Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen tells about his talk:
I begin my talk with a reconsideration in what sense historiography is an empirical discipline and what historiographical knowledge is. Through brief examinations of the concepts of empiricism, evidence, representation and inference, my suggestion is that understanding historiographical knowledge and justification requires a new kind of approach, which penetrates into the inferential structures of claiming in historiography.
To put be it briefly, the idea is that historiographical knowledge is claiming correctly and the challenge is to determine, what correctness amount to in the practice of historiography. The paper argues for a practice revolt, demonstrating by way of a case study on a historiography of Finnish civil war, how philosophy and historiography mesh with each other. The key task is to examine, how historians’ claims are practically warranted within his text. There are at least six different kinds linguistic acts with variable textual and non-textual grounding.
For more information, please contact:
Professor jani.hakkarainen [at] tuni.fi (Jani Hakkarainen)