The Uncertainties of Knowledge by Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein

The Uncertainties of Knowledge by Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein

Author:Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein [Wallerstein, Immanuel Maurice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Politics & Social Sciences, Philosophy, Social Sciences, Methodology, Sociology
Amazon: B003TV441S
Publisher: Temple University Press
Published: 2004-02-28T05:00:00+00:00


PART 1 1

Dilemmas of the

Disciplines

7

Myth, the presumed structure of the pre-modern or the savage ... mind, was the single belief the enlightened class did not tolerate. Discrediting it seemed vital to the superiority of the modern world view.

-Vassihs Lambropoulos (1993, 162)

If human activity is the direct product of the gods, then recounting it is a sacred duty and can only be fulfilled by being faithful to the intent of the gods. But if human activity is the total responsibility of humans, then no referential authority is required to recount it, to analyze it, to interpret it. Modern science defined itself as the explanation of the natural as opposed to the magical. Science refused to accept magic as a meaningful category of reality. Magic was an illusion. The fact that people believed in illusions was real and subject to scientific analysis-but only if the scientist rejected a priori the validity of magic.

History-or perhaps I should say modern history, history as written in the nineteenth and twentieth centurieswas the child of this scientific passion. History, wie es eigent- lichgewesen ist, refused to accept revealed truth, speculation, fiction-that is, magic-as meaningful categories of reality. They were illusions. Thus it is that, for two centuries at least, history has been in search of science.

The search has been incessant, and is embedded in the ever-present litany about objectivity. It makes no difference that objectivity was pursued in hypocritical ways (see Novick 1988; also Diamond 1992). The belief in an objective truth that is knowable has been the prevailing doctrine of the world's historians for these two centuries. The basic data used by these historians were the so-called primary documents, that is, documents that for some reason recorded events at the time they occurred, or were in fact the events themselves. Secondary documents were defined as those things that used documents, even primary documents, without being themselves primary documents. Secondary documents were dubious evidence because of the intrusion into the knowledge circuit of a nonparticipant in the event, an intruder whose motives were uncertain. But even seemingly primary documents were suspect. Any such purported document was submitted to a Quellenkritik, a verification of the plausibility of its authenticity.

Source criticism was, to be sure, a highly controversial doctrine in historiography. For it was feared by some that source criticism could first of all be applied to the Bible, a document that had long been treated by Europeans as an unimpeachable primary document. And indeed, Quellenkritik was applied to the Bible in the form of the "Higher Criticism," whose beginnings occurred alongside the modern historiographical revolution. Historians thus joined natural scientists in their struggle with the churches, at least with any dogmatic and literalist interpretation of revealed truth. It matters not that many noted historians were pious believers. So was Isaac Newton. What matters is the essentially secular, scientistic claim of the historians: there is a real world, which evolves naturally, and its history can be known.

How is it, then, that historians came to be classed for the most part as opponents of science, as part of that other, more literary, "culture" of which C.



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