Postnarrativist Philosophy of Historiography

Postnarrativist Philosophy of Historiography argues that narrativism has made important contributions to the theory and philosophy of historiography but that it is now time to move beyond it to postnarrativism. Much of the theorizing of historiography has focused on defending either absolutist historical realism or relativist postmodernism. Kuukkanen shows how it is possible to reject the truth-functional evaluation of interpretations and yet accept that historiography can be assessed by rational standards. The postnarrativist view maintains that studies of history are informal arguments for theses about the past and that they are always located somewhere between subjectivity and objectivity.

Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Oulu in Finland. He received a PhD from the University of Edinburgh and has held academic positions in the Universities of Durham and Hull in the UK and Leiden in the Netherlands. Kuukkanen has been awarded Fulbright and EURIAS fellowships and has published in leading international journals in the theory and philosophy of history.

Preface
1. Introduction: The Narrativist Insight
2. From Analytic Philosophy of History to Narrativism
3. Three Tenets of Narrativist Philosophy of Historiography
4. Representationalism and Non-representationalism
5. Reasoning in Historiography
6. Colligation
7. Underdetermination and Epistemic Values
8. From Truth to Warranted Assertion
9. The Tri-partite Theory of Justification in Historiography
10. Historiography between Objectivism and Subjectivism
11. Coda: Postnarrativist Philosophy of Historiography
Bibliography