Insight and Hindsight: Historiographic Perspective Between Past and Present

Georg Gangl (University of Oulu, University of Ostrava)

In recent years, an intense debate has been going on in historiography and its philosophy about the aim and perspective of the discipline: Should the historian aim to describe the past in the way historical actors experienced it, i.e. should they try to gain insight into their actions and the reasons for their acting? Or should they make full use of their perspective in the future of the past, using hindsight to describe it in ways the historical actors could never have? Each of these positions comes with its own problems: Historiographic insight is faced with questions about the epistemic possibility of “entering” into the heads of past actors, and historiographic hindsight is confronted with questions about the legitimacy of anachronistic and presentist (re-)descriptions of the past.
 
This talk will offer a compatibilist approach to the question of hindsight and insight, based on informational epistemology and a coherentist understanding of the justification of historiographic claims. This means there is no need to choose categorically between the perspectives, although there is a sense in which hindsight is prior to insight, as I will argue.