The Structure Of Historical Facts

The object of the dissertation is not to describe or interpret the essence of the historical facts, in fact, which is the goal that I have given up, but to present and make clear some concepts such as the Objective History and so on, which enable us to discuss the historical facts in a way of productive results.Here, the dissertation is fully confident of the very primary belief of existence of objective reality of history and accepts the definition of History given by W. H. Walsh in his standard works, the Philosophy of History-Introduction, of which the whole activity of human in the past is named HistoryⅠ.By distinguishing between The Objectivity as the descriptive concept and The Objective as the normative concept, the dissertation will abstract the concept the Objective History from the usual sense of HistoryⅠand establishes the relation between Objective History and the historical text as HistoryⅡcorresponds with the difference of Bedeutung and Sinn by Friedrich L. Frege. Thereby, the historical text is only the way of recognizing the Objective History without reference to the true or the false because the standard of judging the value of the historical text should better be its application. Besides, it must be pointed out that the Objective History is absolutely different from the historical text but in the daily practice of historical studies, the both are always transforming into a compound concept the Objective-Textual History, of course, which is not a bad thing for history. In fact, the dissertation is inclined to think that a=b, at the aspect of accumulating knowledge at least, is of great worth than a=a, because we may say the latter without any information while the former is not always tenable transcendentally.However, the dissertation has reason to draw a line between the Objective History and the historical text. Moreover, on the premise of accepting Carl Becker's views on historical facts and by intensively reading the classical text, What are Historical Facts, which has been comprehended simply until now, the dissertation will construct a model containing four categories: objective historical facts, ideal historical facts, non-objective historical facts and non-ideal historical facts:In the graph above, A is used to designate objective historical facts,B ideal historical facts, namely, the historical texts, A non-objectivehistorical facts, B non-ideal historical facts. So, A∩B indicates the intersection of the objective historical facts and the ideal historical facts,A∩B the intersection of the objective historical facts and the non-ideal historical facts, A∩B the intersection of the ideal historical facts and the non-objective historical facts, A∩B the intersection of the non-objective historical facts and the non-ideal historical facts.As a category of meta-history, A∩B has no meaning in the daily practice of historical study. In other words, the historians can not be certain of both objective historical facts and ideal ones simultaneously. The more exact objective historical facts are, the more inaccurate ideal historical facts are, and visa versa.Under no consideration, historians have all the inclination to drivingA∩B out of the scope of history. However, A∩B is of great significance to describing the nature of history because it indeed exists the practice ofhistorical study. Concretely speaking, the category can be comprehendedfrom four sub-hierarchies: A∩B reflects some basic reality; A∩B obscures or distorts some basic reality; A∩B covers the absence of somebasic reality; A∩B becomes self-simulacrum strictly without any relation to reality.With reference to A∩B and A∩B, historians can never deal with the both categories in their everyday study but the former denotes thesilent historical facts, which is not avoidable to reconstruct the authentic and perfect picture of the past, though it can not be observed directly while the latter may be regarded as Heidegger's Nicht, and which can be comprehended by the metaphor of Dirac's positron.Moreover, except A∩B, a triangle relation below consists of the other three categories A∩B, A∩B and A∩B, which makes separately one vertex standing for the historical facts of absolute condition. As forthe interior zone of the triangle, every point matches one specific historical fact of multiple attributions. For example, historians may say the m segment of the historical fact X falls into A∩B but the n segmentA∩B. In short, the triangular graph draws the whole area of the daily practice of history covering to the full extent.In order to deepening the concept of historical fact, the dissertation will cross the boundary of history and make s survey of negation of history by studying dialectically the computer games of history and the common discourse of history, which will lead us to a conclusion that history and its negation may refer to the same Bedeutung in a reverse manner.On the whole, the writing of the dissertation, to the root of the matter, can only describe the daily practice of historical studies without any interference.