Toward a Logic of Historical Thought

David Hackett Fischer (1970)

Historians’ Fallacies (2) dealt with the organization of the book, the general topic of question framing, and the fallacy of false dichotomous questions.

Misology was a general introduction to the book with some fun quotes.

The overarching theme of this series of posts is that we know historians– anyone who thinks and writes about the past (including instant historians on the internet)– make mistakes in the way they frame their question, gather facts, construct explanations, and argue for the truth of those explanations. If we, as readers know what some of these mistakes are and how to recognize them, we become more critical, and that’s a good thing.

The fallacy of metaphysical questions is type of illogical mistake historians make in the framing of questions. It occurs when one attempts to solve a non-empirical question by empirical means. There are two general forms. The first is easily recognizable by give-away words: inevitable, unavoidable, inescapable, etc. “Was the war inevitable?” What empirical evidence– what facts– would you gather to assert inevitability? In other words, that it could not have been otherwise? The war did happen. To question its inevitability is a problem “devoid of meaning.”

“Ah,” you say. “But what if John Wilkes Booth had been more like his brother?” But he wasn’t now, was he?

The second form of is the “why” question. Why did X occur?

A “why” question tends to become a metaphysical question. It is also an imprecise question, for the “why” is slippery and difficult to define. Sometimes it seeks a cause, sometimes a motive, sometimes a reason, sometimes a description, sometimes a purpose, … sometimes a justification.

p. 14

Fischer suggests there are much more precise adjectives to use: who, what, when, where, how. Questions framed in this way can be answered with empirical methods and will thus be more useful.

Be on the lookout for examples of the fallacy of metaphysical questions!