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Historical  Mode of Inquiry                                

Nature of "Knowledge"

Historical knowledge is knowledge about who and what has come before. Historical knowledge is a narrative, in its basic sense an account of how "events" have followed one another in time. It must follow a chrono-logic.

Two sets of rules for introducing contributions to the narrative exist: For the introduction of new events, textual evidence of some kind is needed to support the claim for the occurrence of the event. Primary sources are better than secondary and corroborative evidence is important. It requires a tangible record of some phenomenon. The second set of rules deals with the introduction of new or alternative connections between events. Here the method resembles that of the other scholars because a version of Scholarly dialectic takes over.

Inquiry—Historical Inquiry

Historical inquiry has two stages (two kinds): empirical and interpretive. In the empirical phase stage or kind of inquiry, the Historian seeks to establish the "facts" (assemble and validate the texts which represent the events.  The second stage is the interpretive stage examining these texts to create a narrative.
            Historical Inquiry sequence:

  1. Identifying the Problem
    EMPERICAL STAGE
  2. Identifying Relevant Texts
  3. Searching for Relevant Texts
  4. Assembling and Validating Relevant Texts
    INTERPRETIVE STAGE
  5. Seeking Pattern(s) in Texts
  6. Explaining the Pattern(s): Creating a Narrative
  7. Relating New Narrative to Existing narratives: The Communal Dialectic
  8. Disseminating to a Wider Audience

All historical problems can be said to arise in the context of the overall narrative, out of some perceived gap or error in the history itself. Two kinds of historical inquiry—pedagogical and institutional.  Like all other forms of inquiry, historical inquiry is essentially a search for patterns that can be deemed meaningful—in this case, patterns of some kind(s) of features in the texts regarded as evidence of some events. Two patterns have dominated—the decline of the teaching of writing, or at least rhetoric, from past to present; the second pattern traces movement from bad toward good, the latter being what we believe or do now (notion of progress). Most of the historians narratives favor the same broad sweep and smooth logic of progress and decline.

A historian checks their narrative in two directions: against the empirical data it purports to account for, and whether other Historians agree that the pattern is in fact there.
Simply contributing to the communal narrative is not enough; here is a need, bordering on a compulsion, to draw for readers—presumably non-Historians—some moral from the story, some lessons from history.  Connors statement—"we see ourselves as reformers as well as scholars. Propagandistic agenda as well as informative agends.

The danger of this propagandistic agenda is that the fervor of reformation will lead to claims that fall outside the boundaries of dialectic response, and so subvert the very inquiry they are trying to perpetuate. Down that road lies the demise of methodological integrity.

Major figures:
Robert Connors, Edward Corbett, Richard E. Hughes, Sharon Crowley, Frand D'Angelo, Lisa Ede, Andrea Lunsford, Albert Kitzhaber, Knoblauch and Brannon (?)

 

 

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This site contains direct excerpts from The Making of Knowledge in Composition by Stephen North. Portsmouth: Heineman, 1987.
Lirvin Researching | Site created by Lennie Irvin, San Antonio College (2007) | Last updated August 20, 2007