ABSTRACT
It is now necessary to examine the claims made by historians to the prin-ciples of objectivity and truth. This cannot be done, of course, without some consideration of the challenge of relativism. To do this I need to summarise the key principles of the modernist epistemological model of history. As I suggested in Chapter 1, the Enlightenment’s logocentric ‘big idea’ was that we could accurately reflect the structure of the past when we write up our empirical investigations. It should by now be clear that two very important realist claims are being made about history and these claims have a very significant outcome. The first claim is the technical one that we can know the past more or less as it really was thanks to our empirical methods in addressing the sources and by using the analytical procedures of inference. This is the belief in what I call ‘knowable referentialism’. The second is that we can describe what we find more or less accurately in our referential statements and narratives. This is the belief in representation. The outcome is that we can reasonably expect to be objective in our history and, therefore, control the relativism that threatens the ramparts of the empirical-analytical approach.
