Skinner Truth and the Historian
Abstract
This article considers the task of intellectual and cultural historians. Two prevailing methods are examined. One claims that historians should treat the texts they study essentially as affirmations of belief. The other argues that the explanatory task of the historian includes that of asking about the truth and falsity of the beliefs under investigation, with a view to understanding what causal pressures enable false beliefs to be accepted as the truth. Against these perspectives the article first argues that the texts studied by historians are best approached not as expressions of belief but as interventions in the intellectual debates of their time. The vocabulary most appropriate to interpretation is that of speech-acts. The aim is to recover the performativity of texts, to explain what their authors may have been doing in writing them. The article next argues that we ought not to raise questions about the truth or falsity of the beliefs that we study as historians, but only about their rationality. The error to be avoided is that of assuming that it could not have been rational to hold true a belief that seems to the historian false. The article concludes by rebutting the contention that such an approach commits the historian to conceptual relativism. Rather, the aim is to prescind from asking questions about truth and falsity in order to leave open the possibility of vindicating the rationality of alien systems of belief.
Keywords: intellectual history, cultural history, methodology of historiography, relativism, speech-act.
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Historians come in many different intellectual shapes and sizes, and they study all manner of different things. But in what follows I want to restrict myself to the work of intellectual and cultural historians─historians like myself. I think it would be fair to say that what we mainly study are texts. By this I do not merely mean texts in the sense in which novels─or newspapers, court records, speeches in parliament or philosophical treatises-may obviously be described as texts. I am also interested in the more extended sense in which paintings and buildings and social actions can likewise be read as texts.
I want to single out two general claims that are often made by cultural historians about the texts─in this extended sense─that form the basis of their research. The first contention I want to consider is this: that historians should treat the texts they study essentially as statements or affirmations of belief.
This is the position that philosophers commonly urge historians to take up. Mark Bevir, for example, in The Logic of the History of Ideas insists on the very strong claim that “when people make an utterance, they express ideas or beliefs, and it is these ideas or beliefs that constitute the objects studied by historians of ideas”. Practising historians have generally shown themselves content to endorse this point of view. To take a distinguished example, Keith Thomas at the start of his classic work, Religion and the Decline of Magic, observes that what he is studying is systems of belief, very much in the spirit of a cultural anthropologist.
As Thomas goes on, when historians investigate such past systems of belief they can hardly fail to reflect that few of the beliefs under investigation enjoy much recognition today. As he indicates, however, for the intellectual or cultural historian this constitutes the most interesting challenge. While many beliefs widely accepted in the past may strike us as obviously false or even groundless, the fact remains that in earlier times, as Thomas puts it, many intelligent persons held them to be true, and the historian’s task is to explain why this was so.
This challenge has been widely taken up by cultural historians in the past fifty years or so, and I now want to single out two such alien belief systems, as we might call them, that historians of early-modern Europe have scrutinised with particular intensity during this past generation of research. First, there has been much study of the alien cosmological beliefs of the period. This trend was perhaps given its strongest impetus by Thomas Kuhn in his classic work The Copernican Revolution, the insights of which he generalised in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn examines the views of, among others, Cardinal Bellarmine, who in his debates with Galileo rejected Copernicus’s hypothesis that the earth orbits the sun, insisting that it is the sun which moves around the earth.
A further set of alien beliefs that have much pre-occupied early-modern historians in recent times have been witchcraft beliefs, and within the still burgeoning literature on this topic there have appeared at least three books that seem to me masterpieces. One I have already mentioned: Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic, first published in 1971. More recently there has been Stuart Clark’s remarkable study, Thinking with Demons. But earlier than either of these, although not translated into English until 1974, was the pioneering analysis of witchcraft beliefs and practices included in Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s The Peasants of Languedoc. Ladurie focuses not merely on the now completely alien belief─widespread in early-modern times─that some people are capable of forming leagues with the devil, who grants them powers to do harm; he also considers the claim that such practitioners of witchcraft habitually encountered Satan when taking flight at night to the meetings known as witches’ sabbats.
There, then, is the first point I want to discuss: that cultural historians are concerned with the investigation of what our forebears believed, what they took to be the case. Cardinal Bellarmine may have been mistaken to suppose that the sun orbits the earth, but that is evidently what he believed. The demonologists may likewise have been in error to suppose that it is possible to enter into a pact with the Devil, but that too was something they believed. The task of the cultural historian, we are told, is to identify and explain such beliefs.
The second and closely connected claim I want to examine is that, when as historians we encounter such alien beliefs, we need to begin by concentrating strongly on their alien character. This is emphatically Ladurie’s commitment in his Peasants of Languedoc. He prefaces his analysis of peasant views about satanic possession by emphasising that these beliefs were not only manifestly false, but amounted to little more than a product of what he describes as ‘mass delirium’. Norman Cohn speaks in almost identical terms in the celebrated book on witchcraft beliefs that he published two years later under the title Europe’s Inner Demons. If we are to explain such beliefs, he says, we need to begin by recognising not merely that they were false but that they largely took the form of ‘a collective fantasy’.
If we interrogate these historians further, asking why they take it to be important to begin by considering the truth or falsity of the beliefs they are investigating, we already find the clue in the passage I have quoted from Cohn. He assumes that false beliefs point to failures of reasoning, and accordingly need to be explained in a different fashion from true beliefs. The same applies even more clearly to Ladurie. If we wish to understand why witchcraft beliefs gained such widespread acceptance, Ladurie argues, what we need is an account of what could have caused such a breakdown in normal processes of reasoning. The puzzle, as he puts it, is to see what prevented the peasants from recognising the falsity of their beliefs, what prompted such an ‘upsurge of obscurantism’.
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