Goldstein; Collingwood; historical anti-realism; evidence; epistemic virtues

This paper focuses on an important difference between historical narratives and fictional narratives, however, this distinction is not based on the common assumption of historical realism that historical narratives or other historical theories are referring to the facts in the past. The reasoning follows Goldstein?s original interpretation of R. G. Collingwood. According to Goldstein, historians of any kind are not asking the questions about the real past, but they are trying to explain the present world and present data, labelled as evidence, by the means of historical reconstruction.For Goldstein and Collingwood, the history is, first and foremost, an inquiry of present kind which is directed towards the mysterious artefacts in our lives. Some non-natural objects (mostly, but not exclusively, texts) require very specific kind of explanation which entails the postulation of an inaccessible past. Such banishment of real past may seem unnecessary or exaggerated, but it is a feasible way to differentiate history from fiction and to save the practice of history from the scepticism and relativism. Without real historical entities, we may become more self-aware of historical work as an inquiry into the presently accepted empirical data and postulating countless different models of our past. These diverse theoretical reconstructions are answering to the contemporary epistemic values and to the needs of historians and their audience. Philosophy of history (or historiography) should be able to explain all kinds of historical inquiry whilst temporal distance or subject matter of our inquiry should be of no concern. We are often tempted to believe that we can come to know the real past, provided we have access to a large amount of data. However, the data must be grasped historically in order to produce history and historical approach includes self-awareness of an historian.