Hayden White Summary

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In the article, Hayden White is addressing Georg Iggers’ criticisms by reemphasizing his belief that history is not a science. White has proposed two major assertions to support his stand. Firstly, White propounds that historical writing is not based on scientific logic connection, but largely dependent on imagination, a process that has more in common with literature than it has with science. Secondly, he argues that historical representation is usually written in the form of a narrative, where historians will fictionalize and create meanings for historical events, therefore making history writing more similar to literature than to science. In this reaction piece, I will be responding to these two arguments that he has proposed to justify …show more content…

398). I disagree with this definition because it will equate history to fiction. Instead, I determine the concept of ‘imagination’ more as a form of hypothetical invention that is based on intellectual historical knowledge. Using my idea of ‘imagination’, I would agree that knowledge-based imagination is present in the writing of history. In fact, it is an inevitable phenomenon in the writing of history because there are always gaps in historical knowledge due to the absence of certain primary sources or the figurative nature of language that causes ambiguity in the meanings of historical events. Therefore, historians have to include their own intellectual guesses and hypothetical constructs to fill in such gaps and these ‘knowledge-based imaginations’ are presented in the form of interpretation in their …show more content…

Simply put, ‘history writing’ will then become fiction writing, where the element of historicity in the writing does not matter anymore. However, I believe the significance of history writing is to put ‘history’ in the center of the topic of discussion, where the idea of historicity, or ‘the truth’, is the most important core in the study of history. Therefore, professional historians should make sure they differentiate interpretation from information to retain the truth-telling function of their

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