A friend recommended and lent me Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought. I must say I immensely enjoyed David Hackett Fischer’s work. He was devastatingly thorough and acutely witty.
The book is a collection of fallacies divided into three large categories: inquiry, explanation, and argument. Each section has a few chapters of fallacies of various subsections. An excellent quality is that it is easy to skip around and read individual fallacies without having to read the rest of the book. To give an example of his wit, this quotation is culled from footnote 48 of his chapter ‘Fallacies of Factual Significance’ discussing the pragmatic fallacy:
By temperament and conviction [Staughton Lynd] is not an observer but a participant. He enthusiastically endorses an aphorism paraphrased from Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach: “The Historians have interpreted the world; the thing, however, is to change it.” To this declaration Lynd adds a rhetorical question of his own: “Should we be content with measuring the dimensions of our prison instead of chipping away, however inadequately, against the bars? For many years Lynd has working like a beaver at the prison bars—not with a file but with a file card. (fn 48: The task is tough enough, given Lynd’s choice of tools. But the trouble is compounded by the fact that Lynd and his radical friends believe that the great penitentiary in which they live—i.e., American society—is cunningly constructed with invisible bars. He has worked for years at what he thinks is an invisible bar, only to discover that it is really a space between them, and that the work must begin again. This cycle has been repeated several times in Lynd’s scholarly career.) p. 83–4
And one that strikes to my writing the fallacy of argument ad verecundiam (an argument to authority [literally, modesty]) of which one of the subtile forms is appeal to pedantic words or phrases, of which Fischer comments, ‘is committed by scholars who never use a little word when a big one will do.’ (p. 285) (Of course had I written it, it’d read, ‘…who never utilize a diminutive vocable when a sesquipedalian term will suffice.
Fischer emphasizes that historians who commit fallacies are not necessarily attempting to deceive or even necessarily bad historians. Good historians compose historical arguments akin to chain mail not chains. If a link if weak in chain mail it does not render the mail ineffective unless of course it is a vital area. He also concludes with a section on the utility of history, primarily by understanding the past we further understand the present and can better deal with its hostilities. I liked this book so much I bought it; Amazon.com should deliver my copy on Wednesday.
