ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the idea of evidence in modern historical research. The discussion of the chapter is conducted in relation to seminal authors on historical evidence, such as Marc Bloch, R. G. Collingwood, Carlo Ginzburg, Michel Foucault and Paul Ricoeur. The chapter investigates a specific idea, labeled the ‘evidential paradigm,’ which stipulates that the modern historian’s relation to material from the past is evidential through and through. The chapter argues that this evidentialist idea is in conflict with both the phenomenology and the epistemology of historical research. The central claims are that material from the past does not enter the historian’s experience merely in the form of evidence and that the very possibility of historical knowledge is, in fact, significantly dependent on not treating material from the past only as inferential evidence. In conclusion, the chapter argues that inferential relations of evidence presuppose a more fundamental relation to material from the past, namely that historians understand their material from within a perspective of meaning. This fundamental relation itself is not inferential but should, as R. G. Collingwood and Peter Winch argued, be understood by framing historical understanding of evidence as analogous to grasping conceptual connections in a language or a conversation.
