Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Knowledge acquired by the use of present evidence from which the knower draws conclusions about the past is called historical knowledge. This tripartite conception of historical knowledge – knower, evidence and known – gives rise to a great many problems. In historical knowledge, the object of knowledge is transcendental. That is, we never have experience with past events as past. This makes it impossible to verify directly the conclusions that we reach about the past on the basis of evidence. Bertrand Russell has put the problem in a particularly trenchant way by pointing out that it is possible that there is no past for historical knowledge to be about: “There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that “remembered” a wholly unreal past’ ( Russell, 1921 ). One might think that this difficulty about knowing an unexperiencable past could be avoided by the use of induction in the following way: we use evidence to gain knowledge about past events which now-living people participated in and remember; once we find that our methods and types of evidence give us reliable knowledge, as certified by living memory, about these recent events, we are justified in extending these methods and types of evidence to the more distant past; we thus infer from this reliability in the case of one ... log in or subscribe to read full text