| This is a disquisition on Ku Chieh-kang's history epistemology. The author argued that the most distinctly characteristic of Ku's history research is his emphasis on the subjective after sliding over the noumenon of history. The thesis analyzed the most famous theories of Ku Chieh-kang: "not to establish one certain truth", "development as stories", "only pursuing its changes" and "the accumulating history of ancient China". These theories actually constituted a logical circle of sliding over the noumenon of history, emphasizing on the subjective, and changes of historical epistemology after the emphasizing.In the introduction, the author narrated the researches about Ku Chieh-kang's historical theories up to now, confined the researching fields and topic limits of this paper, and pointed out the process and methods of his study.There are six chapters in this essay other than introduction and conclusion part.It is necessary to analyze Ku Chieh-kang's history epistemology for the understanding of his historical research. Then the first chapter of the essay concentrated on the question of "argument from silence". In this chapter the author analyzed the difference between Ku Chieh-kang and Chang Yin-lin in the question of "argument from silence" and pointed out that this question should not be recognized as a pure methodology question, and that there are epistemological settings beyond methodology itself. After strict reasoning, the author realized that the limits of argument from silence which were brought forward by Introduction to the study of history are not really work. Argument from silence was always illogical since it is a logical fallacy, but it can be used in historical research when people did not take noumenon of history as the sole purpose of historical writing. Chang Yin-lin's criticism on Ku Chieh-kang's abuse of argument from silence was based on his positivism, in which Ku's theory could not be limited. For Ku, the purpose of history is "not to establish one certain truth, but only pursuing its changes". Therefore, when he used argument from silence, what he really felt on is not the noumenon of history but historical documents and history as memory of ancient people. In this case, argument from silence was usable for him. People mistook the question of argument from silence for about 80 years just because they did not distinguish the different epistemologies before talking about argument from silence. So it is very necessary to attach importance to history epistemology.The article concentrated on the logical circle inside Ku Chieh-kang's history epistemology since the second chapter. The second chapter referred to the first step and the foundation of this circle: sliding over the noumenon of history, so-called "not to establish one certain truth" in Ku's own works. In this chapter, the author explained this theory and pointed out five thoughts permeated in Ku's historical career which have consanguineous relation with it. These thoughts were: 1, the manufacturing of ancient Chinese history was premeditative, purposive and had its own theory. 2, rationally throw doubt on the quality of historical documents as the evidence of external history itself. 3, ancient history and story should be studied with same methods because they have the same nature. 4, documents about one specifically story should be ranged by their written age, and we can find out the times spirit beyond them through researching their difference. 5, as a kind of social science, history should concentrate not only on the noumenon of history, but also on historical writings as text. The second chapter proved that sliding over the noumenon of history was the logic basement of Ku's history epistemology by the expatiation of these five thoughts.Because of Ku's "not to establish one certain truth", subjective replaced the status of noumenon and became the most powerful factor in history writing. This usurpation was expressed by Ku's "development as stories" which was discussed in the third chapter. Ku Chieh-kang researched many kinds of folk culture such as myth, legend and story. These narration forms have their own characteristic that they did not insist in the pursuit of "one certain truth" like history. For them, the influence of subjective is obvious. Ku convinced himself of the profound effect of subjective in history. He knew that both history proceeding and narrator could change the narration content. With his eyesight of story, Ku understood many "things never have been understood". The third chapter depicted Ku's discovering of subjective by his "eyesight of story".Many changes happened in Ku Chieh-kang's history research because of his emphasis on subjective. The most notable one was the change of object's nature in history study. The author reviewed Ku's research method of "history proceeding" and the effect after using this method in chapter four. For Ku, historical documents were not only the imprint of external history, but also the result of human being's mental activity. Then it could be treating as text which was defined by Paul Ricoeur as "any utterance fixed by writing". So we could call his research method as "text transforming".Ku Chieh-kang studied traditional history through the measure of text transforming. There were many basic elements such as traditional method of textual research, historicism, experimentalism, evolutionism, humanism and the emphasis on text which mixed within Ku's theory. The reciprocity of these elements engendered conflict and new idiosyncrasy in Ku's thought. There were three of them: the conflict between historicism and humanism, the tensile force between intentionally manufacturing and unconsciously false in history research, cognition cycle between subjective and text. The fifth chapter explained these three changes caused by Ku's emphasis on subjective.After sliding over the noumenon of history, emphasis on subjective and the result caused by the two steps before, Ku's logical circle of history epistemology came to its terminus. That was one of Ku's famous conclusions: "the accumulating history of ancient China". For history, the external goal and subjective way were always conflict each other. The conflict made out a dilemma in history research that people could never touch external history itself directly which they want to know, the only way to catch the hint of external history was study documents. But Ku Chieh-kang's theory of "the accumulating history of ancient China" solved this problem on a certain extent by desalting the importance of external history and emphasis subjective in history writing and began the transforming of epistemology in history science. The sixth chapter argued about Ku's theory of "the accumulating history of ancient China" and finished the mainpart of this paper.At the epilogue, the author concluded Ku Chieh-kang's history epistemology and pointed out that subjective was one part of history nature like external history itself and could not be totally erased from history writing. Both external history and subjective had crucial importance in history science which could not be tenable without either of them. Totally external history just means totally lost of truth in history practice.
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