Historical Research and the Philosophy of History
Most of the essays in the book, The Historian as Detective, approach history from a somewhat scientific outlook. The authors of these essays deal with the problems of historical research and constructing a puzzle from a pool of tiny pieces, which are not all present. In this sense, the authors look at historical research as a scientific problem which must be solved by gathering and examining all of the evidence. Some of the authors deal with gathering these pieces, looking for hidden objects. Other authors deal with interpreting the evidence properly, keeping the valuable items while throwing out the worthless ones. The title of the book reflects the editor's bent: looking to the detective's vocation in fashioning an approach to historical evidence gathering and interpretation.
The first three parts of the book which illustrate this point well. In these parts, Winks includes essays which deal with the gathering of evidence and the reliability of that evidence. For instance, Robin Collingwood looks at the reliability of "testimony," as that term might be applied to historical evidence. Collingwood uses the term "testimony" to refer to the questioning process which a historian must apply to evidence. He says that the historian must question all of this evidence in his own mind, asking himself whether the fits together and what it means. He asserts that there are no ready-made statements in history. He uses the example of a detective investigating a murder. In that example, a reverend's daughter claims that she killed the victim. Collingwood states that the scientific historian does not ask whether the girl's statement is true, but why she would make such a statement.
A similar essay is that of Winks himself, who compares autobiographies with biographies. As Winks points out, the critical difference between the two forms of history is the authorship. The autobio...