Mr. Dixon asks, "Is the test of "historical interpretation" simply a political result, measured by success in gathering believers, or is there an epistemology which the historian is required to meet to infer historical truth?"

  The epistemology of _any_ discipline can be contested. In the so-called hard sciences, for example, the “laws” of physics rest on an assumption about what a "force" is (one has to start somewhere).  20th-century American historiography has witnessed a long-standing (and often not unsophisticated) argument over the possibility of "objectivity" (an argument that often surfaces in the pages of the journal _History and Theory_).

  As a working historian for nearly 30 years, I recommend Part V of R. G. Collingwood's _The Idea of History_ (1st ed. London 1946) in which he describes a historian at work (the first four parts of the book survey the history of history writing). In his closing section, Part V, Collingwood describes better than anyone else I’ve read the process of handling evidence and reaching conclusions that characterize the historical method as practiced by really good historians.

  There are also many similarities between history and heuristic theological/biblical inquiry when it comes to the handling of evidence, the drawing of conclusions, and the search for truth.  (Ultimately, after all, were are dealing with Pilate's profoundly human question.)

   On these matters Alan Richardson's _History: Sacred and Profane_ (Philadelphia, 1964) should be more widely known as a very good place to begin to grapple with these issues.  Modern secular historians often get mired in a false distinction between "fact" and "interpretation" (E H Carr's _What is History?_ is notoriously shallow on this point). Richardson offers an especially helpful discussion (_History: Sacred and Profane_, pp. 190-194) in which he reminds us that what we often call a “fact” is merely a statement or judgment made from evidence.

  Upon reflection, it is easy to recognize that Richardson's insight touches many disciplines, and warns against intellectual arrogance and hubris.

   Jon Kukla

PS: To one reared in the tradition of Vico, Burckhardt, and Dilthey as an undergraduate, the clever French writers currently fashionable in some circles seem derivative at best, often frivolous, and occasionally (as in their personal flirtations with Nazism) reprehensible – midgets compared to the great historian Marc Bloch, who was executed by the Nazis ten days after D-Day for his activities in the Resistance (see Bloch’s posthumously published _Strange Defeat_ [London, 1949]).



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