Abstract

Although Murphey finds the question "is history scientific?" to be fruitless if not pointless, he does find it of great importance to ask just what it is that historians are doing and how they might do it better. "If truth is to be the daughter of time, it is the historian who must make the delivery, and the quality of his midwifery could stand improvement". At the root of all Murphey’s speculation is the question "just what is ‘historical knowledge'?" It has always been claimed that "history is a discipline which seeks to establish true statements about events which have occurred and objects which have existed in the past". Yet what can this really mean, asks Murphey? Clearly Murphey wants no part of any "empathetic" gestures on the part of historians who claim that they can imaginatively transmigrate back in time. The past as past is not given, or as James Collins, citing Robert Ardley, pointed out recently, "history is what you cannot touch." Just what can we say that "knowing the past" really means, if in fact it means anything? Murphey takes quite serious the implications of Bertrand Russell’s remark that "there is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that ‘remembered’ a wholly unreal past." Murphey argues quite effectively that such an hypothesis involves a complete and inescapable skepticism, more complete than even Danto realized. But Murphey counters this hypothesis by saying that "we should reject Russell’s proposal, not because it is refuted by empirical evidence, but because it is more complex than the alternative". I am not altogether certain that Murphey clearly shows the relatively greater complexity of Russell’s hypothesis, nor that, in the long run, he can work himself free of it.