Part III. Procedures of EstablishingHistorical Knowledge

Professional historians are engaged in cognitive activity. Talking about historical knowledge is meaningful because historians have some procedures of establishing knowledge.

How are cognitive aims set by historians? The usual way to do this is to formulate a theme.

To solve problems, historians need evidence. That is found in the «sources». Anything (documents, pottery, etc.) can be a source if it provides evidence for historians. To get the evidence, critical method («source criticism») was developed. Traditional source criticism was the technique of establishing reconstructive knowledge and of making reconstructive discoveries.

Are problems of acquiring empirical knowledge in history cognitively different from their analogues in other sciences? It seems that there are differences of degree

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but not of a kind. For example, mathematics is treated in a lot of quantitative history as a warehouse of concepts or as. a set of calculating rales. Such procedures are similar to those used in some other social studies. They are not to be condemned: many historical writings belong typologically to applied research, and to solve applied problems one has to calculate.

Are historical theories different from the theories of other sciences? Historians might use non-historical theories («theories drawn from the other sciences). Historical theories presuppose historical laws (as distinct from economic, sociological or politological laws) explicitly formulated by historians.

The acceptance of historical theories does not depend purely on their adequateness for research purposes. Underlying models for historical theories seem acceptable or non-acceptable to both historians and non-historians because they are somehow involved (are in agreement or are in conflict) with differing basic value attitudes towards society held by different collections of people ( e. g. , by different economic classes, nations, political groupings). The use of any paradigma involving a theory may in itself seem unacceptable for the upholders of the existing order of society if any and all theories known in that particular society are concerned with(or. seem to entail) the necessity of its overthrow.

Theories are used for the»scientific» (Hempelian) explanation of empirical (but not reconstructive) knowledge. The term «historical scientific explanation» is used in this book to designate members of a subset of scientific explanations that is characterized by the presumption of

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qualitative difference. Fог example, let К = {K1, ……………,Kn} be a set of laws for the reference system. Let D = {D1, ……………,Dm} be a set of conditions for the reference system. Let L = {L1, ……………,Li} be a set of laws for the system under study (e. g. , the economics of the 17th century Britain), and let С = {C1, ……………, Cj} be a set of conditions for the system under study. Furthermore, let А = K U L and B = D U C. Then a historical explanation is described by the formula:

where Cx Y is a complementary set to the subset Y of the set X. Various examples of different types of historical explanations are described in formulae (4)… (15).

Sometimes historians do not use models but apply quasimodels. The latter are constructions that do not specify the kind of relationships existing between variables. Quasimodels can be used for building typologies, and, thus, for interpreting empirical knowledge.