Mixed messages: The heterogeneity of historical discourse

Abstract

If, as many historians and theorists now believe, narrative is the form proper to historical explanation, this raises the problem of the terms in which such narratives are to be evaluated. Without a clear account of evaluation, the status of historical knowledge (both in itself and in all those social, political, and other contexts in which appeal to historical explanation is made) remains obscure. Beginning with the view, found in Hayden White and others, that historical narrative constitutes a meaning not reducible to the factual content it engages, this essay argues that such meaning can arise only through a synthesis of cognitive and normative discourses. Narrative combines "heterogeneous" language games in such a way that neither appeal to "truth content" nor to "justice" suffices to decide the question of which of two competing historical explanations is, as a whole, superior. Examining in critical detail the opposed positions on this issue articulated by two recent theorists-Frank Ankersmit ("narrative idealism") and David Carr ("narrative realism")- the paper concludes that the debate between those who hold that historical narratives should be judged in essentially cognitive terms and those who hold that they should be judged in essentially political terms cannot be resolved and that a philosophical view of historical narrative that is neither realist nor idealist needs to be developed.