AQC for Today, for Tomorrow, and for ever . . . .
A body of knowledge, both the activity of knowing and what is known, consists of answers (i.e., assertive acts of thought) together with the questions they are meant to answer. R. G. Collingwood, the most important philosopher of the past century, writes:
My work in archaeology . . . impressed upon me the importance of the "questioning activity" in knowledge: and this made it impossible for me to rest contented with the intuitionist theory of knowledge favoured by the "realists". The effect of this on my logic was to bring about in my mind a revolt against the current logical theories of the time, a good deal like that revolt against the scholastic logic which was produced in the minds of Bacon and Descartes by reflection on the experience of scientific research, as that was taking shape in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The Novum Organum and the Discours de la Methode began to have a new significance for me.
They were the classical expressions of a principle in logic which I found it necessary to restate: the principle that a body of knowledge consists not of "propositions", "statements", "judgements", or whatever name logicians use in order to designate assertive acts of thought (or what in those acts is asserted: for "knowledge" means both the activity of knowing and what is known), but of these together with the questions they are meant to answer; and that a logic in which the answers are attended to and the questions neglected is a false logic.
R. G. Collingwood, Autobiography, p. 30-31.
This is the logic of the historian: the Logic of Question and Answer. On this subject there will be more Archival Quality Communication.
James Duvall, M. A.
History Research
Boone County Public Library
Burlington, KY
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