Historical Objectivity and Conceptual Frameworks: A Critical Study of Kant and Hegel

Kant and Hegel brought to attention the inescapability of conceptual frameworks in all areas of inquiry. The aim of this thesis is to assess the impact of this point on contemporary discussions of objectivity in history. ;My strategy consists of four steps. First, I consider several types of historical knowledge for which claims of objectivity are made: reportage, explanation, description, and evaluation. I raise the possibility that the presence of conceptual frameworks defeats the claim for the objectivity of explanations in history. ;Second, an examination of the views of Kant and Hegel on explanations in history highlights the questionable character of claims for their objectivity. The significant patterns in the historical process to which explanations purport to refer do not lie waiting to be discovered in that process. On the contrary, significant patterns in the historical process and explanations in history texts are understood and formulated in terms of conceptual frameworks brought to their investigations by historians. ;Third, I criticize the moves of Kant and Hegel to avoid the possibility that historians merely invent significant patterns in history. They each mistakenly take one particular conceptual framework as a standard for the adequacy of all others. ;Finally, I argue that while there can be many possible conceptual frameworks in terms of which explanations and significant patterns in history are understood, there are non-Kantian and non-Hegelian ways of assessing the suitability of these frameworks