Historical facts

By Dr Michael Stanford

new perspective Vol 2,  No 1

MANY OF YOU KNOW E.H. CARR’S BOOK, What is History? He answers, ‘… it is a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts …’1 If that explains what history is, then we must ask ‘What are the historian’s facts?’ I disagree with Carr that there are special ‘facts of history’.2 But what are facts? The dictionary says a fact is ‘something that has really occurred …’. What is this ‘something’? Charles I died on the scaffold. That is ‘something that really occurred’. But what did occur? His death; not the fact. Facts do not occur; events do that. A fact is not an event, for events happen at a particular time and place; but the fact that Charles I died on the scaffold is everywhere a fact, and has been since 1649.

Facts are Thoughts to Test our Ideas

Two things should be noted about that phrase - ‘the fact that Charles I died on the scaffold’. One is that using the word ‘fact’ claims that what the sentence says is true; in other words, the sentence (‘Charles ... scaffold’) is a true proposition. The second point is that facts (like truths and propositions) are not material like kings and scaffolds, but ideal - like thoughts. It is nonsense to ask how heavy is a fact. Nor is it the sort of thing you can trip over or spill coffee on. It is immaterial, like the number three or democracy. But a fact is not an idea, for ideas include guesses and doubts. Facts, we feel, must be certain. We use the facts to test our ideas. You can change your ideas, we say, but you can’t alter the facts. Facts, then, look like true propositions.

Now, given a true proposition (like ‘Paris is the capital of France’), what makes it true? Surely, the facts about Paris and France. This suggests that a fact is a real state of affairs that corresponds to a proposition and makes that proposition true. The real state of affairs in Whitehall on 30 January 1649 consisted of frosty air, soldiers, a crowd, a wooden scaffold, a headsman, an axe, and so on. These are material things. But we have just seen that a fact is not a material thing. That state of affairs lasted only for a short time and was at one place; facts do not exist at any particular time or place.

Have we contradicted ourselves? We have concluded that facts are both material and immaterial; that they are tied to points of time and space, and yet are free of spatio-temporal limits. It is nonsense to ask where is Saturday or when is circularity. It is equally pointless to ask where is the fact that Charles died on the scaffold.

What we Can Mean by ‘Fact’

My own solution to the conundrum (you may be able to think of a better one) is that we can mean one of several things when we speak of a fact. Sometimes we use it for emphasis: ‘I saw him do it, and that’s a fact!’ This insists that I saw him do it. ‘Fact’ is used here only for rhetorical effect; it adds nothing. To say ‘It is a fact that Charles I died on the scaffold’ is to say no more than ‘Charles I died on the scaffold’. Sometimes, again, we use it as equivalent to a true proposition: ‘I will list the facts - (a) Parliament won the war...’. But at other times we use it as equivalent to a state of affairs or event: ‘The fact that the king had been beheaded shocked Europe’ - i.e. the beheading shocked Europe. Probably it is better on the whole to avoid the word ‘fact’ altogether.

Facts seem to belong both to the real world and to the realm of words. This holds an important lesson for historians, who have two tasks. One is to establish the truth about the state of affairs at any given time and place; this is the ‘world’ aspect of facts. The other is to give an accurate description of what they have established: this is the ‘word’ aspect. Should Charles’s execution be described as an act of justice, a political necessity, or judicial murder? A careful use of language is obligatory for the historian.

Finally, we must remember that both these duties of the historian call for skill and judgement. Neither the ‘world’ aspect of a fact nor the ‘word’ aspect is a God-given certainty. Each is a fallible human judgement. Historical judgements, as we all know, rest on available evidence. This is because they refer to the past. They must be inferred from evidence in the present. The historian has no facts in the sense of certainties; he has only evidence and a mind.

What Carr should have said is that history is a continuous interaction between the historian and his evidence.

Notes

1 See E.H. Carr, What is History? Penguin, 1964, p. 30.

2 Ibid. p. 12.

Dr Michael Stanford is the author of A Companion to the Study of History, Basil Blackwell, 1994.