do two things: on the one hand, to explore and discuss different ways of conceptualizing multiple times, in terms of nonsynchronicities, layers of time, or natural and historical times; on the other hand, to trace how these multiple times have been compared, unified, and adapted by means of elaborate conceptual and material practices that I here call “practices of synchronization.” From the eighteenth century onward, these synchronizing practices, inspired by, but by no means reducible to, chronology have given rise to homogeneous, linear, and teleological time, often identified as modern time per se, or simply referred to as “progress.” In focusing on the practices of synchronization, however, I want to show how this regime of temporality during its entire existence, but especially at the moment of its emergence in the eighteenth century and at the present moment of its possible collapse, has been challenged by other times, other temporalities, slower, faster, with other rhythms, other successions of events, other narratives, and so on.     

THE CRITICAL THEORY OF HISTORY: RETHINKING THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY IN THE LIGHT OF KOSELLECK'S WORK

There are many ways to consider the philosophy of history. In this article, I claim that one of the most viable approaches to the philosophy of history today is that of critical theory of history, inspired by Reinhart Koselleck. Critical theory of history is based on what I call known history, history as it has been established and expounded by historians. What it contributes—its added value, so to speak—is a reflection on the categories employed to think about historical experience at its different levels, not only as a narrative but also as a series of events: their origins, contexts, terminology, functions (theoretical or practical), and, finally, eventual relevance.     

PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY AFTER 1945: A BIBLIOMETRIC STUDY

Much has been said about what philosophy of history should be. This bibliometric assessment of research in the philosophy of history examines what scholars in this field have actually produced. The study covers a dataset—a subsection of the bibliography of the International Network for Theory of History—of 13,953 books, articles, book chapters, dissertations, and other scholarly publications, encompassing materials written in seven different languages published between 1945 and 2014. This material was classified according to a multilayered system of taxonomy consisting of keywords representative of themes discussed in the field. Separate quantitative analyses were made to elucidate characteristics about the publication outputs in the field in the different language groups. Changes in paradigm, often referred to as “turns” or “trends,” have been mapped in this study, according to a quantitative analysis of the most recurrent keywords within a five‐year interval, which give an indication of the most debated themes in each period. ?Religion/theology/secularization? is the most frequent keyword during the period 1945 to 1969, followed by ?Marxism/historical‐materialism?¹ from 1970 to 1984, in what can be considered a second period of the field. Although many of the key publications of the linguistic turn were written within this second period, our dataset shows that it is not until the third period (1985–2014) that their writing goes on to influence other authors in the field.     

History of Psychology in China: Contributions,Challenges, and Future

The history of psychology makes three major contributions:(1) promoting the development of psychology in China;(2) establishing the history of Chinese psychology as an academic discipline;(3) playing an important role in training the next generation of Chinese psychologists.This effort faces numerous challenges,including the reduction in undergraduate teaching hours,declining enrolments at the postgraduate level,limited innovation in research,and a lack of financial support.These challenges stem largely from changes in the Chinese academic assessing system,the greater weight placed on experimental psychology,and a fewer opportunities for researchers.To address these concerns the history of psychology in China should make the history of Chinese psychology its research priority,while also presenting its findings to the public,and developing innovative teaching and research approaches.     

An Epistemology of Scientific Practice: Positioning Hans-Jörg Rheinberger in Twentieth-Century History and Philosophy of Biology**

In this article, I first outline the professionalization of the history and philosophy of biology from the 1960s onward. Then, I attempt to situate the work of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger with respect to this field. On the one hand, Rheinberger was marginal with respect to Anglo-American philosophical tradition; on the other, he was very influential in building up an integrated history and philosophy of the life sciences community at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and beyond. This marginality results, I suggest, from three main sources: his use of concepts coming from continental traditions in the study of the life sciences, which are foreign to Anglo-American philosophers of science; his focus on practices instead of theories; and his research trajectory as a molecular biologist, which led him to be critical of disciplinary boundaries. As a first step in situating and historicizing Rheinberger's trajectory, this article invites comparative studies and calls for a history of “continental philosophy of biology” in the twentieth century.     

FUTURE BY HISTORY: RETHINKING PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Philosophy of history has a threefold dimension: material, formal, and functional, which have largely been conceptualized as mutually exclusive. It is high time to mediate them into a coherent relationship, and Rohbeck's book is a decisive step toward such a new philosophy of history. The book is divided into three parts: the first deals with the relationship between history and the future, the second analyzes the relationship between history and ethics, and the third synthesizes these two aspects into a pragmatics of history. With regard to the first part, historical thinking is based on a perception of temporal otherness related to the past. Rohbeck prolongs the time perspective by bridging this time gap into the future. As to the second, Rohbeck replaces teleology by ethics. Teleology includes ethics but limits its scope to a one‐sided development. Ethics allows many more options. Finally, who is the agent for historical ethics? Rohbeck proposes the “generation” as the basic actor in historical change and the addressee of ethical commitment. At the end of his work, Rohbeck draws consequences for the idea of philosophy of history from his idea of historical ethics. He shows that history has a new perspective if it is viewed through the lens of ethical elements in the fundamental relationship between past, present, and future. Of course, many questions follow this fascinating new version of the old philosophy of history. I raise only three of them: (1) What synthesizes the three dimensions of time into one and the same history? (2) Did we not learn from historicism that values in ethics have an inbuilt temporality? This argument does not run against the idea of an ethics of history, but should sharpen its genuine historical character. (3) Who is the agent of this change: who brings it about and at the same is subjected to it? An anonymous sum of generations in space and time is not a convincing answer. We need an integrative idea that covers the vast field of experience of the human world in space and time and that covers the strong commitment to universal values. In this respect it would be worthwhile to pick up the idea of humankind as it was conceptualized as the red thread of history in traditional, modern philosophy of history.     

STORY MAKES HISTORY,THEORY MAKES STORY: DEVELOPING RÜSEN'S HISTORIK IN LOGICAL AND SEMIOTIC DIRECTIONS

This essay will argue that the traditional opposition between narrative and theory in historical sciences is dissolved if we conceive of narratives as theoretical devices for understanding events in time through special concepts that abridge typical sequences of events. I shall stress, in the context of the Historical Knowledge Epistemological Square (HKES) that emerged with the scientization of history, that history is always narrative, story has a theoretical ground of itself, and scientific histories address the need for a conceptual progression in ever‐improved narratives. This will lead to identification of three major theoretical levels in historical stories: naming, plotting (or emplotment), and formalizing. We revisit Jörn Rüsen's theory of history as the best starting point, and explore to what extent it could be developed by (i) taking a deeper look into narratological knowledge, and (ii) reanalyzing logically the conceptual strata in order to bridge the overrated Forschung/Darstellung (research/exposition) divide. The corollary: we should consider (scientific) historical writing as the last step of historical research, not as the next step after research is over. This thesis will drive us to a reconsideration of the German Historik regarding the problem of interpretation and exposition. Far from alienating history from science, narrative links history positively to anthropology and biology. The crossing of our triad name‐plot‐model with Rüsen's four theoretical levels (categories‐types‐concepts‐names) points to the feasibility of expanding Rüsen's Historik in logical and semiotic directions. Story makes history, theory makes story, and historical reason may proceed.