The aim of the paper is to discuss the definition of the fact presented by Vaclav Cernik. At first, the author outlines the views of the defenders of the naive realism, constructivism (or narrativism), and critical realism in historiography. The leading proponents of narrativism hold that what the historians construe are not single facts, but general narrative interpretations. The second part offers a critical analysis of some notions and distinctions introduced by Cernik in his theory of the social fact. The most questionable is his concept of observation statements and his way of differentiation between observational and theoretical statements. The author's conclusion is that the most reliable is the middle ground between naive realism and constructivism in their radical forms.
During the last decades, narrativism has been one of the most influential approaches in the philosophy of history. Proponents of this movement argue that historical works are not faithful descriptions of the past reality but rather original constructions or interpretations of historians. The views of narrativists have been criticized for being relativistic. For it seems that on their view historians may shape the same data using various interpretative frameworks or conceptual schemes and this leads to plurality in history. In recent years several authors, including Paul Roth and Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen, developed some of the points and conclusions of narrativism. Although these authors are inspired by narrativism, they significantly change understanding of historical works and that is why their accounts avoid relativism. The aim of this paper is to show that these authors overcome relativism. Dualism of content and form, as Donald Davidson puts it, supports conceptual relativism. Since Roth and Kuukkanen avoid this dualism in their understanding of history, they overcome conceptual relativism in current philosophy of history.
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