historiography; narrativism; post-narrativism; pragmatism; hermeneutics;

Hayden White; Keith Jenkins; Tor Førland; Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen; Paul Ricoeur; Jörn

Rüsen.

What criteria can be mobilized to compare - and eventually choose - between competing history texts dealing with the same events and states of affairs in the past? This question is at the heart of this dissertation. It discusses three different schemes for understanding validation in academic historiography, with reference to which history texts could be compared. In the first of these schemes, decanted from positions and ideas of Hayden White and Keith Jenkins, aesthetic and ideological non-cognitive criteria related to the persuasion of the readership of histories predominate. In the second scheme, represented by the positions of Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen and T.E. Førland, cognitive criteria related to the qualities of empirical exemplification and logical argumentative persuasion intrinsic to story texts are predominant. Finally, the third theoretical scheme of comparison, apprehensible in the works of Paul Ricoeur and Jörn Rüsen, recommends a particular synthesis between cognitive and non-cognitive criteria for the validation of academic historiography. Within this third 

scheme, the idea that the methodical rationality proper to historical knowledge in its academic variants makes it possible for history texts to be useful to people living in the present time from a singular perspective, informed by systematic procedures of empirical foundation and intersubjective criticism, prevails. In this dissertation, the 

theoretical perspective associated with Ricoeur and Rüsen is privileged, assimilating both cognitive and pragmatic criteria for the validation of academic historiography, thus taking it as a practice regulated by methodical principles of empirical and argumentative pertinence, although entangled in identity dynamics relevant in the present time. I do not believe it is possible to isolate the cognitive ambitions specific to the science of history from interests and practices related to the power struggles constitutive of social life, due to the existential and cultural practical relevance that stories have. Consequently, the practices of justification, validation and comparison on a cognitive basis within academic historiography necessarily interact with the tensions and dilemmas inherent to socio-cultural practices of identity self-affirmation and dispute over material and symbolic power.