ABSTRACT
All histories accrete and also (re)present the actuality and authenticity and then the accuracy of the ‘historical past’ as the historian best they can. The ‘historical past’ should not be disorganised when engaging with the actual past (and certainly not be confused). Hence, historians invariably have to deploy the factive verb in the presumption that all (or most) historical claims they make are true or very probably true. However, the ‘truth and reality of the past’ is simply a history masque through which histories can be engaged via manuscripts, records, books, journal articles, lectures, tutorial plans, and so forth. Historians, then, and fairly obviously, have two severe problems that they cannot resolve and which are ‘intentionality’ and ‘facts’ and in the historian’s universe of ‘factive historying’ they are sustained by ‘facts’ redefined as events under a description and which are primarily constrained by ‘agent intentionality’.
