Beyond truth: an epistemic normativity for historiography

ABSTRACT How can we compare two historical narratives about the same occurrence when each of the narratives satisfies the criteria of truth but nevertheless, portray incongruent views about the past? To answer such a question, we can identify a conservative view in history that commits to a correspondence theory of the past that argues that the scrutiny of the primary and secondary sources alongside a precise division of what counts as ‘objective facts’ and ‘subjective information’ can discern which narrative is the correct one. In other words, they value ‘truth as correspondence’ as the ultimate way to settle epistemological disagreements. In this paper, I challenge such a view and argue that it does not answer our primary question. I will propose a new standard for historiographic normativity, one that takes Catherine Elgin’s notion of understanding and Alva Noë’s idea of reorganization at its center. I will further argue that Elgin and Noë’s work allows us to bring Arthur Danto’s idea of redescription and Louis Mink’s notion of understanding from the descriptive to the normative realm.