TY - JOUR AU - Christian Delacroix PY - 2020/12/17 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - Uncertainty in History JF - Critical Hermeneutics JA - CH VL - 4 IS - special II SE - Articles DO - 10.13125/CH/4498 UR - https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/ecch/article/view/4498 AB - In history, the idea of uncertainty has taken on many forms, both in the methodological field, with for example the definition of historical sources as traces, and in epistemological terms, with the major question of causality or even ontological with the infinite extension of the “historian's territory”. Nevertheless, more than an operative notion perhaps, it has long remained as an invariant, a kind of epistemological madguard (a "residue" according to the term adopted by Marc Bloch) of historical knowledge. The question of the historicization of the idea of uncertainty in the historical discipline is related to the place assigned to it in the epistemology of historians, always in tension with the desire for scientificity and truth that has long structured the disciplinarization and professionalization of history. Where do we place the cursor between uncertainty and truth for historical knowledge? This could be the guiding question to periodize the place of the idea of uncertainty in history and roughly distinguish after a predominantly scientist phase linked to the professionalization of the historical discipline (19th-first 20th century), a phase of doubts about history's ability to tell the truth, which became clear at the end of the 1970s and could conveniently be characterized as the great reversal of uncertainty in history, which, from an embarrassing limitation to reducing as much as possible, became an operating principle for defatalising history. However, it will be necessary to question this periodization, more or less modelled on the general evolutions of the sciences, marked in particular by the rise in power of probabilistic and indeterministic approaches and more or less directly related to what is perceived by the majority as the rise of uncertainty in the historical world itself ; this will require taking into account another level of analysis that adds to the weight of uncertainty in history, the moral and political dimension around the question of the social function of history. ER -