ABSTRACT
History, ruled over by its dual monarchy of truth and interpretation, simultaneously seeks to address, to bring together and to hold together, a realist epistemology with an interpretive methodology. It claims the status of truth for its intellectual product, all the while acknowledging, indeed celebrating, the interpretive relations of its production. In the succinct words of Jonathan Rose, ‘There are facts, but they all require interpretation.’1 This intellectual puzzle is of course not at all an unfamiliar one across the human sciences and has been at the root of methodological debate across many disciplines. But the very nature of history’s object – a past which has ceased to exist and which therefore has no direct empirical presence beyond fragmentary traces – seems to present special epistemological difficulties for the historian. How can accounts acknowledged as interpretations of the past be validated as true accounts of that past? Faced with this fundamental question, it might be expected that historians would be among the most avid of methodologists, driven by the need to explicate and defend the discipline’s characteristic interpretive techniques as demonstrably sufficient to warrant its ambitious truth claims.
