Temporal Provincialism: Anachronism, Retrospection and Evidence

Aviezer Tucker

This article attempts to explain anachronism and distinguish it from retrospection

according to its relation with the evidence. I argue first that understanding the past in its
own terms is neither possible, nor desirable. Yet, anachronism, temporal provincialism,
is pernicious. I use the method of cases to list paradigmatic cases of anachronism and
retrospection to argue that anachronism is distinguished by the epistemic vices of
avoiding the evidence and ignoring alternative hypotheses that may offer better
explanation of the evidence. Anachronism is distinct of other collections of epistemic
vices by its inability to distinguish aspects of the present that preserve information about
the properties of their origins in the past from aspects of the present that do not preserve
such information. I conclude with some reflections on the two cultures of temporal
provincialism and globalism.
Arguably, historians should attempt to understand the past exclusively in its own
terms. This prescription may be interpreted in phenomenological or conceptual-linguistic
terms. As a phenomenologist, the historian may attempt to gain knowledge of
consciousnesses of historical agents; how they perceived the events they participated in,
against their historical horizons and intentions. What is common to the consciousnesses
of all members of a particular group, especially groups that are unaware of alternative
ways of perceiving the world, may be their zeitgeist, episteme, stage in the history of
being, tradition etc. Alternatively, in conceptual or linguistic terms, historians may
attempt to understand historical events exclusively using the concepts or languages that
were available to individual historical agents or would have been available to them
whether or not they were aware or utilized them. Both interpretations would prohibit the
use of concepts that have been acquired since the studied historical events took place, or
had been forgotten prior to the events. The phenomenological analysis partly overlaps
with the conceptual analysis and both rely on linguistic analysis as evidence for
hypotheses about concepts and conscious states. All three, like all hypotheses about the
past must rely on contemporary evidence to corroborate their claims. When the evidence
is insufficient, it underdetermines historiographic hypotheses, including those about past
states of consciousness or conceptual frameworks (Tucker 2004).
All interpretations of the anti-presentist edict to understand the past in its own
terms must use concepts, terms of trade, that were unavailable during most of history
such as “conceptual framework,” “consciousness,” “language game,” “anachronism” and
so on, to distinguish the past’s “own terms” from present terms. Kuhn’s overturning of
the anachronistic historiography of science that imagined a continuous progressive
process of approximating the truth required the use of concepts like “scientific
revolution” “normal science” “anomalies” and “paradigm” that had been unavailable to
scientists in the past.
We can never be acquainted directly with the historical past, perceive the past
directly without the mediation of evidence. Historians must use historiographic theories
and applied methods to gain any knowledge of the past. Such theories use concepts that
have become widely available only during the last two hundred years, like primary vs.
secondary sources, reliable and unreliable testimonies, collation of sources etc. The

1
theories and concepts that historians must use to corroborate hypotheses about past
consciousnesses and conceptual frameworks would undermine any normative
commitment to understand the past exclusively in its own terms. Understanding the past
exclusively in its own terms is impossible1.
Even if understanding the past exclusively in its own terms were possible, it
would not have been in many cases desirable. Slow processes of historical change such
as the Industrial Revolution, the Scientific Revolution, and the Renaissance were not
noticed and conceptualized by the people who made and witnessed them. Yet, such
historiographic conceptualizations have immense heuristic and explanatory values. Most
of the people who made and witnessed the Industrial Revolution and the democratization
of the United Kingdom around the turn of the 19th century were concerned mostly with
religious disputes about dissent and Catholicism. Understanding that era in terms of the
consciousnesses of its agents or their conceptual framework, avoiding Danto’s (1985)
narrative sentences or Skinner’s (1988, 44) “mythology of prolepsis” would deprive us of
understanding the process of industrialisation which in retrospect was the most radical
break with the past to take place during that era. Brush (2004, 260) criticized
Contextualists for missing the “big picture” by emphasizing events in context.
Metaphysicians debate the distinctions between events and processes, whether processes

1
I do not examine here the epistemic and methodological problems involved in
inferring past states of belief, consciousnesses and conceptual frameworks. Mark Bevir
(1999) argued against the conventionalist school associated with Skinner and the
contextualist school associated with Pocock that language and society, respectively,
influence but do not determine beliefs and ideas. Bevir claimed that these theories cannot
account for conceptual innovations, the ability to step beyond linguistic conventions and
social and cultural contexts and convey new thoughts by using new linguistic conceptual
tools. Yet, Bevir claimed there is no general methodology, no logic of discovery, in the
historiography of ideas, just insight, intuition and good luck. He acknowledged that the
reconstruction of ideas is based on the relics of the past in the present, on evidence, but
did not elaborate how. I think that linguistic conventions and social-historical contexts
may function as non-exclusive evidence for discriminating between competing
hypotheses about the beliefs, concepts and consciousnesses of historical agents. In that
respect Conventionalism and Contextualism may be progressive research programs that
widen and broaden the scope of evidence in the historiography of ideas. However, these
types of evidence may well be insufficient for determining some hypotheses about the
consciousnesses of individual historical agents. The unavailability of certain conceptual
tools to an agent in an institutional context does not ensure that the concepts were not
developed independently by inquiring minds (Spoerhase 2004). For example, it is
implausible that during two millennia of reading of the Bible before the emergence of
Biblical Criticism in the late 18th century, nobody noticed the inconsistencies, repetitions,
and linguistic layers that led to the formulation of the documentary hypothesis. Yet, it
would have been too dangerous for most of those two millennia for anybody to
communicate these findings in public. Hypotheses about such beliefs are therefore often
underdetermined by the evidence. Further, assigning to academics the task of
circumscribing what was imaginable for historical agents is likely to result in a more
limited realm of possibilities than actually was the case.

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are protracted events or series of events. But nobody denies that there are processes. The
Contextualist position may amount to the denial of historical processes.
Historical agents may have possessed a more limited understanding of the
processes they took part in or witnessed than historians because historians use new well
corroborated theoretical frameworks for describing history. For example, the classical
ancients did not know economic theory. They would observe prices going up or down,
but would not describe inflationary and deflationary processes. Nevertheless, historians
may infer ancient rates of inflation or deflation by comparing prices for standard
commodities such as grain or olive oil in different periods. Deflationary pressure may
then explain, for example, Pompey’s conquest of the Near East as an anti-deflationary
measure, fuelled by the Roman demand for gold to mint coins, in similar terms to the
explanation of the Spanish occupation of South America. Even Skinner conceded that
“we must classify in order to understand, and we can only classify the unfamiliar in terms
of the familiar.” (Skinner 1988, 31)
Historical agents fail to understand their own actions when they deceive
themselves about their motives. For example, material motives often appear in religious
or ideological guises, since people prefer to present their actions to themselves as
motivated by their “higher” ideological or religious aspirations rather than by their
“lower” material needs. An historian committed to understanding the past in its own
terms would then be committed to explain, say, the Hussite revolt in the 14 th century in
terms of disputes over the details of Christian ritual rather than as an economic, social or
political conflict over resources, status or power.
Understanding the past in its own terms is limited to a thin outer layer of
historical consciousness and/or conceptual framework, ignoring large processes such as
the Industrial Revolution and deeper causes such as socio-economic changes that
generate political or ideological upheavals. Skinner seems torn between recognizing this
and the demand to understand the past as the agents would have. Note the following
incoherence: “no agent can eventually be said to have meant or done something which he
could never be brought to accept as a correct description of what he had meant or done.
This special authority of an agent over his intentions does not exclude, of course, the
possibility that an observer might be in a position to give a fuller or more convincing
account of the agent’s behaviour than he could give himself. (Psychoanalysis is indeed
founded on this possibility.) But it does exclude the possibility that an acceptable account
of an agent’s behaviour could ever survive the demonstration that it was itself dependent
on the use of criteria of description and classification not available to the agent himself.”
(Skinner 1988, 48)2 Psychoanalysis, behavioural economics, rational choice theory etc. as
well as many if not most explanations in historiography are all based on descriptions and
classifications that were not available to their objects. Skinner’s middle sentence is
inconsistent with the rest of the paragraph3.

2
Skinner’s vague “be brought to accept” is misinterpreted by Rorty (1998, 247-273) as
allowing practically any attribution of position to anybody an ideal world. As Rorty
suggests, in an ideal world a gulag guard may be brought to recognize that he betrayed
his fellow Russians. Sure….
3
Skinner goes on then to discuss the meaning of an action for its performer as its
intention, but that is already a different issue.

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 Granting that the historiographic use of contemporary concepts, theories and
perspectives is not just inevitable, but in many cases also desirable, does not imply that
“anything goes,” and historians may project and impose their contemporary perspectives
on a defenceless past. We need criteria to distinguish pernicious anachronism from
benevolent retrospection that also explain why and how the first can be avoided and the
second recommended. To clarify this distinction, I use the method of cases, I list and
examine obvious cases of anachronism and retrospection and find what is common and
distinct to each type.
Anachronisms
Jesus in the Old Testaments
I chose the following cases from a tract by a British Christian fundamentalist (Carswell
1990) that was presented to me by one of my students in the vain hope of saving my soul
because they display paradigmatic types of anachronism. Carswell collected
interpretations that attempted to prove that the appearance of Jesus was prophesized in
the Bible since “the Old Testament is basically a Jewish book, and therefore Christians
cannot be open to the charge of `tampering’ with or changing these prophecies.” (Ibid 19)
The book of Malachi (3:1) prophesizes the sending of a Malachi, which means in
Hebrew a messenger or an angel or could be a person named Malachi. Carswell
concludes that the messenger must be John the Baptist, rather than any of the many
people who claimed to bear messages from God since Malachi was written, or an angel,
or the Malachi himself. Carswell interprets Isaiah’s foretelling of the birth of his son
Immanuel (7:14) as prophesizing the virgin birth of Jesus. Partly this results from the
mistranslation of the Hebrew word alma that means a young woman (that could be a
virgin--or not) as virgin in the King James version. But in this context, when the young
woman in question is Isaiah’s wife, she was clearly not a virgin. This interpretation
ignores the overwhelming evidence from the rest of Isaiah where each birth of one of
Isaiah’s sons is presented as a sign from God of what the future holds and the new child
receives a symbolic name accordingly. Given the youth of Isaiah’s wife, and the usual
biblical overlooking of the birth of females, the birth of a son was a practical certainty.
Carswell’s hypothesis does not explain the difference between Immanuel (which mean in
Hebrew God with us) and Jesus (Yeshua in Hebrew, meaning saviour or salvation ).
Micah (5:1) promises that the king of Israel will come out of Bethlehem.
Carswell interprets this as prophecy of the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem. He ignores the
frequent biblical reference to Bethlehem as King David’s hometown and by implication
the birthplace of the royal dynasty of Judea, the house of David. Micah expresses then
the aspiration that there will be a new king of the Judean royal dynasty, after its
devastation by the Assyrian, as a contemporary Briton may express a similar aspiration
by saying that a good king will come from Windsor. Actually, it is more likely that the
Nazarene Jesus is described as having been born in Bethlehem to connect him with the
Davidian dynasty rather than the other way round.
In Psalms 41, the poet contrasts the possibility of betrayal by friends with the
steady support of God. Carswell interprets this general theme as foretelling Judas’
betrayal of Jesus. Similarly, Carswell interprets a metaphoric story in Zechariah 11
about Zechariah’s experience as a shepherd and the contribution of his salary, thirty
pieces of silver, to the Jerusalem temple as foretelling the betrayal of Jesus, though the
only similarity between the two stories is the sum of money involved. Finally, Poetic

4
descriptions of the misery of the righteous in Isaiah and Psalms are interpreted as
descriptions of the misery of the crucifixion out of all the possible references to such
sufferings, most notably by the authors of Isaiah and Psalms.
Jesus’ tomb in Japan
40,000 Japanese visit each year a grave in the village of Shingo in the far north of Japan
which they believe is the grave of Jesus. The evidence is the alleged last will of Jesus,
written in ancient Japanese and discovered by a priest in 1935. According to the will,
Jesus arrived in Japan when he was 21 and learned Japanese. He returned to Judea 12
years later to engage in the events told in the New Testaments. But Jesus’ brother was
crucified instead of him, allowing him then to return to Japan, where he married Miyuko
and became a rice farmer till his death at the age of 106. A local priest suggests as proof
the local traditions of drawing charcoal crosses on babies and making kimonos
incorporating the Star of David (Lewis 2006).
The Patriarchs’ tombs in Hebron
According to Genesis 23 Abraham bought a burial site in Hebron for 400 silver shekels.
Given the rough era when Abraham should have lived, this makes as much sense as
reading a document that claims that somebody bought a house in New York during the
18th century for ten million dollars (and paid for it with a credit card). This price tag fits
better the level of prices in the fourth century BC. During that period the town of Hebron
was a disputed border town between the Jewish province in the Persian Empire and its
neighbour. This is the only place in the bible where a Jewish connection to Hebron is
mentioned. More than two millennia later, Israelis and Palestinians violently dispute
sovereignty over the purported site of the caves of the patriarchs in Hebron, a Moslem
structure that houses a group of graves from the Roman period. They also fight over
similar structures traditionally associated with the graves of other Old Testament
characters like Joseph and Rachel. Interestingly the similarly traditional `grave’ of
Jacob’s son Ruben just south of Tel Aviv, firmly in Israeli territory, receives no attention
from either practicing Jews or Moslems….
The challenge of interpreting the old and new testament is in peeling off the
anachronistic layers that were imposed on early texts by later creative editors who were
interested in adapting the texts to their contemporary interests and contexts. In the case
of the Old Testaments, the interests of the returning exiled Babylonian Judean aristocracy
in creating a precedent for their own return to Zion in the story of the Egyptian Exodus,
staking a claim for the territory, and imposing monotheism and its rules on texts that were
generated among polytheists who took Jehovah to be first among many Gods. The New
Testaments on one level attempt to present Jesus as the epitome of the Jewish prophetic
tradition, a combination of Moses and Elijah. On a later level they attempt to present him
as a divinity.
The Conceit of Scholars
“[W]henever men can form no idea of distant and unknown things, they judge
them by what is familiar and at hand.” (Vico 1984, paragraph 122) Consequently, people
judge distant periods when crude people spoke poetic language “on the basis of their own
enlightened, cultivated and magnificent times.” (Ibid 123) Vico distinguished two types
of such anachronisms, the conceits of scholars and nations.
The conceit of scholars is in believing that what they think they know is as old as
the world, leading to the projection of their beliefs on the ancients. Skinner (1988, 32-38)

5
similarly warned against “the mythology of doctrine,” scholars finding their own
doctrines in classical writings, or criticizing the ancients for not developing those
doctrines. Accordingly, Vico rejected not only the Renaissance era Hermetic fabrications
of ancient writings attributed to an ancient Egyptian priest, but also the philosophical
allegoric misinterpretations of Greek fables, and most significantly, natural law theories
(Vico 1984, 127-128). Vico criticized the 17 th century founders of natural law theory,
Grotius, Selden and Pufendorf for projecting backwards in time the rationality of modern
enlightened civilization on the origins of human society and law, on people whose minds
followed poetic logic rather than justice born of rationality (Ibid 394). From a Vichian
perspective, most ironic are the modern conceited interpretations of Vico himself, as a
Hegelian, a Marxist, a Pragmatist and a half dozen other philosophic feds of the previous
century. The projection back of contemporary beliefs, views or theories resembles the
projection back of religious ideas like survival of the soul, heaven and hell, and
messianism on the Old Testaments.
The negative version of the conceit of the scholars is the construction of
intellectual scarecrows, phantom enemies by projecting on past cultures or individual
thinkers opinions that one wishes to criticize, though they would have made little sense to
the objects of criticism. For example, though better known in his own days as a historian
than as a philosopher, David Hume was notoriously oblivious of how ideas and
mentalities evolve historically. He believed in a universal unhistorical and conceptually
robust human nature. Therefore, as he put it, in order to understand the Greeks and the
Romans, it suffices to look at the British and the French. In his famous little treatise on
the subject of miracles, Hume considered miracles to be violations of the laws of nature
to argue that since the prior probability of exceptions to the laws of nature is nil, miracles
are impossible. However, Hume failed to note that the concept of laws of nature was
introduced only during the scientific revolution of the 17 th century. Since the ancient
Jews and Christians who introduced the concept of miracles had no concept of an
inviolable law of nature, it makes no sense to impute to them a concept of miracle as a
violation of such laws. Unsurprisingly, none of the descriptions of miracles provide
sufficient details about their initial conditions to justify or even support a retrospective
interpretation of these miracles as violations of laws of nature (Tucker 2005). Likewise,
Popper attacked in his The Poverty of Historicism (1964) an amalgam of positions
attributes to 19th century philosophers that nobody has actually defended, just as he
attributed modern totalitarianism to Plato and Hegel (Passmore 1975).
The conceit of scholars survives due to the temporal provincialism of too many
philosophers who do not study history and remain unaware of how ideas and concepts
change in history and how historians can use evidence to learn how people very different
from themselves thought. Richard Rorty contended that when the conceited scholars are
philosophers, their misinterpretations may be fruitful in developing philosophy. This
may be true in some cases. But in most cases of anachronistic misinterpretation the result
is not new ideas, but temporal provincialism, the inability to comprehend how people
distant in space and time thought, for example, Rorty’s own misinterpretation of the
philosophers that founded the Czech dissident movement of Charter 77, Jan Patočka and
Václav Havel (Rorty 1998, 228-243). The Czechs combined phenomenology with
Platonic humanism to found a human rights movement based on a concept of the essence
of man that needs to be protected. But Rorty misinterpreted them as anti-foundationalist

6
relativists who were not humanist and offered no philosophic reason for democracy.
These post-modernist clichés hardly contribute anything to philosophy at the cost of
losing the possibility of understanding why Czech philosophers embarked on the course
of establishing a dissident movement (Tucker 1997). Other projections of philosophies
and ideologies such as socialism and libertarianism; post-modernism and pre-modernism;
universalism and relativism, on the same group of dissident Czech texts and persons was
just as misleading (Tucker 2000, 4-5, 43).
Conceit of the Nations
Vico (1984, 125) characterized the conceit of nations as the claim for primacy in the
invention of civilization founded on national memory that stretches back to the dawn of
civilization. The conceits of nations intensified after Vico’s time as a result of the rise of
modern nationalism. The first nationalist manifestation of this conceit was probably the
forging of heroic sagas for new nations like the Scots (Ossian) and the Czechs to prove
both their antiquity and their heroic essence. The second kind of conceit, the claim that
nations stretch back in time, rather than being a 19 th century construction has been far
more prevalent. Nationalist intellectuals at least since Herder and Palacky constructed
narratives of continuity of ethnic and linguistic national identity and characteristics since
time immemorial, ignoring the overwhelming evidence to the contrary (Tucker 2000, 93).
Human migrations constantly create and solidify new ethnic combinations and identities.
Before the standardization of language by empires and intellectuals, there were
interconnected dialects and shades of dialects, but no single language associated with an
ethnic group. Yet, the conceits of the nations have led them to consume intellectually
constructed anachronistic historiographies.
Traditions and other imaginary historical processes
When seeing islands or mountaintops from the air, it is easy to construct gestalt patterns,
connections between the islands or mountaintops where there are none. Historical events
may also appear to form patterns though they are disconnected from each other. When
the events examined are ideas or political structures, it is easy to imagine a pattern
leading to the present. For example, Aristotle’s historiography of philosophy in the first
book of his Metaphysics presented the history of philosophy as groping in the direction of
his own system of four causes, though different philosophers were concerned with
different problems without necessarily concerning themselves with the issue of causation.
The `old’, pre-Kuhnian, historiography of science described a continuous progressive
process of gradual approximation of the truth in the history of science through a
continuous application of the same scientific methodology. The designation of a scientific
`precursor’ of a later development, likewise, assumed in many cases a non-existing causal
link. It was left to historians of science like Kuhn to prove that scientific methodologies
vary in the history of science and there has been no continuous process, but ruptures and
revolutions. Conceited nationalist historiographies connect any isolated manifestation of
nationalist sentiments or intimation of sentiments, to a movement of “national
awakening/ revival,” whether or not they were causally disparate. The underlying
foundation is the sleeping beauty theory of nationalism. Since there is practically no
evidence for nationalist sentiments prior to the French Revolution, nationalist historians
must assume that the beauty had been sleeping and awakened gradually when kissed by
provincial intellectual princes.

7
 The construction of imaginary processes culminating in the present is described
sometimes as teleological or Whiggish historiography. I avoid these labels because one
does not have to assume metaphysically loaded and highly problematic backward
causation to imagine a causally connected process that leads to a present result when
there is no such process. Whiggish historiography that sees continuity in English history
from Magna Charta, or even the ancient Anglo-Saxons Germanic tribes as described by
Tacitus, to the Reform Act, as a history of the progress of liberty, need not assume
teleology. But it must assume a causal continuity that somehow skips the period of
Tudor absolutism, though there is no evidence for such continuity and much evidence for
discontinuity. Such causal continuities receive often the name of traditions, from the
Latin tradere, to hand over. Tradition is a continuous process of handing over, usually of
information, from one group of people or generation to another. The assumption that
such handing over can preserve information is common to myth, priestly religions (where
the priests should hand over the arcane divine knowledge from generation to generation),
Gadamer, and Saul Kripke’s theory of proper names (cf. Tucker 2004, 46-53, 167, 203-
204)
Skinner (1988, 44-45) cautioned against a variation on this traditional
anachronism, when the properties of a cause in the history of ideas are assumed to
resemble its effects, though information has not been preserved in the process. For
example, Locke and Rousseau respectively can be said to have caused modern liberal
democracy and totalitarianism. However, this does not imply that Locke was a liberal-
democrat and Rousseau a Jacobin.
Literalism
Literalism is the conscious or assumed belief that each word has only a single meaning
and that the literalist knows it. Literalism therefore does not recognize that the meanings
of words can change according to their contexts and that words can be used ironically,
understated or overstated, cynically etc., which Skinner (1988, 50-53) called the
`obliqueness’ of texts. Literalism further cannot distinguish a translation from an original
and consider possible gaps. Literalism cannot comprehend as the later Wittgenstein and
Austin did that languages, meanings and references of words, change and mutate through
time and therefore need to be analysed through their uses in the contexts of statements.
Literalism is particularly common among people who are mono cultural, monolingual,
know little or nothing of history, and lack a sense of humour because without puns or
irony there is no humour or parody. Literalism, like anachronism in general, is temporal
provincialism (cf. Tucker 2004, 194ff).
Retrospection
Retrospection offers greater insight into the past by understanding it in our own terms.
Its most obvious types are:
Description of Historical Processes, Colligation and Narrative Sentences
As Arthur Danto (1985) noted, historiography uses sentences that have two temporal
references such as The First World War started with the assassination of Archduke
Ferdinand or The covering law model debate in the philosophy of historiography started
with Hempel’s 1942 article. Such sentences refer to two temporal zones, the
assassination and publication, and five years of war and decades of debate, respectively.
Narrative sentences are not a distinct feature of historiography as they can be found in
science as well, e.g. The universe began about 14 billion years ago in the Big Bang

8
(Tucker 2004, 12-14, 138-139). Narrative sentences are essential for the description of
processes. To be sure, nobody imagined in their worst nightmares during the
assassination or the publication that they would result in the most deadly war in human
history or decades of fruitless tiresome debates respectively. Yet, a historiography that
does not put events in the context of the processes they constituted is limited to the
perspectives and limited temporal horizons of the historical agents. Most people expect
historiography to offer more. Colligation is another method by which historians
construct a whole that explains its parts, like the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution
or the rise of nationalism explain their constituent parts.
Theoretically Laden Descriptions
Some historiographic descriptions use theoretical language that was unavailable at the
time of the events, for example the language of economic theory: inflation and deflation;
recession and economic growth, productivity and capital; or the more controversial
concepts of psychology, hysteria, narcissism, bi-polar disorder and psychotic
hallucinations can all be applied to describe and explain the behaviour of historical agents
who neither understood themselves nor were understood by their contemporaries in those
terms. Economics can describe macro-processes that participants in micro-level
economic activities cannot perceive. The integration of historiography, sociology and
philosophy of science has been so fruitful exactly because historically informed
philosophy of science, like Kuhn’s, can provide conceptual frameworks that offer better
understanding of the processes of theory change and paradigm shift in the history of
science. The applications of theories and their conceptual frameworks to historical
events allows better understanding of the historical events than was possible while they
were taking place4.
Evidence, Anachronism and Retrospection
Understanding the past in contemporary terms, rather than in its own terms, can be both a
manifestation of temporal provincialism, anachronism, or of historical sophistication and
understanding, retrospection. The obvious question then is how to distinguish the two?

4
Retrospection, understanding the past in a new light, given new evidence or
theories in the present, should be distinguished from its opposite, the understanding of the
present given a new perspective from the past. Historians may suddenly develop a greater
interest in some events because they display a certain similarity to a new feature of the
present. In such cases “Whiggism is not all bad” (Brush 2004, 259). For example,
Vico’s philosophy did not cause semiotics and hermeneutics, but it received greater
attention following the emergence of these philosophic schools. This should not have
altered the interpretations of Vico, but the interpretations of Vico may shed a new light
on twentieth century hermeneutics and semiotics. The emergence of totalitarianism in
the 20th century led to greater interest in totalitarian or semi-totalitarian episodes in the
past like the Münster Anabaptist 16th century theocracy and the Jacobin regime in 18 th
century France. Neither caused modern totalitarianism. However, historians of ideas and
political historians are interested in these episodes because of their similarity with
modern totalitarianism. But as long as the past is used to put the present in perspective,
rather than the other way around we are dealing with neither anachronism nor
retrospection but with a historical perspective on the present.

9
 The answer is the relationships between historiography and evidence.
Retrospection displays the virtue of epistemic diligence in searching for relevant
evidence for description of the past, while anachronism lacks that virtue. Retrospection
compares alterative hypotheses that explain the same evidence while anachronism does
not. Anachronism considers contemporary religion, language, politics and ideas to be
evidence for the past, whereas retrospection does not because they do not preserve
reliably information about their origins.
Virtue epistemology (cf. Montmarquet 1987; Fairweather & Zagzebski 2001;
Steup 2001) argues that epistemic responsibility, courage, conscientiousness and
diligence are conducive for the attainment of truth. The virtue of epistemic
courageousness includes diligent search for relevant evidence for one’s beliefs and
following its implications on one’s web of beliefs. This virtue is assumed in everyday
life: When we buy an appliance we look for evidence for its performance rather than just
take the salesperson word for it; when we embark on a course of academic study we
should look for evidence about the employment and other achievements of its graduates,
the pedagogic competence of the faculty and its publication record. Epistemically
virtuous, courageous and competent historians, journalists and detectives who specialize
in corroborating beliefs about the past diligently work to find and collate sources of
evidence such as archived documents, sources in government, and eye witness
testimonies.
Anachronism follows epistemic vice, epistemic cowardice and laziness,
neglecting relevant available sources of evidence. Epistemically virtuous interpreters of
verses in the Bible should examine other relevant verses in that book, to note that the
symbolic birth of Isaiah’s first son, Immanuel, fits that of his other sons and that the
Davidian dynasty originated in Bethlehem and is closely associated with it. They should
examine terms in the original Hebrew in the various places they appear in the Bible to
avoid confusions based on mistranslations of words that refer to messengers and young
women who may be virgins. They should examine extra-biblical evidence for property
prices in different periods. The Japanese who take the tradition of making kimonos that
incorporate the Star of David as proof for 2000 years old Judaic traditions should look for
evidence that associates Jews with the Star of David prior to the European Middle Ages
and find none; the symbol of Judaism during the Roman period was the menorah.
Scholars who write about texts from different times and places should bother to do more
than read translations, they should read them in the original and read other texts that
shared the same context to discover that the ancient concept of miracles had nothing to do
with laws of nature but was a symbol for the superiority of Jehovah over other lesser
gods. Natural law theorists should benefit from the evidence that anthropologists have
collected, and philosophers who interpret texts need to read other texts from the same
period and by the same author to determine their interpretations. Nationalist historians
ignore evidence for the non-nationalist identity, self-perception and aspirations of the
ancients they consider their forbearers. They also ignore evidence for unheroic histories
of what they take to be their nations. Historians who see imaginary processes ignore the
evidence for discontinuities and alternative reasons for similarities between earlier and
later events in perceived traditions. Literalists ignore evidence for how languages and
words change their meanings in time and context and rarely know foreign languages.

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 By contrast, retrospection is marked by epistemic virtue, active search and use of
evidence to generate better knowledge of the past. Narrative sentences rely on evidence
that had been unavailable at the earlier of the two time references. Obviously, we have
today plenty of evidence for the results of the assassination of archduke Ferdinand that
was unavailable in 1914, and contemporary philosophers of history are familiar with the
dire effects of Hempel’s 1942 article. Theory laden descriptions add also further
evidence indirectly, through the use of theories that had been tested against a much
broader range of evidence earlier. For example, when historians discuss Roman inflation,
they bring to bear the results of a broad range of evidence that has been used to examine
theories of inflations earlier.
Many philosophers of science consider accepted scientific hypotheses to be the
best among competing explanations of the evidence according to various criteria,
cognitive values (Lipton 2004). Hypotheses are almost never examined in isolation, but
in competition with each other. Better hypotheses increase the likelihood of the evidence
more than other hypotheses, as well as explain a broader range of different types of
evidence, are simpler and more fruitful. Likewise, in virtue epistemology the
consideration of alternative competing beliefs to one’s own is a virtue. Anachronistic
hypotheses are not compared with alternative hypotheses. A phrase from Malachi may
be explained as the prophetic prediction of the activities of John the Baptist. But it may
well be explained much better by alternative competing explanations that may have
considerably higher prior probabilities, as a phrase from Zechariah may predict the
betrayal of Jesus but is more likely to describe a symbolic episode from the life of
Zechariah himself. Descriptions of the misery of righteous prophets may refer to Jesus,
but they are more likely to be universal poetic descriptions of the moral absurdity of the
universe or self-pitying contemplations about their authors. Vico’s philosophy may be an
early version of Hegel, but is more likely to be a late version of neo-Platonism.
Retrospection, like scientific historiography in general, is the best among competing
explanations of the widest breadth of evidence.
It is trivially true that all knowledge of the past originates with information
transmitted in the present, evidence that preserves information about its origins.
However, historians distinguish aspects of the present that preserve information about the
past with high fidelity, such as eye witness testimonies that were written immediately
after the events or bureaucratic reports, from aspects that do not preserve information
with high fidelity, such as oral traditions or memoirs that change and mutate too often
and quickly to be reliable sources of information about the past (Tucker 2004).
Anachronism is founded on an inability to distinguish the aspects of the present that
preserve information about the past from those that do not. “Anachronism is always a
matter of temporal mis-location of something within an historical description.” (Condren
2004, 289) The ancient authors of the story about Abraham’s purchase of the burial cave
in Hebron failed to notice that real-estate prices in the present do not preserve
information about past prices, as the forgers of nationalist sagas during the late eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries and the literalist readers of the bible today have failed to note
that language in the present does not preserve with high fidelity information about its
shape in the past: since the Hebrew of the Pentateuch is not distinct of that of Kings, it
could not have been written by Moses five centuries earlier. The conceits of scholars and
nations likewise are based on the inability of scholars and nationalists to realize the high

11
rate of change of ideas and identities. Retrospection, in contrast, is based on the
distinction between information bearing signals from the past and less reliable sources of
information in the present that are contaminated with `noise’, and the inference of
descriptions of past events from their information preserving effects, the practices of
scientific historiography (Tucker 2004).
The three above criteria are necessary and sufficient for distinguishing
anachronism from retrospection. It is worth noting that the first two criteria, epistemic
virtue in search for evidence and the comparison of competing hypotheses or
explanations of the evidence are universal, whereas the last, the identification and use of
aspects of the present that preserve information about their historical origins with the aid
of theories to infer descriptions of past events and processes, is particular to the historical
sciences, historiography, historical comparative philology, textual criticism, archaeology,
evolutionary biology, geology, and cosmology.
Independence of Anachronism from Teleology and Necessity
Some contributors to the literature on anachronism associate it with teleology—
temporally backward causation, and necessity. They seem to think that anachronistic
descriptions of historical events and processes also assume that they had a telos, a
predestined purpose. But most of the paradigmatic cases of anachronism presented above
do not assume a metaphysical commitments to either backward causation or an epistemic
commitment to knowing all the necessary forward and/or backward causes for the
historical processes in question. Hume’s anachronistic misunderstanding of miracles
makes no assumptions about the direction of the historical process or its necessity, nor is
literalism. Religious anachronistic interpretations of the Bible may assume teleology, but
if they take free will seriously, they cannot assume necessity. If a historical process has
an end that causes it backwards, it does not imply that it was necessary, just as the
existence of a necessary historical process does not imply that the reason for this
necessity is teleological. A teleological substantive philosophy of history does not imply
anachronism. Vico and Hegel, the founders of historicism, both believed that history has
a teleological end. But they recognized a historical process of change towards that end
where cunning providence or reason uses the baser, historically changing, motives of men
towards that end. Considering their respective philosophical environments, Cartesianism
and Kantian universalistic enlightenment, Vico and Hegel were incredibly sensitive to the
differences between historical periods and cultures. Historical teleology, necessity and
anachronism are then conceptually independent of each other.
The Two Cultures: Temporal Provincialism vs. Globalism
Anachronism is temporal provincialism founded on epistemic vice, historical
illiteracy, a failure to comprehend the human condition in time, how society, language
and concepts change and remain in constant flux. It is a moral failure to practice
epistemic virtue, have sufficient courage to look for and consider the relevant evidence
and weigh alternative competing hypotheses about the past.
I see a growing cleavage between two cultures, temporally provincial and global.
The first is composed of people who tend to be monolingual, mono cultural, historically
illiterate, and humourless. They form their beliefs following the oldest epistemic vice,
wishful thinking. Wishful thinking leads to seeing in the past what the believer wishes to
believe, projections of their present desires and fears. The historically illiterate live then
in a mythical story, often constructed to manipulate them. Most of the trenchant ethnic,

12
nationalist, and religious conflicts in the world, from the Middle East to Northern Ireland
are entangled with such temporally provincial and historically illiterate narratives.
Manipulative wishful thinking about the past is an effect of a conflict more than its cause:
for two thousand years the story about Abraham’s purchase of the caves of the patriarchs
in Hebron did not generate any conflict because it was in nobody’s interest. Only when
sections of the Jewish and Arab population became infected with nationalism and its
accompanying violent xenophobia did the story become effective again, first in the Arab
riots in 1929 that annihilated the ancient Jewish community of Hebron, and then
following the Israeli capture of the town in 1967, when groups of Israeli religious and
nationalist fanatics settled there. It would be naïve to expect Israelis and Palestinians to
realise that hundreds of lives were lost in a struggle over Roman era graves
anachronistically identified with an earlier story that had been anachronistic as well,
about the purchase of a cave in a disputed border area between two provinces in the
Persian Empire during the fourth century BC. They would in all likelihood come up with
some other excuse to kill each other over. The conflict would end only once people
awake to the fact that in our day and age territory and population size do not bring wealth
or happiness and embrace modernity, end patriarchy get an education and start working
for a living, temporal globalism would then be a side effect of economic globalization.
Yet, I believe it is the epistemically virtuous duty of historically literate, temporally
global, people to assault such anachronistic murderous myths. A second, temporally
global, culture is marked by retrospection, an understanding of change in time, epistemic
virtue, curiosity, search for evidence and a culture of debating competing hypotheses by
devising methods for distinguishing information bearing reliable evidence from less
reliable one. Having a non-literal understanding of language allows then the appearance
of humour, being funny.
Academic institutions and research reflect these two cultures. In my opinion there
is too much temporal provincialism about. It is too easy to receive a PhD in the
humanities and social sciences without being historically literate or even knowing foreign
languages, understanding how to infer descriptions of events from evidence and the
extent to which present events do not preserve information about their origins. In my
own discipline, philosophy, temporal provincialism is reflected mostly in literalism and
the conceit of scholars. Literalist philosophy misreads philosophic and other texts
without considering their context, language, conceptual framework and the uses of
humour and irony. The conceit of the scholars leads philosophers to consider their ideas
universal whereas they are not, natural law in the philosophy of law, common sense
morality in ethics, and laws of nature and covering laws of explanation in the philosophy
of science. In that respect, some philosophers are just as temporally provincial as the
religious fundamentalists whose literalist interpretations of the scriptures they like to
denigrate.

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