“FN I. This point, important as it is, has recently been exaggerated by epistemologists. Note three errors in the following statement: “The difference between history and science is not that history does and science does not employ organizing schemes which go be­yond what is given. Both do. The difference has to do with the kind of organizing schemes employed by each. History tells true stories.” (Arthur C. Danto, Analytical Philosophy ·of History [Cambridge, 1965], p. 111).

“First, history tells no tales-historians tell them. Second, scientists are storytellers too. All scientists use story schemas some of the time; some use them nearly all the time. Examples are geologists, paleontologists, and astronomers. Third, historians use many other organizing schemes in their work, occasionally in place of narratives, and often in addition to them. It is, I think, an error to distinguish history from the sciences on epistemological grounds alone.

Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought, David Hackett Fischer. Harper & Row, New York, 1970.

Going to get the learning out of the way early today. And this is not something I didn’t know about but I did not know the particular fallacy–one of my faves–could be depicted graphically.

First though, a quick comment on the footnote, quoted above. Many years ago Arthur Danto was in our backyard. So now you have a degrees-of-separation to him. More importantly, the point about history / historians can be applied–and I would argue most definitely should applied–to science / scientists.

Fallacies of Narration take on several flavors, my favorite being presentism in which:

Understanding events of the past in terms of the present. Fischer gives several examples (I’ll not cite his sources). A historian writing in the early 1960s declares Thomas Jefferson was anti-libertarian, based on the standards of the contemporary ACLU. The narratives of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. in which there is “a steady progress of pragmatic liberalism from Jefferson to Jackson to Franklin Roosevelt. Finally, the Kennedys become Top Family, and History comes to a .”

[That’s not a typo. It’s a joke–the punctuation mark period being called a ‘full stop’ in British English.]

Simply as a heuristic devise, we can imagine a historical problem–i.e., some history needing explanation. This problem has 25 actual events, and they can be depicted over time:

Be sure you note the pattern. Each slice of time (2-5) begins with not a new event, but with an event from the past.

Two historians, on a presentist, the other not approach the problem. Each can select 15 from the 25 events to use in his or her analysis / explanation of the past.

The presentist selects or samples from the data.

The historian who is not a presentist uses a different method to sample.

According to Fischer,

• the presentist method is self-contradictory; for the sake of modernity and utility, it sacrifices knowledge useful in the establishment of present trends and future tendencies
• the non-presentist interpretation provides a better sense of the configuration of past events, and a more enlightening perspective on the present.

And there you have it! Learn something new everyday.