ABSTRACT
Historical accounts are both potentially infinite in number, and yet at the same time subject to the possibility of disconfirmation. History is both an art and a science (in the loose sense of the latter word). History involves creative leaps of the imagination; but it is at the same time a discipline characterised by collective discourses with a variety of concepts, questions, methods, procedures, and standards of evaluation. And, for all the differences of approach across paradigms, even if we cannot agree on ‘supra-paradigmatic’ or ‘theory-neutral’ criteria for evaluating competing accounts, we can at least attain some clarity about the issues involved in deciding for one approach over another. We are not, in short, left with history as fiction. Nor do we have to buy into a notion of one single historical truth to be able to develop ways of rationally deciding between competing accounts of selected aspects of the past; rejecting a notion of progress in history does not simultaneously entail rejecting a notion of progress in historical understanding.
