INTRODUCTION

The synchronic and diachronic forms of explanation I have outlined apply only to sincere, conscious, and rational beliefs. Historians can explain these beliefs by locating them in webs of belief, which, in turn, they can explain by showing them to be the products of the way individuals extended and modified intellectual traditions in response to specific dilemmas. Earlier I justified an initial focus on these beliefs by showing how the grammar of our concepts requires us to ascribe beliefs to people in a process governed by norms in favour of the sincere, conscious, and rational. Clearly, however, not all beliefs are of this type. A presumption in favour of a type of belief certainly does not imply that all beliefs are of that type. Historians can legitimately ascribe insincere, unconscious, and irrational beliefs to people. Our analysis of objectivity as a product of a comparison between rival webs of belief precludes our identifying necessary or sufficient conditions for postulating such distorted beliefs as historical objects. None the less, we can say that historians sometimes find inconsistencies between the beliefs someone overtly attributes to himself and the way he behaves, and, moreover, they can often make sense of these inconsistencies by postulating distorted beliefs. Whenever historians thus postulate distorted beliefs, they invoke historical objects to which our synchronic and diachronic forms of explanation are inapplicable. To complete a logic for the history of ideas, therefore, we must identify the forms of explanation appropriate to distorted beliefs.