Historians' Fallacy

In preparing to write my final paper, I kept thinking back to one of
Carolyn Steedman's comments in "Dust: The Archive and Cultural
History": "There is always a pleasure as a reader in finding something
that the writer did not know was there (or that he has hidden, deep in
its crevices and cracks)…Indeed, in one view, the practice of history
in its modern mode is just one long exercise of the deep satisfaction
of finding things" (10). While I can understand this "deep
satisfaction," it does seem that she is taking for granted what was or
was not intended by a writer (or whatever aspect of history one is
looking at). This seems to be related to what David Hackett Fischer
describes as the "historians' fallacy." Fischer explains this as "the
error of assuming that a man who has a given historical experience
knows it, when he has it, to be all that a historian would know it to
be, with the advantage of historical perspective" (209). Just as
Fischer suggests that one can't expect someone to fully realize the
historical significance of an event when it first happens, one can't
always assume that they didn't see any larger meaning, either. It may
be the case that we just don't have enough evidence to prove what
someone did or did not think at any given moment.

-Cullen Gallagher