Trust, Testimony, and the Epistemic Value of Historical Narrative

One of the significant contributions of narrativist philosophy of history (in its three branches: analytical, phenomenological, and poststructuralist) is its emphasis on the limitations of relying solely on “strictly” epistemic considerations to evaluate historical narrative. Rather than assessing narratives solely based on their compatibility with empirical evidence, which is often perceived as theoretically neutral and devoid of moral values, narrativism urges a broader perspective. This is because, on the one hand, there is no value-neutral or literal way of describing or classifying people and their behavior. On the other hand, following Ian Hacking, there is the 'looping effect' between kinds of people and the people classified. Which is why narrativism found an important ally in various constructivist theories of linguistic meaning (what is generally and vaguely referred to as the 'linguistic turn'. In other words, Narrativists, without denying the relevance of evidential evaluation have expanded the criteria by appealing to a phenomenological notion of temporal experience as the ultimate referent of narrative, or in terms of a non-naive sense of Esthetics, or in Ethics and moral terms. In fact, narrativism has undeniably facilitated a sincere 'ethical turn' within the discipline, giving rise to what Paul Roth has named the “epistemic intractability” of historical narrative.

My motivation in this regard is twofold, on the one hand, to warn and recognize that main disputes in academia and in the public sphere regarding the acceptability of narratives about the past continue to be in terms of epistemic values, that is, trust, truth in relation to the facts, the evidence or the reality itself (as it can be seen in post-truth and fake news phenomena). However, in these discussions, I detect that certain notions of "truth", "science" and "epistemology", already questioned and/or totally challenged during the 20th century, are still circulating. This necessitates clarifying what is meant by "epistemology" and "epistemic validity," encouraging us to explore recent approaches in the field, especially focusing on interpersonal epistemology of testimony. That is, a philosophical approach that explores the extent to which the epistemic evaluation of our factual, theoretical, and narrative accounts is framed in terms of notions of authority, trust, and cognitive or epistemic responsibility embedded within an epistemic community that recognizes or shares an identity narrative. This will lead to a philosophical inquiry into what it means for 'a person to believe in other people, in their words,' as well as being believed by others. In other words, what is involved in being or not being recognized as an epistemic agent by the community and being a victim or perpetrator of epistemic injustice. On the other hand, my second motive, to counter (or at least to attenuate) a kind of reading of White's work as part of an anti-epistemological drift in narrativist philosophy of history. My interpretation of White's legacy aims to demonstrate that his theses explicitly critique professional historians' use of an outdated epistemological framework. But, in deploying criteria for the acceptance or rejection of narratives, he employs a vocabulary akin to recent epistemology of testimony, explicitly referencing concepts such as trust, authority, cognitive responsibility, and implicitly (or in a precursor sense) epistemic injustice.