Trusting records in a postmodern world

Archivaria

Volumn 51, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 36-47

  MacNeil, Heather ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 38149130346     PISSN: 03186954     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (41)

1. Barry Smart, "Postmodern Social Theory," in Bryan S. Turner, ed., The Blackwell Companion to Social Theory (Oxford, 1996), p. 396.
2. Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (New York, 1991), p. 2.
3. In this article, the meanings of postmodernity, postmodernism, and postmodern theory follow the meanings given to those terms by Best and Kellner in their book Postmodern Theory. Accordingly, postmodernity refers to the historical epoch that allegedly follows modernity. Postmodernism is used to "describe movements and artifacts in the cultural field that can be distinguished from modernist movements, texts, and practices." Postmodern theory refers to a range of discourses which focus on the critique of modern theory and which argue for a postmodern rupture in theory. In such discourses, Best and Kellner explain: "Modern theory - ranging from the philosophical project of Descartes, through the Enlightenment, to the social theory of Comte, Marx, Weber and others - is criticized for its search for a foundation of knowledge, for its universalizing and totalizing claims, and for its allegedly fallacious rationalism. More specifically, postmodern theory provides a critique of representation and the modern belief that theory mirrors reality, taking instead 'perspectivist' and 'relativist' positions that theories at best provide partial perspectives on their objects, and that all cognitive representations of the world are historically and linguistically mediated."
4. Best and Kellner, Postmodern Theory, pp. 2-5.
5. As Barbara Shapiro describes it, the development, in the seventeenth century, of a standard of "moral certainty" (or "rational belief") was part of an attempt to establish an intermediate level of knowledge, below the level of absolute certainty but above that of mere opinion. Philosophers, theologians, and natural scientists distinguished between 'knowledge' or 'science,' on the one hand and 'probability' on the other. There were three subcategories of knowledge, each possessing a different kind of certainty: physical, derived from immediate sense data; mathematical, established by logical demonstration such as the proofs of geometry; and moral, based on testimony and secondhand reports of sense data. This moral certainty was most relevant to law, history, and many kinds of natural science. What others called 'moral certainty' was for Locke a species of probability, the very highest level of which commanded universal assent. It rose 'so near to a certainty' that it governs 'our thinking as absolutely as the most evident demonstration.'" The concept of moral certainty also underlies the "proof beyond a reasonable doubt" conviction standard that developed during the eighteenth century in English criminal law.
6. Barbara Shapiro, "Beyond Reasonable Doubt" and "Probable Cause": Historical Perspectives on the Anglo-American Law of Evidence (Berkeley, 1991), pp. 7-8. and passim.
7. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, A.D. Woozley, ed. (New York, 1974), book 4, chapter 15, section 4.
8. The concept of universal cognitive competence is discussed in Jonathan Cohen, "Freedom of Proof,in William Twining, ed., Facts in Law: Association for Legal and Social Philosophy Ninth Annual Conference at Hatfield College, University of Durham, 2nd-4th April 1982 (Wiesbaden, 1983), passim.
9. Jean-François Lyotard, " The Postmodern Condition," in Keith Jenkins, ed., The Postmodern History Reader (London and New York, 1997), p. 36.
10. Jean Mabillon, De re diplomatica libri VI (Paris, 1681).
11. For a detailed discussion of the evolution of legal and historical methods for assessing the trustworthiness of records as evidence,
12. Heather MacNeil, Trusting Records: Legal, Historical, and Diplomatic Perspectives (Dordrecht, 2000), pp. 1-31.
13. The term fact is defined here as "a thing done; an action performed or an incident transpiring; an event or circumstance; an actual occurrence; an actual happening in time or space or an event mental or physical; that which has taken place. A fact is either a state of things, that is, an existence, or a motion, that is, an event." Black's Law Dictionary, 6th ed. (St. Paul, 1990), s.v., "fact." 11 Nancy Partner, "Making Up Lost Time: Writing on the Writing of History," Speculum 61 (January 1986), pp. 105, 94.
14. Event is understood here to be an instance of a fact. See above, fn. 10. For a fascinating discussion of the relationship between records and events,
15. Stanley Raffel, Matters of Fact: A Sociological Inquiry (London, Boston and Henley, 1979), pp. 48-74.
16. Raffel, Matters of Fact, pp. 23, 29.
17. Marilyn T. MacCrimmon, "Developments in the Law of Evidence: The 1988-89 Term: The Process of Proof: Schematic Constraints," The Supreme Court Law Review, 2nd ser., vol. 1 (Toronto: Butterworths, 1990), pp. 346-47.
18. Jane Parkinson, "Accountability in Archival Theory" (Master of Archival Studies thesis, University of British Columbia, 1993), pp. 25-26
19. Raffel, Matters of Fact, p. 92.
20. Raffel, Matters of Fact, p. 102.
21. Jack Goody, The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society (Cambridge, 1986), p. 152.
22. Amy Mullin, "Purity and Pollution: Resisting the Rehabilitation of a Virtue," Journal of the History of Ideas 57 (1996), pp. 510, 520-23.
23. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore, 1976), cited in
24. Best and Kellner, Postmodern Theory, p. 21.
25. James Chandler, Arnold I. Davidson, and Harry Harootunian, "Introduction," in Chandler, Davidson, and Harootunian, eds., Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and Persuasion across the Disciplines (Chicago, 1994), p. 5.
26. Gabrielle Spiegel, "History, Historicism and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages," in The Postmodern History Reader, p. 184.
27. Best and Kellner, Postmodern Theory, p. 21.
28. Michel Foucault, "Truth and Power," in Colin Gordon, ed., Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 (New York, 1980), p. 131.
29. Michel Foucault, "Truth and Power," in Colin Gordon, ed., Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 (New York, 1980), p. 133.
30. Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think (Syracuse, 1986), p. 92.
31. Raffel, Matters of Fact, p. 112.
32. Stuart Sim, "Postmodernism and Philosophy," Routledge Critical Dictionary of Postmodern Thought, p. 14.
33. Carlo Ginzburg, "Checking the Evidence: The Judge and the Historian," in Questions of Evidence, p. 294.
34. Partner, "Making Up Lost Time," pp. 95-96.
35. Tony Bennett, "Outside Literature; Texts in History," The Postmodern History Reader, p. 221.
36. Wendy M. Rogovin, AThe Politics of Facts: The Illusion of Certainty," Hastings Law Journal
37. Wendy M. Rogovin, "The Politics of Facts: The Illusion of Certainty," Hastings Law Journal 46 (August 1995), p. 1728, n. 14.
38. Richard Rorty, "Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism," in Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis, 1982), p. 165.
39. Rorty's formulation of the doctrine of pragmatism takes us some distance from Locke's formulation of the doctrine of probability and the standard of moral certainty (see above, fn. 4). The distance is evident when we compare Rorty's statement with this statement of Locke's concerning truth and probability: "[T]he first and highest degree of probability is, when the general consent of all men, in all ages, as far as it can be known, concurs with a man's constant and never-failing experience in like cases, to confirm the truth of any particular matter of fact attested by fair witnesses; These probabilities rise so near to certainty, that they govern our thoughts as absolutely, and influence all our actions as fully as the most evident demonstration; and in what concerns us we make little or no difference between them and certain knowledge. See An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, book 4, chapter 16, section 6.
40. The term "metaphysical comfort" is attributed to Nietzsche, who considered the need for such comfort to be the driving force behind the philosophical pursuit of transcendent truths. In Nietzsche's view, of course, the pursuit is futile. As Richard Schacht explains, for Nietzsche, "there is no 'truth' in the sense of correspondence of anything we might think or say to 'being,' and indeed no 'true world of being' to which it may even be imagined to fail to correspond; no 'knowledge' conceived in terms of any such truth and reality; and, further, no knowledge at all - even of ourselves and the world of which we are a part - that is absolute, non-perspectival, and certain." Though he rejected all religious and metaphysical interpretations of the world as illusory, Nietzsche nevertheless recognized that illusion is as necessary to humans as truth.
41. Robert Audi, ed., The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (Cambridge, 1995), s.v., "Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm."