History Fallacies: Food For Thought
A Companion to The Signs You Are About to Hear Pseudohistory
Recently, I picked up a book from the thrift store called ‘Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought.’ It posited that historians needed to follow logical rules of reasoning and balance their story-telling drive with statistics and numbers. Basically, if a historian was going to make an argument in their book or monograph, they should commit to the bit and make as sound an argument as they could.
It gave me something to consider when reading history books, which I like doing and I suspect you do too.
The Basic Idea
The writer, one David Fischer, lists fallacies in the appealing listicle fashion we all love.
He goes one step further and groups them by stages of research to create general categories, which could then be broken down into specific fallacies.
For instance, his first chapter is called ‘Fallacies of Question Framing’ and deals with how you pick the question you will answer. Fallacies he then lists and describes are: starting with no specific question, asking metaphysical questions that historians can’t really answer, false dichotomies, sneaking in a bunch of questions with your first question, and asking questions that presume something that isn’t true.
Once he listed the fallacies, he concludes with tips on the approaching the job correctly.
It is by turns mind-numbingly meta and dryly witty, and the examples are a bit obscure, helped immensely by the books age. But perhaps it is the very obscurity and distance that gives it weight.
Aged?
The book was written in 1969.
You can tell. He calls Maslow of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs a recent innovator.
Is this book even still in print or relevant to the academic climate he was speaking to 50 or so years ago? I have no idea.
One thing that was interesting was the writer’s skepticism, reserved and gentle, of using Freudian psychology to understand history. That reservation sure aged well, given that Freud is now persona nongrata even in psychology circles.
But somethings still ring true to me personally after all these years.
A Point For Us Reading Popular History
Mostly, the individual fallacies made a lot of sense in any non-fiction, though I think it is particularly hard to track in history books.
The first fallacy that ran true was asking metaphysical questions. Fischer is emphatic that why is a slippery question, and often veers into metaphysical questions that nobody historian could get a good handle on. It’s about asking questions you can get an answer to, ultimately.
Good old false dichotomy is still around and always bad. We are constantly faced with questions that are framed in a way that excludes reasonable answers because someone can’t imagine alternatives. Pascal’s Wager is the archetypal example.
We who consume popular history are probably confronted more with the ‘fallacy of the lonely fact.’ This is when a historian has one example of something and generalizes mightily from it. The one fact will follow the generalization, and everyone will repeat it without realizing that what ‘happened all the time’ in fact happened once.
Often, someone will argue that something couldn’t have happened by skipping other relevant facts, and you might wind up with someone skipping whole swathes of evidence in favor of something.
You have probably stumbled upon the ‘didactic fallacy,’ in which specific lessons are supposed to be pulled from a past event and applied to us now- and completely ignores all of the ways in which the past event differs from our current circumstances. How many times do we have to be urged to war because appeasement didn’t work with Hitler?
I think I have complained before about reducing causes in history to next to nothing. Fischer sites Marxist history for its habit of reducing absolutely everything to the clean march from primitive communalism to the dictatorship of the proletariat via class warfare. There’s good old ‘tyrant was a megalomaniac and that is the only reason he started a war,’ too, for shrinking the messy human experience that is history to nothing.
A Thing to Learn for the Contrarian
Maybe part of this comes from the time that it was written, but Fischer spends some time chiding historians whose job seems to be taking the current accepted narrative and saying ‘nu-uh!’
They don’t introduce any new players, explore new facts, or consider a fresh angle. They just declare good guys the new bad guys and emphasize a more sinister aspect to old facts.
If your revision of history consists of declaring that, since someone you don’t like said water was wet, water must be dry, you haven’t added anything.
Conclusion
Have I made these mistakes before? Yup.
Will I make them again? Yup.
Have other people written sterling, thoroughgoing, well-crafted histories that make one or two of these mistakes without ruining the whole argument? Yup.
Are these folks who overgeneralized that one time or offered one false dichotomy still been much better at the whole history thing than I? Yup.
Still, each argument is its own entity to be evaluated on its own terms, and at least you know when to apply a little more scrutiny to a particular argument now.