On Historical Evidence

This thesis aims to explore the basic part of historical knowing-historical evidence.The research revolved around the following question:"Why can the identical historical evidence result in opposite conclusions?" Through the review of academic history,this diesis found that scholars often confuse the concepts of historical evidence and historical materials,and avoid/cover the reflection on historical evidence by discussing the related issues of historical materials.This means that we need not only to clarify our concepts,but also to reconstruct the logical relationship between historical evidence and historical materials.Therefore,in chapter 2 and chapter 3,the concepts of"evidence" and "historical evidence" are analyzed in detail,even tediously.By using the methods of analytic philosophy,I tried to reveal clearly the implied content behind the argumentative language(system),that is,the mutual commitment and interaction between evidence and ontology So there are two directly related questions:1.Can historical evidence exist without historical ontology in historical knowing(that is,necessity)?2.What is the relationship between the authenticity of historical evidence and historical ontology(that is,authenticity)?I discussed the two questions in chapters 4 and 5 separately.In chapter 4,the idea of historical evidence in ancient Greece was taken as a case to show the influence of ontology on the idea of evidence,and then,with an ideological experiment,the necessity was discussed in the way of proofing by contradiction.In chapters 5,the issue of historical truth was discussed from a macroscopic view(that is,combing the history of historiographical ideas from the perspective of cognitive model),and a reasonable model,in my opinion,was posted to judge historical truth.In chapter 6,a specific case(that is,to explore Davis'use of a set of evidence)was used to test the practical effectiveness of the theoretical assumptions which were the way of thinking and conclusions in the previous chapters of this tiesis.Universality requires theory to focus on not only the past and the present,but also the future.In the last part,as a summary of the foll text,or as a fuhure orientation,I discussed the basic issues of new technology application in historical research in future.