Abstract

This study takes its shape around two fundamentally opposed ways of understanding the discipline of history. The one regards historical inquiry as capable of discovering "what really happened" in the human past and considers historical truth to be a matter of the correspondence between historical accounts and the past as it actually was. The other regards historical inquiry as actually constructing the human past by its methods of interpreting evidence and considers historical truth to be a matter of the internal coherence of historical accounts and their compatibility with the evidence upon which they are based. My thesis is that neither the "Discovery Theory" nor the "Construction Theory" offers a satisfactory analysis of history. I offer an alternate theory which regards the concepts of correspondence and coherence as complementary and mutually necessary to such an analysis. ;The primary material of this study is to be found in two recent books, Jack Meiland's Scepticism and Historical Knowledge and Leon Goldstein's Historical Knowing , which attempt systematically to defend a Construction Theory of history. These two defenses are particularly interesting because they are grounded in very different epistemological orientations. Meiland approaches the subject from a logical positivist point of view; Goldstein takes a perspective an idealist or phenomenologist would appreciate. ;I begin in Chapter 1 with a brief historical sketch of the way the Construction Theory has evolved out of criticisms of the Discovery Theory. In Chapter 2 I argue against Meiland's claim that there cannot be present evidence of past events. Here I consider the nature and the role of general correlation principles in history. In Chapter 3 I argue against Meiland's use of the positivist Verifiability Criterion to prove that historical statements are meaningless. My claim is that historical statements are indirectly verifiable in principle. In Chapter 4 I develop Goldstein's theory of historical verification and support his view that the concept of coherence plays the major role in this process. In Chapter 5 I argue against Goldstein's theory of historical reference and develop the claim that verified historical statements must be regarded as referring to the past. In Chapter 6 I return to Meland in order to consider the relevance of the concept of correspondence to the analysis of historical reference. ;In Chapter 7 I attempt to define the middle ground between the two theories by developing the idea of historical truth. I argue that the concept of coherence is an indispensable part of the analysis of historical verification, that the concept of correspondence is indispensable to the understanding of historical reference, and that both are involved in the notion of historical meaningfulness