Can History Be Objective? (Part 3)

By Ron Nash

I will first restate them and then note the more serious objections.

1. Several of Beard’s arguments for historical relativism appeal to the undisputed claim that the historian’s knowledge of the past is indirect. While the claim is true, Beard overstated the entailments of his claim. Beard phrased his point this way:

The historian is not an observer of the past that lies beyond his own time. He cannot see it objectively as the chemist sees his test tubes and compounds. The historian must ‘see’ the actuality of history through the medium of documentation. That is his sole recourse.’

When Beard asserts that what the historian seeks to know (the past) no longer exists and that the historian’s access to the past must be mediated by documents and records that exist in the past must be mediated by documents and records that exist in this present, he is correct. More problematic is Beard’s attempt to set up a contrast between scientific knowledge (like Chemistry), where the subject matter is supposedly observable in a direct manner and thus objective, and history, where the approach is indirect and thus relative.

In other words, his first argument for relativism seems to equate relativism with indirect knowledge and objectivism with direct knowledge. His position rests on the claim that A can know B if and only if A can directly inspect B. Unfortunately, Beard’s claim implies that a person cannot have knowledge of anything that cannot be inspected directly. What Beard forgot is that a great deal of scientific investigation, which he regards as a paradigm of objectivity, also proceeds in an indirect manner. When an astronomer peers through a telescope, he does not perceive the object of his vision directly. Light from the star or planet he is studying has been reflected many times before it reaches his eyes; this makes his knowledge indirect.

Beard’s first line of argument, then, would not only destroy the historians’ knowledge of the past, it would also nullify any scientific claim to knowledge that is indirect. Furthermore, Beard’s argument would exclude scientific claims to knowledge based on past experiments. Any conclusion derived from the prior work of others and not verified personally by our scientist would be indirect knowledge. Beard apparently would say that such conclusions do not qualify as knowledge, and on this position every scientist would have to repeat every experiment relevant to his current investigation.

Finally, Beard’s argument would rule out indirect knowledge about things or events occurring at other places. We conclude then that if there is a good case for hard relativism, it cannot be based on the claim that historians’ knowledge of his subject matter is indirect.

2. Beard based his second line of argument for historical relativism on the claim that the historian’s knowledge of the past is incomplete. The historian can seldom be sure he has assembled all of the possible and relevant documentation. Once again Beard begins with an indisputable observation but draws an invalid inference. Just because a historian cannot know everything about the past, does it follow that he cannot know anything about it? Doe it follow that his knowledge is tainted by relativity? Of course it doesn’t. The box score of a baseball game is not complete; it does not report everything about the ball game. But the incompleteness of the account of the box score doesn’t necessitate that it is false. Beard’s argument also ignores the fact that no human inquiry presents a full report about its subject. Physics and biology, no less than history, give incomplete reports.

Nor does much of significance follow from the fact that historical inquiry is selective … all human inquiry is selective to some degree; no academic inquiry simply reproduces its subject matter. As American theologian Van Harvey notes, “If selectivity is the precondition for knowing or relating anything at all, how can its existence be used as an argument for the impossibility of any objective historical knowledge?” The mere presence of selectivity in an account does not by itself compromise the objective truth of that account, since some selections can be more plausible, have more support, and be more reasonable than others. It is also important to notice how many times historians select material that leads to truth that runs counter to what their own values would have led them to hope to find.

3. Beard grounded his third argument on the fact that the historian must impose some kind of structure or form on history. Without an overarching pattern, the historian would have only a mass of unrelated data. This structure is not discovered in the past; it is imposed on the past by the historian. But, as noted earlier, Beard once again oversimplifies the situation and ignores the extent to which any science is forced to provide structure for its material. The problem of structuring is not unique to history and thus does not ground the claim that history is relative or subjective. What destroys objectivity is not the arrangement of data but the ignoring or twisting of data.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4