The last chapter clarified how historians of heterogeneous backgrounds agree on much of historiography. This chapter attempts to explain historiographic disagreements. I argue that the best explanation of dissent on historiographic issues within the uncoerced heterogeneous group of historians who work within the Rankean paradigm is the absence of knowledge of history and the alternative dominance of historiographic opinion. Historiographic opinions are historiographic hypotheses that are not better confirmed than inconsistent competing hypotheses. It is necessary to understand first why some historiographic hypotheses cannot use the theories and methods outlined in the previous chapter and achieve the status of probable knowledge. Then, I will outline areas of historiographic opinion and their sociological manifestation.

Historiographic skepticism predicts disagreements among historians that should reflect their varying perspectives. If historiography is indeterminate in relation to the evidence, inconsistent historiographies could result from contradictory social interests and ideological rifts. Still, it is impossible to reduce all or even most historiographic disagreements to ideological and cultural biases or economic and social interests. To do so, skeptics must prove statistical correlations between historiographies and social or ideological variables. But fairly homogenous groups of historians are nevertheless rife with historiographic disagreements. To be sure, social and political convictions may explain differences in historiographic interpretations expressed in the values that historians use to decide what was significant, good, or bad about history. But the topic of this book is historiographic knowledge and opinion, not historiographic interpretation.