Colin Takenori Historical Reasoning Thought

The idea on historical inference is the central content of Collingwood's methodology. To Collingwood, the capture of the characters, functions, and meanings of history needs historical inference. On the other hand, historical inference is also the result of his reflection to the characters of historical cognition, helping to answer the questions as what kind of cognition is historical cognition? Contrasting to other forms of cognition, what is its peculiarity? How can it go along? The research of the idea on historical inference will help us to comprehend how Collingwood grasps the essence of history and the regulation of the development of history, and clarifies his opinions to the nature of historical cognition. This paper then tries to wholly probe into Collingwood's idea of historical inference. Firstly, this paper tends to investigate in what background can Collingwood's idea on historical inference come into being, emphasizing it was the offspring of the influence of Positivism, Historicism, and Realism. Secondly, this paper points out that Collingwood's idea of historical inference is the essential require of scientific history, taking the form of logic of question and answer, and introduces its exertion in historical analysis. Finally, when commenting on the tendency of making history scientific then and there, this paper indicates the revolution of history and human's cognition which advocated by Collingwood is useful, and his emphasis on the subjective initiative in the course of historical thinking is meaningful, but the idea of historical inference itself exists warps and lots of contradictions.