ABSTRACT
Ishall now evaluate and illustrate the nature of mainstream or construction-ist history as it is thought and practised today. I shall do this by explaining how the modernist epistemological model has been modified through the recognition that the historian constantly makes ontological choices in the effort to resolve the unavoidable tensions that exist within the production process of historical knowledge. This is done by the connections made between human agency and probability, and the structures that are said to result from human activity. The nature and complexity of all this is revealed through the working of covering laws. The basic tension between our being and our knowing, as I suggested at the end of the previous chapter, is not capable of resolution. All that constructionist historians can do is compromise: generating meaning as objectively as they believe is possible with truth as their regulatory ideal. The term ‘constructionist historian’ can only be helpful as a description for those historians who agree with the broad idea that somehow history emerges from the constructive intellectual conversation between their concepts and the content of the past. What this means is that the ways in which they conceptually map, sift and order the evidence has determined the huge variety of approaches that characterise the mainstream of history practice today. What all varieties of constructionist history share is, first, the procedural belief that all their descriptive statements must take the form of propositions and, second, that testing them in the evidence must embody some overall theoretical design, some model that the historian intends to exemplify through the nature of ‘discovered reality’.
