Historians’ understanding

Gracia argues: “Consider a text of a message sent by a particular historical figure to another, and which is being examined by a historian. The historian wishes to determine exactly what the person who sent the message meant, and what the person who received the message understood by it, so that she can draw a connection among various events surrounding the message. It would do the historian no good in view of her purpose to understand the text of the message in ways different from the ways in which it was understood by the author and receiver of the message, for that would lead to a misconstruction of history.”

Oh, sed contra : The historian, presumably, knows things that the sender and receiver didn’t know, knows things that were happening at the very same time that the participants didn’t know, and certainly knows the consequences of the message and its reception that the sender and receiver could not know or foresee. If she is going to write history, and not merely chronicle “X was sent on Y on Z,” then she has got to understand the message and reception differently.

Suppose the sender is a general sending the message “Attack” to a field commander whose obedience to his orders led him into a disastrous ambush. The historian who limits herself to “determining exactly what the person who sent the message meant” has not done her job. Of course, he meant “Attack,” but he didn’t know what he meant.