Historians' Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought by David Hackett Fischer

Historians' Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought Reviews

• 
  Stefania Dzhanamova

  I have been reading history extensively for over three years. About a year and a half ago, I read Savoie Lottinville's The Rhetoric of History – an essential guide for everyone who writes or wants to write history. It was an eye-opening book, for before I read it, it had not occurred me what a painstaking, complex process the writing of history is. It is akin to an iceberg. What the reader sees on the pages of the final product, the published book, is just the tip. The bulk of the work – the research – is hidden below the water. The author's knowledge of the subject he writes about far exceeds the knowledge he shares with the reader. Only this way he can convey the information in a graspable and confident manner. Weak written histories, just like weak books in general, result from cases in which the author lacks clear understanding of the event, figure, period etc. he is writing about. 
  
  Yet, being a historian is so much more than narrating events in history well. The process of analyzing, understanding, and interpreting the past correctly is the base of historical scholarship – in other words, the development of a specific thinking, a logic of historical thought, as David Hackett Fischer calls it in his outstanding guide for historians. In HISTORIANS' FALLACIES, he brings attention to the many and varied mistakes of logic a historian can commit.
  
  I have lost count of the times I have heard or read someone express his frustration with history for its universal relativity. History, according to many, is infallibly subjective and open to re-intepretation, which, allegedly, makes historical analysis pointless because it never yields definitive answers. To my delight, Fischer disagrees with this point of view. While history is indeed always open to re-intepretation, that is mostly so because the many objective truths that are to be told about the past are frequently wrongly understood and interpreted by historians – whether on purpose or by accident.
  
  Just like any other person, a historian cannot be fully objective. The desire to prove one's point of view often beclouds objectivity and compels one to wrench historical facts to suit oneself instead of adapting one's theories to the unarguable facts. I have found many instances of historians' falling into this trap in the books I read. Recently, for instance, I read Frederik Logevall's EMBERS OF WAR, in which he is so determined to prove that South Vietnam's Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem was a dictator that he attempts to conform the facts to his thesis – with unconvincing results. Facts are, fortunately or not, very stubborn things. 
  
  That is why being a historian is difficult. I do not think that it is even possible to become so aware and so unbiased as to produce a perfect historical analysis. Nevertheless, there are important rules that can help any historian improve his reasoning and develop a sound logic of historical thinking that would help him free himself at least partially from the narrow-minded tendency to prove one's own point of view no matter what. David Fischer outlines those rules in the form of different kinds of fallacies that threaten historians on their quest for the truth.
  
  These fallacies are organized in three main sections: fallacies of inquiry, of explanation, and of argument. The biggest category is, not surprisingly, the fallacies of explanation, for while most historians would not venture to falsify facts, they would conveniently interpret those facts wrongly. Fischer gives many on-point examples to illustrate his argument. One example that stuck with me discussed the taxes in Boston in the years before the American Revolution. A certain historian expresses his outrage at the allegedly egregious taxes Great Britain burdened Bostonians with – they had to pay thirteen pounds in taxes – and argues that it was because of such taxes that the Bostonians revolted. However, he never elaborates what exactly a tax of thirteen pounds meant at the time. How much money did the average citizen of Boston earn? How badly did a tax of thirteen pounds affect an average Bostonian's income? If the people of Boston paid a thirteen-pound tax, how much did the people of Great Britain pay? Those are important questions, and their answers can easily transform the picture of an oppressed Bostonian into a lucky colonial subject who paid tolerable taxes – especially if compared to his British counterpart.
  
  It is impossible for me to enumerate all the different fallacies Fischer addresses, and there is no need. The main message I would like to convey is that to avoid or correct mistakes, one should first become aware of the mistakes he can make or has been making. I read this book carefully, highlighting almost every page, and tried to commit to memory as many of Fischer's warnings as possible. In the end, I understood that just like The Rhetoric of History did not do magic for my writing skills until I started persistently practicing my writing, HISTORIANS' FALLACIES would not make a brilliant historian out of me overnight. It is a useful guide, but the road to becoming a good historian is long and bumpy. To understand Fischer's point is one thing, to master analyzing history like he advises historians to is another. It would require many years of practice and a greater life experience than mine. Nevertheless, this work is an essential start, and I recommend it to every historian – and to every reader of history as well. 
• 
  Marc

  In the 50s and 60s of the twentieth century David Hackett Fischer was a renowned American historian who earned his spurs in the historiography of the United States. In 1970 he published this booklet in which he gives an almost exhaustive enumeration of the different types of methodological errors his colleagues of then and of the centuries before him have committed. As you can imagine the work caused a huge wave of indignation in the historical Guild. Of course, in itself his deed has something quite arrogant and pedantic. But Fischer didn't care: this booklet is written with so much authority, flair, wit and humor that the outrage can be seen as just petty reactions. Still, there are quite a few comments to be made on Fischer's approach. Fischer is an absolute empirist: historiography (and by extension all social sciences) can only be taken seriously if it is practised according to strictly empirical procedures; and this can be done only by asking the right questions and answering them according to a strict methodology (called “historical logic”). Fischer doesn’t dare to admit it anywhere, but with this starting point he puts himself in the pure positivist tradition.
  The booklet is full of outrage against all speculative historiography à la Spengler and Toynbee (rightly so), but he also wipes all meta-history and narrative history of the table. This pure empiricism may be a very sound basis for any scientific activity and evolution, but excluding all more theoretical or artistic points of view seems to me – philosophically - rather dubious and not a fruitful way of addressing science. However, I have read this book with a lot of pleasure: it is full of practical, methodical tips that indeed are very useful in the historical work. A big drawback however is that Fischer illustrates his propositions almost only with American examples.
• 
  Matt

  Great critical thinking when it comes to historiography. The logic chopping is a little pedantic at times but the overall affect is greater clarity on how to reach responsible historical conclusions.
  
  The problem however is that Fischer thinks historians should spend all their time answering "what" and "how" questions and avoid trying to answer "why" questions. Now "why" would he say that? Well he tells us. He says that the "why" questions deal with metaphysical issues that yield no fruitful or definitive results. Even if that is true, and I don't believe it is, the metaphysical questions are still the most interesting to beings who can't be reduced to the physical realm.
  
  I don't believe that Fishcer's scientific "what-and-how-only-approach" is much better at producing certainty either. For instance, "what" kind of document is the Constitution of the United States and "how" did it come to be? Well, some say that it is primarily influenced by British Capitalism ("the pursuit of happiness"), others that its primarily influenced by French ideas of equality ("all men are created equal") , others that the classical idea of a well informed, upstanding citizenry is the primary influence ("the consent of the governed"), others say Christianity and the Puritan moral vision is still calling the shots ("endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights"). To complicate matters there are those who argue that the Constitution is a betrayal of the Declaration of Independence and others that it is basically faithful to it and still others who believe that it is an almost pure extension of its values.
  
  "How" did it come into its final form is tricky as well, since fifty-five delegates operated behind closed doors and were hopelessly divided between two factions of independently minded men like Madison and Hamilton on one side and Sam Adams and Patrick Henry on the other with guys like Washington caught in the middle. To make this even more confusing, some think that Madison caved to the anti-federalists by drawing up the Bill of Rights and others that he was tossing them some hushpuppies to shut their mouths so that the Constitution would pass.
  
  I also hope that this makes it clear that you may distinguish the "why" from the "what" and "how" and even "who" questions, but you will never separate it from those topics. What God has joined together, let no man, even a respectable historian, put asunder.
• 
  Sense of History

  Fischer is not a man of diplomatic language: "historians are inexact scientists, who go blundering about their business without a sufficient sense of purpose or procedure. They are failed scientists, who have projected their failures to science itself. Nothing could be more absurd, or more nearly antithetical to the progress of a potent discipline ". Naturally Fischer here refers to the indeed widespread dislike among historians against any theory of history and against the tendency to find laws and structures in history. I understand that dislike, though, because often theory is associated with such generalizations that any sound relationship to the reality of the past is lost; and the obsession to discover patterns, laws and structures in history regularly has amounted to inapt tunnel visions.
  
  Fischer shares that concern, because he turns out to be a thoroughbred empiricist who in his own history practice is very close to positivism. In this book the sarcastic comment on too speculative theory, syntheses and analyses is abundant, e.g. p 14: “In my opinion — and I may be a minority of one — that favorite adverb of historians should be consigned to the semantical rubbish heap. A 'why' question tends to become a metaphysical question. It is also an imprecise question, for the adverb 'why' is slippery and difficult to define. Sometimes it seeks a cause, sometimes a motive, sometimes a reason, sometimes a description, sometimes a process, sometimes a purpose, sometimes a justification. A 'why' question lacks direction and clarity; it dissipates a historian's energies and interests.”
  
  But at the same time Fischer really believes in a sound science of history, a science that obviously must be founded empirically. “There are many more practicable adverbs — who, when, where, what, how — which are more specific and more satisfactory. Questions of this sort can be resolved empirically, and from them a skilled historian can construct a project with much greater sophistication, relevance, accuracy, precision, and utility, instead of wasting his time with metaphysical dilemmas raised by his profound 'why' questions, which have often turned out to be about as deep as the River Platte”.
  
  In essence, Fischer is a very practical, pragmatic man: “history is, in short, a problem-solving discipline. A historian is someone who asks an open-ended question about past events and answers it with selected facts which are arranged in the form of an explanatory paradigm. These questions and answers are fitted to each other by a complex process of mutual adjustment. The resultant explanatory paradigm may take many different forms: a statistical generalization, or a narrative, or a causal model, or a motivational model, or a collectivized group-composition model, or maybe an analogy (…) always, it is articulated in the form of a reasoned argument” .
  
  Fischer's logic of historical thought is essentially a methodology, a very strict, rigorously applied methodology, without much consideration about the larger framework and the philosophical implications of the historical work. In other words, his book is very useful in this limited domain (regularly also extremely funny, though), but don’t expect more of it!
• 
  Jackie

  Excerpt from my report:
  
  Every so often, a work surfaces which attempts to redefine the boundaries of an idea or discipline. Einstein’s theory of relativity opened doors to new ways that physics could be perceived; Emile Durkheim infused a new validity into the study of sociology. Likewise, David Hackett Fischer’s Historians’ Fallacies seeks to do nothing less than change the way that history is understood by academics. Though noble in its cause, the book misses its mark: rather than expanding the possibilities of historical theory, as other revolutionaries have done in their respective disciplines, Fischer strives to narrow the spectrum of permissibility for what qualifies as acceptable historical research. What follows are a series of analyses and criticisms wherein Fischer often defies the regulations he has established elsewhere in the book. While Fischer’s criticism can serve as a useful guideline for historians, his restrictions are too severe to be followed absolutely.
  
  The greatest ongoing problem in Fischer’s analysis is that when providing examples to condemn a particular historical fallacy, he commits another fallacy he has already warned against. In his critique of misplaced literalism, he reprimands historians who would literally interpret John Marshall’s claim that he idolized democracy. To substantiate his complaint, Fischer reasons, “A glance at the contours of John Marshall’s career suggests that he did not idolize Jeffersonian democracy, or Jacksonian democracy, or indeed democracy in any accepted meaning.” Here, Fischer has made an authoritative claim about John Marshall’s true meaning. As the book continues, however, Fischer introduces the “fallacy of the one-dimensional man”, wherein the historian “reduces the complex psychic condition of men merely to their political roles.” It appears, here, that Fischer has broken his own law. By claiming to know decisively what John Marshall’s mindset was, even as Marshall uttered a statement to the contrary, Fischer depicts Marshall as a political entity incapable of having contrasting or complex opinions. Furthermore, Fischer’s mentioned “glance” at the contours of Marshall’s career does not offer any sufficient or concrete evidence to refute the claim that Marshall idolized democracy. It is discourteous for the author to discredit an argument without providing any explicit evidence for doing so, and it invalidates his example.
  
  In Fischer’s review of the fallacies of factual significance, he renounces what he calls the “furtive fallacy,” the idea that “reality is reduced to a set of shadows, flickering behind a curtain of flimsy rhetoric.” This fallacy would include the far-fetched conclusions of conspiracy theorists as well as, one can presume, a great number of journalists. While the furtive fallacy was rightfully introduced, Fischer seems to confuse misleading factual pronunciations with genuine historical interpretations. It is verifiably the case that many common historical narratives are fraught with hidden side-stories and questionable intentions. The narrative storyline of U.S. history which is commonly taught in schools excludes a great number of insidious details which are less palatable to the American public: the economic advantages offered by the constitution to its property-owning authors, for instance. Though it may be difficult to prove a conspiracy out of such facts, they deserve to be noted and explored with an array of possibilities. Fischer ought not to condemn the furtive fallacy outright, but rather to condemn it on the condition that it is not supported by facts. Provided a historian does not falsify information or arrive at unfounded conclusions, he should be permitted to deviate from the accepted understanding of an event and offer alternative explanations.
  
• 
  Missy

  Originally published in 1970.
  
  5/25/2019 2ND READING ATTEMPT - With my second attempt, I made it to chapter 6 of this book for my 52 Bookmark Reading Challenge prompt #24/52 - "Book you never finished"...Still never finished!
  
  It was highly recommended by Dr. Shane Bernard, historian on Avery Island, Louisiana. He claimed it was the most valuable book he's ever read. Great! This was exactly THE kind of book I had been looking for to help me determine a good history book (the truth) verses a bad one (propaganda), since we are having all these problems with the cancel culture and woke leftists trying to cancel out and change history. But, I need to search for another by a different author who writes in a language I can actually understand. On page 285, the author writes regarding a fallacy of many historians, a form of error is…”committed by scholars who never use a little word when a big one will do.” Well, this author could learn from his own writing. You need a dictionary handy just to decipher what it is he’s even talking about. But if you are a scholar, I'm sure you would actually rate this as top-notch. The 1-star is due to my own inadequacy for understanding, not for the quality of this book.
  
  7/22/2018 - 1ST READING ATTEMPT - What the hell did I just read? You seriously need a doctorates degree to read and understand this book! I read through the first chapter a month ago and found it to be way over my head. So I put it down. I actually had it ready to go in the Goodwill box but just couldn't see it go just yet.
  
  I did learn something substantial in that first chapter: That all historians write about history in their own biases and beliefs. Good or bad, right or wrong, their job is to present history to their readers, preferably backing up their writing with empirical proofs, and not their point of views. It is subjective and individual. Wow! I never even thought of it like that before. I've always just simply read and accepted every word in every history book as fact.
  
  Because of this insight, I decided to go ahead slowly and painstakingly try to read through it again and try to gleen at least one important piece of information from each chapter in hopes of learning how to critically read history books, news reports or any other nonfiction piece of work, and to determine if what I'm reading can be a "trusted" source. I found that I'm not smart enough to determine a truth from a lie. But, I did at least learn a little bit about how historians write and the many fallacies that could make or break their reputation as great historians. I was only able to read through half of chapter 6 before totally giving it up for good because I literally couldn't understand one single word they were writing about. It's back in the Goodwill box for the next brilliant mind...😒
  
  
  SEVEN RULES OF THUMBS FOR HISTORIANS
  
  1. Historical evidence must be a direct answer to the question asked and not to some other question.
  2. A historian should provide the best relevant evidence from sources closest to the actual event.
  3. Negative evidence is actually no evidence at all. An historians' evidence must prove a fact!
  4. The burden of proof rests solely on the historian author....rule of responsibility!
  5. If a historian can't prove A to be true, nor disprove B to be false, then the historian sets about proving A is more "probable" than B....rule of probability.
  6. [Did not understand]
  7. [Did not understand]
  
  Whelp! That's it folks! It's off to Goodwill.
• 
  Lynn Spencer

  I had to read this in college, and I'll admit that it seemed terribly dry the first time around. After all, in those days I wanted to learn history - not pick apart someone's writing style. However, I found my copy recently while doing some cleaning and sorting, and sat down to read it again.
  
  It really is a helpful book not just for reading and writing history, but for considering a whole host of subjects. The author does a good job of picking apart logical fallacies so that we can recognize them when we read a work more closely. It can make writing more intimidating, though, because I think it's impossible to read this book without worrying about how many of these issues might be infesting one's own work.
• 
  Paul Cornelius

  Classic text on the methodology of writing history. And humorous too. Fischer takes just about every historian of note--at the time--to task. I can't remember anyone emerging unscathed, including Fischer himself. And, frankly, his list of do's and don'ts is so thorough and pervasive that it may be impossible to write adhering to the "guidelines." While the book is relatively short, it should be read and thought over in short segments, perhaps to the accompaniment of a text illustrating the "faults." This was the first book I encountered in my freshman class on historiography almost fifty years ago.
• 
  Deb

  This book, which I loved, actually unfitted me for life in America. I cannot help but apply these logical tests to politicians, businessmen, religious leaders, and I find them lacking.
• 
  Richard Thompson

  It's a favorite lawyer trick to pick apart an opponent's argument and try to use small errors in reasoning to undermine the entire position, even when the mistakes of logic are small enough to leave the main line of argument unscathed. And I remember vividly how my father used to count grammatical errors in the speeches of politicians and then be unwilling to discuss the substance of what they had to say with me because he was so caught up in how the grammatical error count was proof that they were idiots so no substantive discussion was needed. These are the kind of behaviors that Mr. Fischer's approach encourages. I am certainly in favor of logically reasoned arguments that are free of fallacy where possible. But I couldn't help thinking that Mr. Fischer's obsession with rooting out the fallacies sometimes makes him miss the point.
  
  Mr. Fischer is so caught up with the minutiae that he commits the "can't see the forest for the trees" fallacy. Perhaps we should call it the argument "ad silvam." Though he sometimes praises the overall value of a historian's work right before ripping into it for some minor error in reasoning, he is mostly quick to dismiss histories in which he finds the fallacies that he enumerates without end. Any book length work is likely to have some fallacies, but can still be hugely valuable. Unfortunately, they are all shot down by Mr. Fischer's fallacy gun long before they can safely take flight. So it becomes easy to miss some of the bigger points in quibbling over the small ones. Marx and Freud, as examples, both had many fallacies in their works. Some of their fundamental ideas were dead wrong. But they were also both influential geniuses, whose works left us much of value to ponder. We can't let nit-picking fallacy hunting bury our greatest thinkers.
• 
  Peter Stein

  I'm not exactly the intended audience for this book, as I am not a professional historian or historiographer. The book is almost a reference book, painstakingly taxonomizing the many fallacies, large and small, that historians make. As a reader of history, but not a practitioner, I found the book interesting and entertaining, but not immediately useful.
  
  Substantively, his points are clear and well-argued, if overly nitpicky. The main area in which I would disagree with his arguments is his rather circumscribed view of the historian's role as an analyst. I don't know whether his views on this represent his own personal opinions or reflect the prevailing ideas of his time (the book was published in 1970). I'd be curious to know which, if any, of Fischer's thoughts on the discipline of historical writing have evolved over time.
  
  The main impression the book left me with is a love for Fischer's caustic writing style. The book is written with a lot of wit and very little sugarcoating. In a way, it's just a 300+ page diss track toward historians. I found it very fun to read, but I imagine folks like E.H. Carr may have felt differently.
• 
  Alex Stephenson

  Very of its time, with concerns appropriate to the age. I think its unsparing nature has made it age better than it could have, and however you feel about his philosophical approach, the logical "fallacies" he outlines are good things to be cognizant of in your writing/arguing. Even if you decide "dammit, I'm gonna still do it anyway". :)
• 
  Steve

  "That's a fallacy," some dolt says to you. You respond: "which one? there are over 200." The fallacies are all listed in the back, and they apply not only to history but just about everything. This is a key book to study for clear thinking on just about any subject.
• 
  Virginia Rand

  Funny in some places and interesting in others, but it felt far too long.
• 
  E.A.

  An essential read for more than students of history. What a privilege it would be to have attended one of the author's courses.
• 
  Queme

  "How intriguing are the fallacies that lead men's minds astray." - Tarquin.
  
  I find myself drawn to lists and examples and studies of logical, rhetorical, historiographical, and other types of fallacies, again and again. The main reason may be that so many of such fallacies are encountered so often on the internet, on blogs and forums, even those claiming to be the most reasonable, fair, and "logical," and in newspapers and television news programs, where they seem to have undergo random evolutionary mutation resulting in a tenfold multiplying of their birth-rate. Yes, news-heads, news-readers, and newspaper-writers are filled with fallacies and myths more than any other segment of society I know of. This is not to say that politicians are a distant second; the fact is that politicians' foot-in-mouth events are as likely to be caused by ignorance or even stupidity half the time, leaving logical fallacies to account for no more than half of their total self-exposures. So I want to be able to recognize those fallacies so I can understand how to identify the truths they distort, politically as well as academically.
  
  A second reason, no less important than the first, maybe even more important, is so that I can avoid such fallacy-mongering myself, as much as possible. Does Fischer's book help me towards these two goals? I believe it does. While lists of fallacies abound on the internet, they are useful for discriminating individual statements. They work best when applied sentence by sentence, line by line. Fischer's book helps develop a way of thinking that allows one to undertake an extended reading, or a lengthy writing project, with a greater clarity, sharpness, and accuracy than has been demonstrated by many who do not have ventured into this arena of analysis and reasoning.
• 
  DoctorM

  A rather enjoyable and provocative look at the "fallacies" of historians--- including some major names. What Fischer seems to mean by "fallacy" varies chapter to chapter, from suspect metaphors to ideological blinders to embarrassing anachronisms. Moreover, his examples of bad historical writing often seem idiosyncratic. Fischer criticises a bio of Calvin Coolidge called "A Puritan in Babylon" for the mix of images, but...the title seems to me to be immediately evocative and immediately comprehensible, whether or not 17th-c. English religious dissenter or a city in Mesopotamia are actually involved. Nonetheless, this is a nicely-done guide to common errors in historical writing, and very much worth reading.
• 
  Joshua Horn

  This book is very helpful for anyone who is interested in history at a deeper level. He identifies many mistakes that historians make on every aspect of their trade. He has many, many examples, (occasionally from his own books) and with funny and biting commentary.
  
  Although at times I disagreed with him, and he tends toward too academic language and creating terms for things that just need explaining, it is a very helpful book. Many of the things he mentions are things that I see I need to watch for.
• 
  Diana

  I read this as a reference for a paper I am writing for English class. Since I am a history major, we had to write something pertaining to it. This is not a book on history but on how to look at, and work with history. The book was a fascinating look at how one historian feels all historians should focus their work. Some of it was a bit dry, and hard to get through while other parts were extremely funny. Though an older work, I think it still has valid information for today's historians. I am looking forward to reading more of this authors books.
• 
  Walt

  This is more of an arm-chair classic in the philosophy of history - especially teaching history.
  
  Using major historical works pre-1970, Fischer points out fallacies in research, interpretation, and presentation. Ultimately, the book comes down to proposing a simple question: "why do we teach history?" It is more rhetorical than anything else. However, he does raise some valid observations in discussing the fallacies.
• 
  Ryan Reeves

  Rarely does a book about historians and their writings deserve such praise. But David Hackett Fisher deserves the rank of "public intellectual" based, I think, solely on this book. It is witty (I laughed outloud regularly), almost G. K Chestertonian. Most importantly of all, the book encourages people to think well, not in a way that attempts to know everything about everything, but in a way that knows something about something.
• 
  Kristin-Leigh

  This book is an essential read for anyone considering a career as a historian, or even interested in the historical process and wanting to be able to look at historical writing more critically.
  
  I'll agree with the commenter that said the book dragged in places--by the end you can definitely tell he had a length requirement to meet! Still, the first 75% of the book is incredibly useful, even if you just want to be able to shout "Fallacy!" during debates with friends. ;)
• 
  Mark Singer

  Long before David Hackett Fischer gained fame for books like Albion's Seed, Paul Revere's Ride and Washington's Crossing, he wrote this guide on how NOT to write history. Using examples from histories both famous and obscure, Fischer illustrates a series of logical fallacies that could have been avoided. The only reason that I don't give it five stars is the turgid writing style.
• 
  Daryl Muranaka

  A relevant book on this mistakes historians make in thinking. The book is relevant because is catalogs many of the common mistakes people make in thinking in general. Sure, it's fun to giggle at the mistakes of some pretty big historians, but many of these mistakes are common.
• 
  Fredrick Danysh

  History is usually written by the winner or the survivor and colored with their perceptions. The author examines several theories that could be flawed.
• 
  Carol

  Dense, but disciplined.