ABSTRACT
At the close of the last chapter I suggested that before we can understandthe arguments about the nature of history, we should be clear how most historians think about what they do. The aim of this chapter, therefore, is to address the most basic conventional beliefs held by historians – specifically the belief in the reality of the past and the possibility of the correspondence of history with it. The expectation that flows from the empirical and inferential method is that of being able to objectively separate our ontological state from how we generate and represent historical knowledge about ‘the real past’. This is not, of course, to claim that the majority of historians believe in the complete separation between history (as a written discourse) and historian (as an author) although there are still relatively few Schamas and Davises around. Notwithstanding the reasonableness of this belief and before dealing with inference and explanation in the next section there is a fundamental assumption that needs to be addressed. This is the realist presumption that historians can escape the confines of representation into the once real world of the referential, evidence, ‘facts’ and ‘factualism’. It is this belief that, as I noted, has been threatened by idealist thinkers since Hume and Kant but which is an epistemological position that realist philosophers and historians have tried to defend and support through their belief in the knowability of the past via its evidence and the correspondence theory of truth.
