Semantics of Historical Representation in Terms of Aspects

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI: 10.1163/18722636-12341252

Journal of the Philosophy of History 7 (2013) 244–256 brill.com/jph

Semantics of Historical Representation in Terms of Aspects

Eugen ZeleňákCatholic University in Ružomberok, Slovakia

[email protected]

AbstractIn his latest book, Frank Ankersmit proposes an original theory of historical repre-sentation. In this review I focus on what I take to be his most important semantic points with respect to representation, meaning, truth, and reference. First, I pro-vide a short summary of the book. Second, I explore his semantics in terms of aspects and compare it with a different account inspired by the Fregean notion of mode of presentation. As my examination shows, Ankersmit’s analysis faces the problem of “loosing indirectness” and, moreover, there seems to exist an alterna-tive and plausible view that does not suffer from this problem. Finally, I conclude with a couple of comments on the Copernican Revolution advocated in the book.

KeywordsFrank Ankersmit, semantics of history, historical representation, aspects

Frank Ankersmit, Meaning, Truth, and Reference in Historical Representation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012; Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2012), 264 pp., ISBN 978-90-5867-914-7

The latest book of Frank Ankersmit is an excellent example of an attempt to exam-ine distinctive features of historical writing. Ankersmit is exceptionally perceptive to what he believes distinguishes history from some other disciplines and he is assiduous in pointing out these interesting and sometimes surprising features to his readers. In his book, he analyzes the basic notions of meaning, truth, and refer-ence. He deals with the most important semantic questions of history and presents detailed arguments in favor of treating historical discourse in a special way. His examination results in a unique and original semantics of historical text, which is probably unparalleled in its scope and thoroughness. One does not necessarily

Review Articles / Journal of the Philosophy of History 7 (2013) 244–256 245

have to agree with all the points made in the book, but a person with a serious interest in the philosophy of history should be aware of the exciting proposals and ingenious arguments contained in the book.

Frank Ankersmit, a renowned Dutch philosopher of history, is undoubtedly one of the most original thinkers in the field today. Anyone interested in contem-porary theory and philosophy of history must have come across some of his many papers or books, which include, among others, Narrative Logic (1983), History and Tropology (1994), Historical Representation (2001) and Sublime Historical Experience (2005). The semantics of historical text has been already discussed in his Narrative Logic – a book presenting one of the most innovative accounts of historical writing – and some of its conclusions also inspire Ankersmit’s latest work. For instance, in Narrative Logic Ankersmit argues that there is a crucial difference between singu-lar statements and narratios (historical texts as wholes), namely, narratios are not mere sums of statements.1 This is one of the most important pillars of his approach to historical writing. It is further developed – in terms of the distinction between description and representation – in the inspiring and philosophically rich first chapter of Historical Representation.2 This pillar also supports some of the results reached in his latest book. Moreover, in Narrative Logic, Ankersmit emphasizes the metaphorical nature of historical texts and he introduces narrative substances (i.e., points of view that are expressed by historical works) to argue that historical works cannot be viewed as simple copies of the past reality. The same insights are further advanced in his latest book. Therefore, those familiar with the work of Ank-ersmit, will find in his Meaning, Truth, and Reference in Historical Representation a most welcome continuation and illumination of his project. On the other hand, the latest book includes several original notions (e.g., the notion of aspect), observations and arguments (e.g., those related to the “presented” of historical representation). A number of Ankersmit’s conclusions may even seem to be inconsistent with some of the views defended in his earlier books. But a careful reading will show that these new ideas are in fact, in a certain sense, drawing on his older views.

In this review I focus on what I take to be the most important semantic points presented, especially in “the heart of the book” consisting of chapters 4 through 7. This is not, however, meant to imply that this is the only part of the book contain-ing thought-provoking insights. On the contrary, other parts include analyses of various other provocative topics such as historicism, the linguistic turn in history, experience, etc. First, to acquaint the reader with the content of the book, I start with a short summary of most of its chapters. Second, in the next two sections,

1) F.R. Ankersmit, Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis of the Historian’s Language (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1983), 59.2) F.R. Ankersmit, “The Linguistic Turn: Literary Theory and Historical Theory” in F.R. Ank-ersmit, Historical Representation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 29–74.

246 Review Articles / Journal of the Philosophy of History 7 (2013) 244–256

I explore Ankersmit’s semantic account in terms of aspects and compare it with an alternative semantics inspired by the Fregean notion of mode of presentation. Finally, I conclude with a couple of comments on the Copernican Revolution advo-cated in the book.

1. A Short Summary

The book starts with a chapter on historicism, the position that “phenomena are defined by their place in a process of development or change” (10). Therefore, according to historicists, we should focus on development in order to understand what is happening in society and in history. But, as Ankersmit points out, even historicists assume that each historical phenomenon contains something that is not subject to change, namely, it contains an historical idea (11). Yet Ankersmit argues that, even though the historicist notion of an historical idea is fruitful, it was mistaken to locate the idea in the past itself. “Instead”, he suggests, “we must situ-ate it in the historian’s language about the past” (13). He believes that historical ideas (e.g., the Renaissance, the Cold War, etc.) are to be viewed as our tools that help us organize our accounts of the past; they allow us to write comprehensible works about the past. But they should not be understood as simple reflections of pre-existing entities inhabiting the past itself. This is a familiar point (made, for instance, in Narrative Logic with respect to narrative substances),3 but this time it is derived from historicism.

Hence, Ankersmit announces, the goal of the project pursued in his book is to take what is valuable from the historicist notion of an historical idea, to correct what is misguided in its “realist” version, and to apply it to historical writing. So, in a certain sense, his book might be interpreted as an attempt to “translate Ranke’s and Humboldt’s brand of historicism into a more modern philosophical vocabu-lary” (28). As I read him, Ankersmit emphasizes that historical works are organized in terms of structuring tools which do not have their source in the past itself but, to put it briefly, in the historian’s language. Consequently, his book offers a “transla-tion” of this point, i.e., it presents the semantics of historical representation in terms of presenteds and other notions.

The second chapter, “Time”, begins with an outline of three different approaches to time – transcendental, chronological, and lived. Drawing on this overview Ank-ersmit examines some of the claims of Louis O. Mink and Arthur Danto, focusing on Hans Michael Baumgartner’s transcendental reading of Danto. As it turns out this excursion shows that “the copy theory of representation” (later called also the “Magritte conception of historical writing”), i.e., the belief “that there has been a

3) Ankersmit, Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis of the Historian’s Language, 96–100.


past that [historians] should ‘copy’ as well as they can in the language they use for writing about it” (45), is wrong. The reason is that the historian’s language tran-scends the past. It does not copy the past but organize it in terms of “things” that are not located in the past itself. These “additional things” are, for instance, such notions as the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, or the Cold War and they transcend the past because they “lead their lives exclusively in historical narratives” (46).

The following chapter, “Interpretation”, highlights a couple of notable points. Ankersmit starts with a fascinating discussion of the painting by Jan Hackaert, which is on the cover of his book. He uses this painting to document his conclusion that representation precedes interpretation: “you cannot even begin to understand a text’s or a painting’s meaning (i.e., have an interpretation of it) as long as you have no idea of, or deliberately refrain from asking yourself, what the text or painting might be about (i.e., what it represents)” (53).

Another remarkable point concerns the truth of historical representation. In some of his earlier works Ankersmit is very cautious when it comes to speaking about the truth in history. He tries to limit the notion of truth to “the level of singu-lar statements”: we can assign a truth-value to statements but not to narratios as wholes.4 Judging from the critical reactions,5 this is possibly one of the most con-troversial ideas defended in Narrative Logic. It may look surprising but in his latest book Ankersmit is not so hesitant any more and he claims “historical representa-tion serves no other purpose than to discover the truth about the past” (62). In fact, as he points out, since historical representation is a typical example of representa-tion (the notion analyzed in aesthetics) and at the same time it attempts to reach knowledge and truth, it follows that historical writing aims at aesthetic truth (59). This is an interesting development in Ankersmit’s account. Yet, in my opinion, it should be understood neither as a radical change in his views nor as a claim con-tradicting his previous rejection of truth at “the level of representation”. It seems to me that it is more appropriate to read it as a clarification of his views. As is made clear in the chapter “Truth”, Ankersmit still rejects applying the notion of proposi-tional truth – based on correspondence between a statement and a part of the past reality – to representation as a whole. It is a different notion of truth that he is advo-cating. The latter notion of truth is characterized in chapter 6 as ontological.

Chapters 4 through 7 present an original semantic account to which I return below. The rest of the book is devoted mainly to the topic of presence (chapter 8), experience (chapters 9 and 10), subjectivity (chapter 11) and the decisive role of political history (chapter 12).

4) Ankersmit, Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis of the Historian’s Language, 77.5) See C. Lorenz, “Can Histories Be True? Narrativism, Positivism, and the ‘Metaphorical Turn’”, History and Theory, 37 (1998), 309–329; J. Zammito, “Ankersmit and Historical Repre-sentation”, History and Theory, 44 (2005), 155–181, 181.


It seems to me that the part of the book dominated by the topic of experience tries to balance the earlier chapters – pointing out that language gives only a com-plicated and indirect access to reality – with observations about some kind of direct experience of the past. Some may even find it confusing that, after reading various ingenious arguments showing that historical representation cannot depict the past reality in a straightforward way, one is told that a certain type of direct experience of the past is possible. Is it not the case that these two views exclude each other? My impression is that Ankersmit suggests this is not an either-or issue. We should not conclude that either we have only mediated approach to the past or we have always an immediate access to reality. As I read some of his claims and similes, for instance the one about a hurricane, Ankersmit implies that although historical works in general use a proxy (representational language) in order to help us understand the past, sometimes we get in touch with the past reality in a more direct fashion (experience). To use his simile: “wherever the storms of historical representation acquire the force of a hurricane, where storms of historiography never come to rest – think of the Renaissance and the French or the Industrial Revolution – we shall find in its eye the silence of a historical experience” (232).

The penultimate chapter on subjectivity contains a sharp exposition of a para-dox called “the double bind of historical objectivity”. Ankersmit argues that the reason why moral and political values play such an important role in history is that they are present both in the subject (the historian) and object (the past itself). Since values infect both the former and the latter it is extremely difficult to disen-tangle subject and object. In fact, the attempt to accomplish such a separation and to free oneself or one’s historical work from values leads to paradox. An historian trying to negate her values, or even to ban her subjectivity from her work, will find herself in a paradoxical situation “in which the subject underlines its presence by its pathetic and self-defeating claims about its alleged absence” (225).

The last chapter returns to historicism, which was already discussed at the beginning of the book. This time Ankersmit approves of the historicist insistence on the significance of political history. He argues in favor of this traditional view and concludes with the claim that “politics is history’s backbone” (256).

2. The Aspectual Semantics

Ankersmit outlines his semantics of historical representation in chapters 4 through 7 – “Representation”, “Reference”, “Truth”, and “Meaning”. First he clarifies the concept of historical representation, a crucial concept of his oeuvre, and subse-quently he applies his results to analyses of the basic semantic notions of refer-ence, truth, and meaning.


In his earlier works Ankersmit firmly emphasizes that narratios or (to use the terminology from his 2001 book) historical representations do not depict the past reality in a direct way. In fact, he maintains that they are related to reality in a cer-tain manner but the important thing, which is often denied or simply neglected, is that they construct “images” or “pictures” (but these “images” are not copies trying to resemble their objects, they are rather representations in a technical sense) of the past.6 They propose certain points of view from which reality should be seen.7 In his latest book, he draws on these insights but he supplements them with a more detailed account illuminating how representation works. Supposedly, the former notions of image and point of view could have been understood by commentators in various ways, therefore, Ankersmit tries to specify the nature of the “things” rep-resentations construct or propose. He does this in terms of aspects. Before I focus on the notion of aspect, I need to clarify briefly one basic distinction, as well as the notion of representation.

Ankersmit maintains that there is a crucial difference between description and representation: singular statements describe past reality, whereas historical texts as wholes represent it. More specifically, statements (such as “Mikhail Kutuzov was a general”) contain terms picking out particular objects (“Mikhail Kutuzov”) and terms that ascribe to them attributes (“is a general”). Because of the fact that the singular terms uniquely pick out particular objects from reality, we say they refer. Moreover, if the objects referred to possess the given attributes, we say these state-ments are true. This is how it is with reference and truth at the descriptive level of statements. According to Ankersmit, the situation is very different at the level of representation. Historical representations do not refer in the way statements do. Therefore representations cannot be true or false in the same way statements are. Hence, it may seem the notions of reference and truth do not apply to historical representation. In reality, Ankersmit claims this is not completely right. Indeed, representations do not refer to the past, but they are nonetheless, in a certain sense, about the past. Moreover, even though “the demise of reference in historical representation” (101) has to have its consequences, still Ankersmit speaks of the “ontological truth of representation” (109).

According to Ankersmit, representation is a special relation (he uses the term “operator”), which should be distinguished from description. First of all, one has to realize that representation is not a two-place but a three-place relation: “a repre-sentation (1) defines a [presented] (2) in terms of which the world (3) is seen – and the point is to avoid conflating (2) and (3)” (72). “[A] representation (1) offers us the presented, or aspect (2) of a represented reality (3), much in the way that we may

6) Ankersmit, Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis of the Historian’s Language, 204.7) Ankersmit, Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis of the Historian’s Language, 225.


draw someone’s attention to certain features of a thing. Though these features are reducible neither to that thing itself nor to its properties. . . . aspects or presenteds are less than things and more than properties” (73).

A naïve approach to historical work will probably assume that historical repre-sentations depict the (represented) past reality and this is basically all we need in order to account for how to conceive of the language-world relation in history. But Ankersmit warns us not to confuse presented that is defined or offered by repre-sentation with represented reality. According to him, the tie between the text and past reality is more complicated and indirect than the naïve view might suggest. Historical texts as wholes are about the past (represented reality), but they offer it in terms of something in the middle (presented). If one neglects this interme-diary, one overlooks something essential for understanding the mechanism of representation.

It is interesting that Ankersmit proposes to analyze this intermediary, present-eds of representations, in terms of aspects.8 As far as I know, this is a new idea not to be found in his earlier books. It was, however, already suggested in his paper from 2010.9 In his latest book it is discussed in a more detail and it provides an anchor for the semantics outlined here. So how should we conceive of aspects? Ankersmit claims aspects are less than things and more than properties.10 But if they are neither the former nor the latter, are they some kind of extra type of entity? Are they a type of entity, which is – when compared with things and properties – “equally ontologically real”? Of course, to provide a satisfactory characterization of the ontological status of things and properties is not a simple matter. So why should we complicate the whole situation even more by introducing another type of entity? Is it not enough to rely on what usually figures in ontological and semantic theories, i.e., to rely on things and maybe on events or (more controversially) on properties? Let me state my concern in a somewhat traditional fashion adducing to Occam’s razor, which is usually formulated as saying: “entities are not to be mul-tiplied beyond necessity”.11 If this is read as a principle of semantic parsimony, one

8) The reader should note that I use the term “presented” as a general term to speak about any type of intermediary and the term “aspect” to speak about one specific type of interme-diary – namely, Ankersmit’s proposal regarding how to understand the presented. 9) F. Ankersmit, “Representation and Reference”, Journal of the Philosophy of History, 4 (2010), 375–409.10) Although, he says later in the work that aspects are “loose bundles of properties in the absence of unique identifiable things to which they can be tied” (111). Does this mean they are reducible to sums of properties? Or are they some kind of irreducible bundles?11) D. Cohnitz, M. Rossberg, Nelson Goodman (Chesham: Acumen, 2006), 76.


may ask the following with regard to aspects: is it really necessary to postulate aspects to account for the semantics of historical work?12

I have certain doubts when it comes to conclusive proofs of the necessity of this or that. But I still believe it is possible to give arguments criticizing or defending the introduction of this or that item into one’s account. Before I turn to aspects, let me start with a more general picture of history as presented by Ankersmit. In my opinion, his critique of the view according to which historical works are straight-forward depictions of the past reality is very persuasive. Historical texts are not simple copies of past events; they are more complicated proposals of how to view the past. But his criticism of “the copy theory of historical representation” goes hand in hand with his proposal of a more sophisticated relation between the text and the past reality. Therefore, if one accepts Ankersmit’s critique of the naïve pic-ture of the language-world relation in history and concurs with his suggestion that the relation is in fact mediated – I believe that Ankersmit is right in both issues –, it seems necessary to conclude there is some kind of intermediary that has to be included in the whole account. Ankersmit convincingly shows there must be a pre-sented which plays a role in linking historical representation and the past. Never-theless, does it immediately follow that the presented should be understood in terms of aspects?

It seems the problem of whether aspects should be admitted into the semantic account of history can be divided into two separate questions. First, do we need to assume there is some kind of intermediary between historical representation and represented reality? Indeed, Ankersmit shows that any accurate and fruitful semantics of historical representation has to work with such an assumption. There must be a presented offered by any historical work which represents a part of the past.13 But here comes the second question. Do we need to analyze this intermedi-ary (this presented) in terms of aspects? This is an independent issue. One can agree that there are presenteds but refuse to equate them with Ankersmit’s aspects. Such a refusal could be substantiated either by pointing to a problem with the notion of aspect or by arguing there is a different and preferable analysis of the notion of presented. Below I consider both options. I try to show that introducing aspects into the semantics of history is problematic. I, then, suggest an alternative analysis of presenteds.

12) The prime interest of the book under review lies in the area of semantics, but obviously semantic issues are linked to ontological, so the discussion below could be extended also to the latter questions.13) Recall that the term “presented” is a more general term and the term “aspect” is used to speak about Ankersmit’s understanding of the presented.


3. Controversial Aspects and the Fregean Semantics

Earlier I posed a question about the nature of aspects. Should we take them to be certain “attitudes”, “perspectives”, or “points of view” we use to approach reality? Ankersmit explicitly opposes such an analysis. He claims an aspect is not “a way of looking at the world” because it “is part of the reality represented by a representation – hence part of reality itself ” (76). Thus, an aspect is “part of the world itself ” (105). Now, why should this be a problem?

As I read Ankersmit, one of his most interesting and convincing contributions since the times of Narrative Logic has been his insistence on, and elaboration of, the claim that historical texts (as wholes) do not depict reality in a direct way. There is always some indirectness, at least at the level of whole texts such as nar-ratios or representations. There is an intermediary (presented) between language and reality in history. But, and here comes the problem, if presenteds are defined in terms of aspects and aspects are part of the “reality/world itself ”, it seems to me we loose a certain kind of indirectness. Since aspects belong to reality, historical texts are attached directly to reality itself – only this time it is aspects they are attached to. This is the problem of “loosing indirectness”.

To analyze this problem in more detail, let me come back to some of the main points made by Ankersmit in his earlier works.14 In general, he argues that, when it comes to the issue of the language-world relation in history, the situation differs from a naïve copy approach. There is both a certain complexity and a certain indi-rectness which the naïve view mistakenly ignores. Historians do not describe past events; they do not present “textual copies” of the past. Historians suggest propos-als regarding how to account for past events. For instance, works on the French Revolution offer certain proposals regarding how to explain events of the French Revolution. The complexity in history stems from the fact that there are not merely two items (i.e. historical texts and the past reality), but there are three items – historical texts define proposals, theses or, to use his recent terminology, presenteds, to account for the past reality. That is why representation is a three-place relation.

Ankersmit’s discussion of this complexity is often intertwined with his discus-sion of indirectness. To put it in a few words, indirectness arises due to a “logical space”,15 a gap existing between historical texts (language) and the past reality (world). Ankersmit argues that the crucial things for understanding history hap-pen precisely in the gap where presenteds should be located. In his earlier works, when talking about what is located in this gap, Ankersmit used such terms as a “point of view” or a “thesis”. In his latest book, however, he rejects defining a pre-

14) Ankersmit, Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis of the Historian’s Language, Ankersmit, Historical Representation.15) Ankersmit, “The Linguistic Turn: Literary Theory and Historical Theory”, 41.


sented as “a way of looking” on the past and, instead, he says presenteds are aspects. However, since aspects are part of the world, it seems to me the alleged gap between language and the world is filled by another chunk of the world. Since aspects belong to the “reality/world itself ”, historical texts are directly attached to certain chunks of reality. Hence, indirectness disappears. Yet indirectness of historical representation (in the sense of a logical space between the text and real-ity) seems to be an important feature of Ankersmit’s critique of the naïve view. It is also a crucial element of his conception of historical representation. Therefore, it is problematic to introduce aspects into the semantics of history to account for what is expressed by historical representation.

Is there an alternative and viable analysis of the notion of the presented? Draw-ing on Ankersmit’s remarks from his earlier works, e.g., on his observation that historical texts present points of view,16 one may suggest that the presenteds of historical works should be analyzed in an epistemic fashion. Presenteds might be conceived of as perspectives or cognitive standpoints we adopt when we look at the world. This would mean, however, that they are not another ontological entity, additional part of the world, something between things and properties. Presenteds analyzed in this way would rather be cognitive outlooks that should not be reified.

One specific analysis going in this epistemic direction may be inspired by Gott-lob Frege’s notion of meaning (sense).17 In a nutshell, Frege claims words (such as “the morning star”) not only stand for their referents but they also express their meanings (senses). So linguistic expressions are not simple labels of the things they refer to. In addition, they present certain meanings, which are characterized by Frege as “modes of presentation” of their referents.18 Now, there is an extensive discussion about how to interpret Frege’s notion of meaning. For our purposes, however, it is not important to pick the best available interpretation. We may sim-ply draw on some of the insights presented by Frege (as interpreted by authors defending an epistemic reading of his notion of meaning) and call the semantics loosely inspired by them Fregean semantics.19 The main tenet of this semantics is that words express modes of presentation (meanings) of their referents. Applied to the case of history: historical texts propose modes of presentation of the past events they are about. Moreover, a crucial feature of this semantics is that the

16) Ankersmit, Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis of the Historian’s Language, 225.17) See G. Frege, “On Sense and Reference” in A.W. Moore (ed.), Meaning and Reference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 23–42. The application of what I call “the Fregean semantic framework” is presented in more detail in my “On Sense, Reference, and Tone in History”, Journal of the Philosophy of History, 4 (2010), 354–374.18) Frege, “On Sense and Reference”, 24.19) Note, however, that the Fregean semantics is not necessarily the semantics Frege defended or would defend.


notion of a mode of presentation (meaning) is understood in an epistemic way. The mode of presentation expressed by a historical representation is basically a cognitive perspective from which the past reality is approached.

Of course, one would have to add “flesh to these bones” in order to present an attractive alternative to Ankersmit’s analysis of presented in terms of aspects.20 However, even this short introduction to using Fregean semantics to explicate the presented in terms of modes of presentation allows me to show that this semantics does not suffer from the problem of “loosing indirectness”. The Fregean semantics offers the following picture: historical texts are about the past reality but they approach it via presenteds understood as modes of presentation or points of view. Since these points of view are more or less epistemic attitudes, presenteds are not another part of the reality itself. Therefore, there is an item inserted between the text and reality, which is not a chunk of the world and which is, at the same time, able to guarantee the indirectness.

Above I asked whether we need to analyze presented in terms of aspects. As my examination shows, the notion of aspect faces the problem of “loosing indirect-ness” and, moreover, there seems to exist an alternative and plausible characteri-zation of the presented in epistemic terms. Why, then, should we rely on a problematic notion of aspect if what looks like a viable analysis of the presented is available?

4. The Copernican Revolution in the Semantics of History

My critical analysis concludes with a suggestion to replace the notion of aspect by the notion of meaning (mode or presentation) inspired by Frege’s ideas. This result, however, is firmly rooted in a rather conventional tactic of drawing on the seman-tic insights from the philosophy of language and applying them to the language of history – especially to the account of historical representation. Yet Ankersmit makes it clear in his latest book that he refuses to follow this somewhat traditional path. He believes we should not take notions of meaning, truth, and reference from a philosophy of language focusing on singular expressions or statements and

20) I must add that Ankersmit refuses to interpret his account of representation in terms of Frege’s semantics and he doesn’t approve of equating the presented with the notion of meaning (73, 105). But Ankersmit seems to interpret such a meaning as a conceptual entity (105), whereas the Fregean semantics introduced here relies on a different notion of mean-ing. Here, it is understood in an epistemic way. Moreover, if one starts with a presupposition that the presented is an aspect and aspect is a part of reality, then it follows that the pre-sented cannot be a Fregean meaning interpreted as “an item that is not part of the reality”. In this review, however, I try to question the given presupposition.


employ such notions to make sense of historical writing. On the contrary, he embraces a kind of revolutionary approach in historical theory: “Paradoxically, representation precedes true description. This, then, is the ‘Copernican Revolution’ advocated in this book” (156). More specifically, he maintains we should first study the uniqueness of history and historical representation and come up with a novel semantics suitable for their purposes. So this is what he is trying to accomplish: to introduce the notions of representational meaning, truth, and reference.

In fact, as I noted earlier, he claims representation does not refer in the sense proper names do and there is no propositional truth to be found at the level of representation. Finally, Ankersmit focuses on representational meaning and he observes:

We cannot define meaning – because there is nothing outside meaning or, rather, prior to meaning (such as truth and reference) in terms of which it could be defined. But the content of meaning – what meaning a word, sentence, or text actually has in individual cases – can be fixed, established, or determined in terms of its contrast(s) with other such words, sentences, or texts (143–144).

This is an intentional reversal of what Ankersmit considers to be a traditional way of analyzing semantic concepts in the philosophy of language where reference and/or truth are used to define meaning (recall, for instance, that Frege character-izes meaning as a mode of presentation of the referent of the word). In contrast to such a position Ankersmit believes meaning must remain undefined.

So how relevant does my alternative analysis of the notion of the presented seem to be once we take into account the Copernican Revolution? It should be obvious by now that the roots of aspectual and Fregean semantics are fundamen-tally different. Fregean semantics draws its inspiration from the standard philoso-phy of language. Ankersmit, on the other hand, develops a unique semantics of history. Is this then a case of talking past each other? Do we have here incommen-surable solutions arising from two rival paradigms? Since, at first sight, there is not much common ground between the two standpoints, seemingly, it does not make any sense to start the debate between the aspectual and the Fregean semantics. It may appear that nothing fruitful can come out of such a dispute.

Yet I believe there is no serious reason why we should adopt such a pessimistic attitude. Especially when it is clear that examination of the notion of aspect and comparison of the two analyses of presenteds document that it is possible to explore the results of one paradigm from the perspective of an alternative para-digm. It is even possible to criticize crucial points of one paradigm from the point of view of the other. Of course, my critique of the notion of aspect will hardly lead to its rejection. After all the notion of aspect receives a strong holistic support from


several interconnected pillars of Ankersmit’s account of historical representation. (For instance, from such presuppositions as “historical representation needs a unique semantics which does not have its counterpart in the usual philosophy of language”, “representation and description differ in an important way and that is why the items figuring in the semantics of the latter cannot be part of the seman-tics of the former”, etc.) Nonetheless, it seems to me that a critical examination of the aspectual semantics still makes sense – at least it provides an opportunity to rethink and strengthen the basic assumptions of the given semantics or maybe even to modify them.

The same is true if one perceives the situation from the opposite side. Ank-ersmit’s original account challenges a more traditional paradigm which analyzes historical writing in terms of concepts inherited from the standard philosophy of language. Ankersmit’s semantics provides an exceptionally interesting alternative to more conventional solutions. In short, his Meaning, Truth, and Reference in His-torical Representation compels his critics to reconsider their positions and even to wonder whether it all might be the other way. What if, in the end, it is really the case that to understand historical writing we need to abandon the traditional approach and embrace the new perspective offered by Ankersmit? Those who are open to novel ideas and who are willing to question their own assumptions will undoubtedly benefit from reading this book. It will not necessarily make them see historical writing in the way Ankersmit sees it, but I would be surprised, if they found nothing in the book to challenge their own view of history.

To conclude, although I am persuaded by most of Ankersmit’s claims about his-torical representation (e.g., representation cannot be accounted for in terms of the copy theory; representation is a three-place and not a two-place relation; represen-tation defines a presented in terms of which the past reality is represented, etc.), I am still cautious when it comes to his notion of aspect and when it comes to an enthusiastic and unshakable conviction that history requires a unique semantics. On the other hand, Ankersmit’s discussion of the semantics of historical represen-tation is so irresistible and, in many regards, so convincing that I cannot stop think-ing “What if, in the end, the Copernican Revolution, or a version of it, is right?”21

21) I would like to thank Frank Ankersmit and Ján Haluška for their helpful comments on a previous version of this text. This does not mean, however, that they agree with the views expressed here.

Semantics of Historical Representation in Terms of Aspects

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