1. Historians of a particular kind will tend to accept the arguments offered by the ‘common sense’ philosophers G. E. Moore and John Austin that material objects exist and hence they dismiss sceptical concerns as pointless theoretical reflection. See G. E. Moore, Philosophical Papers (London, 1959)
2. see also J. L. Austin, Philosophical Papers (Oxford, 1961), and How to Do Things with Words (Oxford, 1962). Moore is famous for his‘proof’of common sense by demonstrating that two human hands exist by describing how he can move them–first one then the other. This common sense approach is basic to conventional history thinking–two hands on the past? But while this remains unconvincing to the multiple-sceptic the conventional claim that flows from it is even stranger. Hold up your two hands, place them palm to palm. See how they match? Imagine the left hand is the past and the right is history. There is no dissonance. The reason is that they have been placed palm to palm–but they are not symmetrical if they are placed sideways and overlapped. They no longer look the same and cannot be aligned. A crude analogy I admit, but doesn’t it make you think…? For a defence of Moore see Thompson Clarke, ‘The Legacy of Skepticism’, Journal of Philosophy, vol. 68, pp. 754–69. This common sense notion is also widespread outside the historical profession. See Gabriela Dumbrava’s defence of the ways in which narrative at once assimilates and returns us to experience in ‘Turning History into Culture: The Narrative Discourse as a Way Out of the Museum’, European Journal of English Studies, vol. 11, no. 3 (December, 2007), pp. 251–61.
3. As we shall see again later, this also raises the adjacent issue of subjectivity and the situation whereby no one, as Keith Jenkins has argued, ‘comes from, or writes from, nowhere. Everyone has a position…’, Keith Jenkins, ‘Sande Cohen: On the Verge of Newness’, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, vol. 12, no. 4 (2008), pp. 437–62.
4. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Book 1, 35–9 in Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes, The Modes of Scepticism: Ancient Texts and Modern Interpretations (Cambridge, 1985), p. 19.
5. Paul O’Grady, Relativism (Chesham, 2002), p. 2.