HISTORY IS NOT HISTORICISM

Nassim Taleb's dismissal of history as based on the "narrative fallacy"-which reads our present knowledge of past events into our reconstruction of the past-is based on a fundamental misconception of what historians actually do. Historians do not, as Taleb presumes, try to infer general, predictive laws from "hard" facts, as do natural scientists; instead their aim is to discover the causes of unique historical facts among antecedent facts. This is no different, in principle, from "narrating" the cause of a supernova by referring to physical causes. The construction of universal historical laws would admittedly be a fool's errand, but that is not the task historians-as opposed to historicists-actually set for themselves.