Coherence and ambiguity in history

History and Theory

Volumn 39, Issue 2, 2000, Pages 167-180

  Pollmann, Thijs ^a  

^a UTRECHT UNIVERSITY   (Netherlands)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61949109533     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/0018-2656.00121     Document Type: Article

References (57)

1. I want to thank Malcolm de Mowbray for his comments on an earlier version of this article, which originates from two contributions to Dutch journals, Theoretische geschiedenis and TvL, Tijdschrift voor literatuurwetenschap. I thank the editors of both journals for permission to use materials from these papers. A note on method: to systematically collect examples of the application of the concept in different historical fields, I used the occurrence of words like "coherence," "coherent," "fit," and so on in the abstracts in the e-version of Historical Abstracts
2. Here are a few examples from different fields of study, taken from Historical Abstracts. H. G. Koenigsberger, "The Past and the Future History of Nationalism," European History Quarterly 26 (1996), 591-602
3. Colin Brooks, "Individuals, Parties and the Parliamentary Record in the 1690s," Parliaments, Estates & Representation 16 (1996), 175-191
4. W. H. Dray, "R. G. Collingwood on the a priori of History," Clio 12 (1983), 169-181
5. William Paul McGreevey, "Reinterpreting Colombian Economic History," Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 23 (1981), 352-363
6. Timothy Wilks, "The Picture Collection of Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset (c. 1587-1645), Reconsidered," Journal of the History of Collections 1 (1989), 167-177
7. Mark Bevir, "Mind and Method in the History of Ideas," History and Theory 36 (1997), 167-189
8. Raymond Martin, "Objectivity and Meaning in Historical Studies: Toward a Post-analytic View," History and Theory 32 (1993), 29, 43, 44-45
9. In the following examples, reviewers praise authors for coherence in their work: John Jay TePaske, "The Royal Treasury Accounts of Spanish America," European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 49 (1990), 122-125
10. a review of B. H. Slicher van Bath, Real Hacienda y Economìa en Hispanoamèrica, 1541-1820 (Amsterdam, 1989)
11. Alfred W. McCoy, "Southeast Asia and the Costs of Modernity: Reflections on the Cambridge History of Southeast Asia," Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 40 (1997), 107-116
12. a review of Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, ed. Nicolas Tarling (Cambridge, Eng., 1992-1993)
13. Caroline M. Barron, "From City to Metropolis," London Journal 13 (1987-1988), 61 -64, a review of London 1500-1700: The Making of the Metropolis, ed
14. A. L. Beier and R. Finlay (London and New York, 1986)
15. For example: Ludmilla Jordanova, "Body Images," Art History 15 (1992), 537-541
16. in a thoroughly favorable review of Barbara Stafford's Body Criticism (Cambridge, Mass., 1991)
17. Fulvio Salimbeni, "Storia e storiografia dell democrazia cristiana. Per la memoria storica de un'esperienza politica," Studium 80 (1984), 825-844
18. John Grumley, "Fukuyama's Hegelianism-Historical Exhaustion or Philosophical Closure," History of European Ideas 21 (1995), 379-392
19. a review of Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York, 1992)
20. Hans Kellner, Language and Historical Representation: Getting the Story Crooked (Madison, Wisc, 1989)
21. Bevir, "Mind and Method in the History of Ideas," 167-189. Bevir presents an acute refutation of the standpoint of Pocock and Skinner in the article
22. Pierre Bourdieu, "L'illusion biographique," Actes de la Recherche en sciences sociales 62/63 (1986), 69-72
23. John H. Zammito, "Are We BeingTheoretical Yet? The New Historicism, the New Philosophy of History, and 'Practicing' Historians," Journal of Modern History 65 (1993), 783-814
24. Richard L. Kirkham, Theories of Truth: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1992), 111
25. The argument is sometimes called the drunken sailors argument. Haack refers to C. I. Lewis, who should have said that the idea that empirical beliefs can be justified by nothing but relations of mutual support is as absurd as suggesting that two drunken sailors could support each other by leaning back to back-when neither was standing on anything. Susan Haack, Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology (Oxford, Eng. and Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 27
26. In an abstract of Jürg Liemann's "Wiedergutmachung durch Konflikt? Die Syrische Denkschrift zum Deutsch-Israelischen Wiedergutmachungsabkommen von 1952," Asien, Afrika, Lateinamerika 22 (1994), 513-538 we read: "Following the opening of East German archives, a Syrian memorandum on the German-Israeli agreement of restitution was found in Otto Grotewohl's estate. This agreement resulted in strong protests from the Arab League, which feared the strengthening of Israel by the German payments. The article examines the political-historical coherence of the Syrian note and discusses Syrian attitudes toward Syrian neutrality, Israeli policies of annexation, and problems of the Palestinian refugees." Historical Abstracts 48B: 3230
27. Ann Rigney, "Mixed Metaphors and the Writing of History," Storia della Storiografia 24 (1993), 149-159. "Central to the historiographical endeavour is 'generating coherence from diversity'" (150)
28. Peter Kosso "Historical Evidence and Epistemic Justification: Thucydides as a Case Study," History and Theory 32 (1993), 3
29. Famous is David Marr's pioneering Vision: A Computational Investigation into the Human Representation and Processing of Visual Information (San Francisco, 1982). The reader is also referred to the fascinating chapters about visual perception in Visual Cognition and Action: An Invitation to Cognitive Science, ed
30. Daniël Osherson, Stephen Michael Kosslyn, and John M. Hollerbach (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1990)
31. A. L. Yuille and S. Ullman, "Computational Theories of Low-level Vision," in Osherson, Kosslyn, and Hollerbach, ed, Visual Cognition
32. Cf. Irving Biederman, "Higher-level Vision," in ibid. Biederman mainly relies on the investigations about word recognition by McClelland and Rumelhart
33. Cf. David E. Rumelhart et al. Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition (Cambridge, Mass., 1986)
34. Elsewhere I have shown that in interpreting allegorical paintings art historians use the logic as presented above. Cf. Thijs Pollmann, "Waarheidstheorieën in de geschiedbeoefening," Theoretische geschiedenis 22 (1995), 149-165
35. This is what Kosso meant in the quotation above; see note 15
36. Normally called "theory-laden."
37. Kirkham, Theories of Truth, 217
38. Peter Kosso, "Observing the Past," History and Theory 31 (1992), 32
39. Ted Sanders, Discourse Structure and Coherence: Aspects of a Cognitive Theory of Discourse Representation (Dissertation, Tilburg University, 1992)
40. William C. Mann and Sandra A. Thompson, "Rhetorical Structure Theory: Description and Construction of Text Structures," in Natural Language Generation: New Results in Artificial Intelligence, Psychology and Linguistics, ed
41. G. Kempen (Dordrecht, 1987), 85-95, esp. 90. In my enumeration I do not want to be complete, or take a stand in discussions among text-linguists about this completeness
42. "Justificationally observed," the sense of Kosso's account of the epistemic status of (historical) observations. Kosso, "Observing the Past," 21-36
43. K. Davids, "Technological Change and the Economic Expansion of the Dutch Republic, 1580-1680," in The Dutch Economy in the Golden Age: Nine Studies, ed
44. K. Davids and L. Noordegraaf (Amsterdam, 1993), 89
45. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Zaanstreek was a rural environment in which shipbuilding industry and the sawing of timber wood by windmill energy flourished as nowhere else in the Netherlands. There were no towns nor guilds. Since Amsterdam was trying to protect its carpenters' and shipbuilders' guilds, the Zaankanters thought it wise to turn to things they didn't do before: that is, build large ships and buy and sell wood and timber themselves. This point of view is stressed for both inventions in one of the oldest histories of the Zaanstreek, Hendrik Jacobsz. Soeteboom, Zaanlandze arcadia in vyf boeken verdeelt (s. 1., 1650), 535-539
46. See also R. W. Unger, Dutch Shipbuilding before 1800: Ships and Guilds (Assen-Amsterdam, 1978)
47. This point of view has been refuted by J. Six, "Opmerkingen omtrent eenige meesterwerken in 's Rijks Museum," Oud-Holland 11 (1893), 101-102 on the basis of the absence of any resemblance between this portrait and real self-portraits of Hals. He suggested leaving the matter of the identity of the sitters unsettled. The origin of the conjecture that the man in the double-portrait is Dirck Hals is unclear
48. One will find the arguments in E. de Jongh and Pierre Vinken, "Frans Hals als voortzetter van een emblematische traditie. Bij het huwelijksportret van Isaac Massa en Beatrix van der Laan," Oud-Holland 76 (1961), 117-150 esp. 146ff
49. My explanation is based on the papers of J. Joll, "The 1914 Debate Continues: Fritz Fischer and His Critics" and "1914: The Unspoken Assumptions," in The Origins of the First World War: Great Power Rivalry and German War Aims, ed. H. W. Koch (London and Basingstoke 1972), 13-29 and 307-328
50. and on the analysis of the controversy in Chris Lorenz, De constructie van het verleden: Een inleiding in de theorie van de geschiedenis (Amsterdam, 1987), 51-53; 80-90
51. In Lorenz's analysis the controversy is about the supposedly mutually exclusive motives of Bethman Hollweg in writing the memorandum. Lorenz, Constructie, 83
52. Joll, "The 1914 Debate Continues."
53. Katharine A. Lerman, "Wilhelmine Germany," in German History since 1800, ed. Mary Fulbrook (London, 1997), 199-226, 215
54. Klaus Hildebrand, Das vergangene Reich: Deutsche Aussenpolitik von Bismarck bis Hitler 1871-1945 (Stuttgart, 1995), especially 322-326
55. "All in all, the 'continuity of [Bethmann Hollweg's] thoughts on how to end the war' found in the September memorandum its ambiguous expression." Ibid., 326 (my translation, T. P.)
56. Malcolm de Mowbray (personal communication)
57. Most notably to my knowledge Haack, Evidence and Inquiry