Toward a Logic of Historical Thought

David Hackett Fischer (1970)

People write histories. Writers (often) commit fallacies. People read histories. [Normative statement coming up.] Readers should read critically. Readers familiar with writers’ fallacies are better critics.

I’m not a logician and that’s not a good argument (?) but you get the gist.

So we are going to look at some of these fallacies from the reader’s point of view.

A few points on background. The book– and hence the fallacies– is divided into three main parts. Inquiry examines the fallacies of question-framing, verifying facts, and determining the relative significance of the facts. Explanation deals with generalization, causation, false analogy and so forth. Argument addresses semantical distortion and substantive distraction. We’ll dig into what Fischer means by each of these categories of fallacies as we go along. Fischer is a man of great breadth. There’s as much philosophy of history as there is historiography as there is analogy/dis-analogy with the methods of science in the book. But he’s also a clear writer.

Finally, note what Fischer says in the Introduction:

A historian is someone (anyone) who asks an open-ended question about past events… .

p. xv

There are historians everywhere. Be on the lookout!

Fallacies of Question-Framing

A moment’s reflection should suffice to establish the simple proposition that every historian, willy-nilly, must begin his research with a question. Questions are the engines of intellect, the cerebral machines which con­vert energy to motion, and curiosity to controlled inquiry. There can be no thinking without questioning– no purposeful study of the past, nor any serious planning for the future. … Without questions of some sort, a historian is condemned to wander aimlessly through dark corridors of learning.

p. 3

The fallacy of false dichotomous questions is a species of the fallacy of many questions but important enough to be considered separately. And since it is extremely easy to spot we will begin with it.

A true dichotomy exists when something can be separated into only two parts. The parts are 1) mutually exclusive, the two circles of a Venn diagram cannot overlap, and 2) collectively exhaustive, every atom of the something must be in one or the other of the two circles– nothing outside. There is no middle.

He gives a lot of examples from books and academic articles that were actually published. (Don’t forget, he’s writing in the late 60’s.)

• The Causes of the War of 1812: National Honor or National Interest?
• Jacksonian Democracy: Myth or Reality?
• The Robber Barons– Pirates or Pioneers?
• The Parliament of Edward I– Royal Court or Representative Legislature?
• Martin Luther– Reformer or Revolutionary?

I could go on and Fischer does. Many of the examples “encourage simple-minded moralizing. Most are very shallow.” But the biggest issue is that they are “structurally deficient.” The dichotomies are not true. The choices are neither mutually exclusive nor collectively exhaustive. There could (and does) exist a middle.

Take the Robber Baron example. Note that the dichotomy, Pirates/Pioneers, applies to all Robber Barons. Could some have been Pirates while others were Pioneers? Could any one of them been a pioneer (whatever that is) with Pirate tendencies (whatever those may be) and thus in the middle? Could he/they have begun as one and morphed into the other? The dichotomy also implies two end points. However Pirates/Pioneers are defined (if they are), is there a class of Robber Baron worse than Pirate? Better than Pioneer?

The fallacy of false dichotomous questions, Fischer says, is how historians teach as well as do research. “What can a student do in the face of a false dichotomy?”

1. Show that “the dichotomous terms can coexist”;
2. Demonstrate a third possibility;
3. “Repudiate one or the other or both alternatives.”

These work, but within the framework of the underlying structural deficiency. The best response is to call out the deficiency and to revise the inquiry itself by introducing more refined and open question which can be “flexibly adjusted” when needed.

From a reader’s perspective– and again, I’m talking about reading almost everything, not just history books– be on the lookout for false dichotomous questions.

First post on Historians’ Fallacies (much lighter).