THE WILL TO TRUTH - A REPLY TO NOVICK

This article challenges Peter Novick's claims that truth and objectivi ty are not proper goals for historians to strive after. The author arg ues that, on the contrary, these ideals are morally and intellectually indispensable. The argument consists of an attack on several fundamen tal claims Novick makes: that history and fiction are barely distingui shable; that although there are such things as facts, it is easy to ge t them right and it is possible to construct whatever theory one likes around them; that historians should be honest not in the sense of bei ng faithful to the truth (which, he believes, does not exist) but only in the sense of admitting that what they do is make up stories.