Historiography and the philosophy of history The topic of the philosophy of history comes up frequently here. The related domain of "historiography" has not come up yet, however. What is the relation between these bodies of study about the writing of history? Let's begin by asking the basic question: what is historiography? In its most general sense, the term refers to the study of historians' methods and practices. Any intellectual or creative practice is guided by a set of standards and heuristics about how to proceed, and "experts" evaluate the performances of practitioners based on their judgments of how well the practitioner meets the standards. So one task we always have is to attempt to identify these standards and criteria of good performance. This is true for theatre and literature, and it is true for writing history. Historiography is at least in part the effort to do this work for a particular body of historical writing. Historians normally mak...
