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HISTORICAL FACTUALITY AND REPRESENTATION
Abstract
Historical facts are not objects. Historical-real is constitutively representational and constitutively temporal because it is a process. The question of what is a given truth in history then becomes the dilemma of creating a representative reconstruction of the process of (past) events that is close to the real events as they are given in that specific time. Those real events have been conceived, represented, lived, created, and narrated. The interweaving of the theory of history and the [cognitive] theory of representation is revealed as a central interlacing that could be proposed between the theory of history and the theory of narrative on the one hand and the theory of history and the theory of action on the other. From one perspective, history is about other people, other institutions, other representations and other visions of the world. It is about people who lived in different eras, who have created and inhabited different institutions, who spoke other languages, who embraced other conceptions and beliefs and so on. From another perspective, however, historians are not faced with a radical otherness. History describes people like us, but it is we who are the heirs of those cultures, those institutions, that wealth of knowledge, those skills, those beliefs and so on, and we are not without tools to recover, reproduce or re-present them.
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References15
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Ricoeur, P., Memory, History, Forgetting. Trans. by K. Blamey and D. Pellauer. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004, p. XVI.
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see Ricoeur, P., Memory, History, Forgetting, op. cit., p. 235.
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See Ankersmit, F., Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis of the Historian’s Language. La Haye-Boston-London: M. Nijhoff Publ. 1983.
see Ricoeur, P., Memory, History, Forgetting, op. cit., pp. 279-280.
See White, H., Metahistory: the Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University 1973.
See Busacchi, V., ‘The Epistemology of Testimony: A Hermeneutical Key’. In M. Bianca, P. Piccari (eds.), Epistemology of Ordinary Knowledge. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015, pp. 394-405.
See Ricoeur, P., Memory, History, Forgetting, op. cit., pp. 219-220.
see Ricoeur, P., Memory, History, Forgetting, op. cit., p. 220.
See Ricoeur, P., Memory, History, Forgetting, op. cit.
Markman, A. B., Knowledge Representation. Mahwah (NJ) & London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers, 1999, pp. 5, 7, 8 and 10.
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see White, H., The Content of the Form. Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, op. cit., p. 20.
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