ABSTRACT
Hayden White, in his Metahistory and in the articles collected in Tropics of Discourse, has focused the attention of theorists of history on the relation of how an historian says something to what he says. White’s tropical analysis is peculiarly antihistorical, since it focuses on texts, on products, not the events of process. White’s position seems to be an extreme nominalist position that texts are, in fact, all that we have, that “history” is simply a group of texts, and that the only commitment of the historian is to his product, the finished text in its textuality. Therefore, in order to illumine the processes and evaluate the practice of either of the traditional disciplines of history or law it is necessary to describe the rules of argument which control the expounding of the problems and issues of civil events. Feyerabend’s notion that discovery is “historical” can be authenticated in several ways.
