Abstract

The widespread influence of skeptical and relativist philosophies has led to an abandonment of empiricist accounts of objectivity in historical investigation. Can one do justice to the historical conditionedness of the historian without totally denying objectivity in historical judgments? This article introduces Bernard Lonergan's answer to this question. Lonergan contends that one can avoid both the Scylla of naive empiricism, fostering the myth of some simple backward gaze at the facts of the past, and the Charybdis of total relativism. He proposes a form of perspectivism which, he believes, does justice both to the belief of the majority of working historians that they are gradually increasing our knowledge of the past, and to the points brought out by writers on historiography, such as the "metahistorians," concerning the impossibility of ascending to some god's-eye view of the historical process.Lonergan's perspectivist position is built upon a prior philosophical account of cognition and epistemology, which I outline here. I will then move on to some immediate concerns of working historians, such as value judgments in history, the relationship of historical data to the facts the historian claims to know, and the criteria of selection used by the community of historians. In treating these issues I will highlight some of the areas of convergence and divergence between Lonergan's work and that of other philosophers and historians who have written on historiography