Cover -- Haft-title -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Introduction: The Philosophy of Historiography -- the philosophy of scientific historiography -- historiographic knowledge -- philosophy of historiographic interpretation -- philosophy of history -- the research program -- 1 Consensus and Historiographic Knowledge -- knowledge of history vs. skepticism and esotericism -- consensus and knowledge -- critique of consensus as a process -- the epistemic significance of consensus on beliefs -- uncoerced -- uniquely heterogeneous consensus on beliefs -- sufficiently large consensus -- cognitive values and consensus on beliefs -- historiographic consensus and excommunication -- 2 The History of Knowledge of History -- biblical criticism -- classical philology -- comparative linguistics -- scientific historiography -- evolutionary biology -- second-stage evolutionary biology and comparative linguistics -- the historical sciences -- 3 The Theory of Scientific Historiography -- bayesianism and historiographic confirmation -- comparison of likelihoods: concise bayesianism -- the historical sciences -- the meaning of token common cause explanations -- how to infer common causes? -- prior probability of the common cause hypothesis -- likelihood of a variational group given some common cause -- evaluating the separate causes hypothesis -- comparison of likelihoods -- alternative common cause hypotheses -- inferring the properties of particular common causes -- fidelity and likelihoods given competing common causes -- constant rates of fidelity -- formal fidelity -- bayesianism and historiography -- 4 Historiographic Opinion -- comparative historiography -- comparison with social science theories -- underdetermined historiography -- traditionalist science -- the semantics of traditionalist historiography -- the fable of the "card game".

historiographic traditions are not historical -- 5 Historiographic Explanation -- best among competing explanations -- traditionalist explanations -- common cause explanations of descriptions of events -- historiographic understanding (verstehen) -- 6 The Limits of Historiographic Knowledge -- discarding the old arguments -- complexity -- coincidence -- historical contingency and necessity -- counterfactuals and the evaluation of historical necessity and contingency -- reformulating the question -- uniqueness -- 7 Conclusion: Historiography and History -- References -- Notes -- Chapter One -- Chapter Two -- Chapter Three -- Chapter Four -- Chapter Five -- Chapter Six -- Index.