Metodo

International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy

Journal | Volume | Article

174877

Due ontologie della realtà storica

Documentalità e intenzionalità collettiva alla prova della storicizzazione

Stefano Vaselli

pp. 211-233

Abstract

Realist ontologies about history stress that entities such as documents, their sources, and events whom they are talking about are objectively given in the ontological reality of social history, beyond our skills to recognize them. Thus, how is it possible to understand the extension of the ontological independence of historical findings and where does our (mis)interpretations of those findings begin? As every realist ontological commitment must provide us with a suitable tool to solve the age-old problem of findings’ reliability, in this paper we analyze how such realist views, like Searle’s Collective Intentionality, cannot be a solution, meanwhile, on the other hand, other realist purposes could represent valid alternatives. In fact, Searle’s theory surely accounts for the constitution of such social objects as false historical acts, but its definition of function of status (FS) as “X count as Y in C” permits, even only in principle, that the same entity X, which has counted as Y, in the far-off times historical context C0, could “re-count” as Y  Y in a more recent context Ct  C0, after an involuntary forgery too. Being by definition iterative, FS could iterate clamorous twists, also ad libitum, making future historians’ shared intentionality lose the contact with the reality of original status’ functions. On the contrary, Ferraris’ Documentality satisfies this historical reliability test, because its definition of a social object as inscription of an act distinguishes between what a fact/event/object X of the past has been, and what characteristics this same X must possess to become a document, discerning, this way, voluntary from unintentional effects of the creation of an object/event/fact, to instantiate a social fact, or to cause an historical event, and their different taxa of historicity.

Publication details

Published in:

(2012) A partire da Documentalità. Rivista di estetica 50.

Pages: 211-233

DOI: 10.4000/estetica.2136

Full citation:

Vaselli Stefano (2012) „Due ontologie della realtà storica: Documentalità e intenzionalità collettiva alla prova della storicizzazione“. Rivista di estetica 50, 211–233.