Objectivity is a method, not a claim to have no point of view

The argument

Proponents of this position argue that the case against objective history usually attacks a definition no historian uses. The objection assumes that writing objectively would mean writing from nowhere, with no background, nationality or sympathies, which is plainly impossible. Proponents argue that objectivity in history means something different and achievable: a discipline of procedures designed to catch the errors a historian's own position would otherwise produce. Those procedures, on this account, are specific and testable. A claim must rest on evidence that can be cited and inspected by someone who disagrees. Sources are assessed for who produced them, for whom and with what interest. Where the record is thin or contradictory, the uncertainty is stated rather than smoothed over. Counter-evidence is addressed rather than omitted, and work is submitted to specialists who have every professional incentive to find what is wrong with it. Proponents argue that a historian who follows these rules can reach conclusions another historian with opposite sympathies will accept, and that this happens routinely on questions of what occurred, when, and in what sequence. They add that the proof is in how the field behaves. Proponents argue that historical claims are revised when documents are opened, overturned when a reading is shown to be mistaken, and abandoned when the evidence goes against them, including claims their authors would have preferred to keep. On this account a body of work that corrects itself against evidence is behaving objectively whatever the individual beliefs of its contributors. The argument concludes that because objectivity consists in a method that constrains conclusions rather than in the absence of a viewpoint, history can be written objectively.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics reply that the method constrains answers without constraining questions, and that the decisive choices in writing history are made before any procedure applies: which subject is worth a book, which archive is consulted, which lives count as part of the story. They add that peer review polices work against the assumptions a field already shares, so it corrects individual error while entrenching collective bias, which is the harder problem. Critics also note that the examples of self-correction tend to involve matters of fact such as dates and sequences, while the interpretive claims that make a history worth reading are precisely the ones that do not get settled this way.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Redefining objectivity as a method concedes the original objection, since the claim in dispute is whether the resulting account is free of the historian's standpoint. [Rejecting P2] The procedures constrain answers without constraining questions, and the decisive choices of subject, archive and starting point are made before any of them applies. [Rejecting P3] Self-correction operates mainly on matters of fact such as dates and sequences, while the interpretive claims that make a history worth reading are not settled this way, and peer review tests work against assumptions the field already shares. [Rejecting C] At most it follows that historians can be disciplined about evidence, not that a history can be written from no standpoint.