INTRODUCTION

Our analysis of historical meanings showed that they were intentions or individual viewpoints. The current unpopularity of intentionalist analyses of historical meaning owes much to a sceptical opposition to the possibility of our recovering the intentions of people from the past. Phenomenological sceptics, in particular, argue that historians cannot reproduce the past as it was, but rather must be engaged in a continuous dialogue, a fusion of horizons. Historians cannot return to a primal past: they necessarily appropriate a text that already bears the traces of previous appropriations, and they do so from their present perspective. Much of what these sceptics say makes excellent sense as a phenomenological account of historical understanding. To argue that historians cannot have unmediated access to the past, to argue that historians play a creative role when they read a text, to argue these things is to explicate some of the consequences that flow from a rejection of the very idea of given empirical facts. None the less, the fact that historians do not have unmediated access to the past does not imply that they cannot have objective knowledge of the past. Scholars can reach a sceptical rejection of intentionalism only if they adopt an additional premise, namely, that we cannot have objective knowledge of things of which we do not have pure experiences. To reject intentionalism, therefore, the sceptics must equate objective knowledge with an unmediated access to pure facts.