INTRODUCTION

The first task of historians of ideas is to use relics from the past to reconstruct as historical objects the weak intentions that constitute the hermeneutic meanings of utterances made in the past. Only afterwards do they turn to the task of relating these historical objects to one another in narratives or theories, although, of course, the theories they already hold will influence the way they reconstruct historical objects, and no doubt as they devise further theories so they will modify their understanding of the relevant historical objects. No account of the tasks of a practice, however, can tell us everything we want to know about it. In particular, I have said nothing to answer the question of how historians should set about, first, reconstructing historical meanings from the relics available to them, and second, justifying the narratives or theories they develop around the hermeneutic meanings they thus reconstruct. Consider a group of students who want to know what a particular utterance means. Suppose they consult the works of several eminent historians only to find that the historians disagree among themselves. What the students need is a way of deciding which historian best describes the meaning of the utterance.

At one extreme, some scholars suggest that historians can justify or condemn an individual theory as conclusively true or false, with every reasonable person then being bound to accept that theory. Some of these objectivists pin their faith on a particular method.