This chapter has the title it does, rather than merely “the history of historiography”, because setting about that writing requires five sections of discussion of the necessary preliminaries before we finally achieve success in the last two sections.

Historiography of historiography: prior considerations

We may here summarize our position, which has involved generalizing from the philosophical modelling of science to the philosophical modelling of historiography, in terms of some main elements as follows:

1. The philosophical model of a discipline is typically offered as being both descriptive and prescriptive.

2. Second-order justification is necessary for us to accept a model of a discipline as a true model, regardless of that model's subject matter (that is, it is irrelevant whether the model in its first-order context is itself a model of justification).

3. Generalizing from the post-Hempel discussion in the philosophy of science, where philosophical opponents shared the appeal to historical facts about science, we regard the appeal to historical facts (being continuous with everyday understanding) as also the appropriate second-order justification for the philosophical modelling of historiography. It was self-evident to the parties to the post-Kuhn discussion that this historiographical appeal should be made, but that it is self-evident is a contingency relative to the state of our understanding.

4. In recovering historical facts about a discipline, the prescriptive and the descriptive are necessarily linked.

5. The philosophy of a discipline requires the historiographical recovery of the model characterizing the discipline (recalling again that historiographical recovery is continuous with everyday recovery, and recalling again that the model may be pluralistically understood).

6. […]