Abstract

Through both a conceptual analysis of historical evidence in general, and a specific study of Thucydides' evidence on the Peloponnesian war, the structure of justification of historical knowledge is described and evaluated. The justification is internal in the sense of being done entirely within a network of evidential and descriptive claims about the past. This forces a coherence form of justification in which the telling epistemic standards are eliminative, indicators of what is not likely to be true rather than what is. The epistemological contrast is between justification by coherence among historical claims, or by appeal to epistemic foundations. Any evidential claim in history that is informative and credible must itself be justified in the context of other things known about the past. Thus, the evidence used to support historical claims is neither foundational nor a direct report on the facts of the past, and an appeal to evidence is itself an appeal to coherence