'Neath the Moth‐Eaten Rag: Do Artefacts Play a Special Role for Historical Knowledge?

Abstract

Normally, school students learn academic subjects in classrooms, but it is best practice to, now‐and‐again, take them on trips. Often, it is then that they come face‐to‐face with ‘the real thing’, an historical artefact. This paper seeks the knowledge acquired in seeing such an artefact. If knowledge means propositional knowledge, we land on the horns of a dilemma, in which the artefact seems to be both crucial and yet incidental. On the one hand, it seems to be the labels, the resources in the exhibition, the guides, not the artefact, that give students knowledge. Yet, the learning experience is valued because of the artefact, not these things. This poses the question: can students gain knowledge from artefacts? I argue, drawing on R.G. Collingwood's characterisation of historical knowledge as mediated, inferential and requiring imagination, and on Heidegger's understanding of ‘things’, that the debate can be moved beyond bald propositional knowledge of the kind that motivates the original dilemma. Students gain historical knowledge from artefacts because students can reflectively think, and work to re‐enact in their minds the world of the artefact. As Aldridge suggests, the student is transformed by this: she does not simply learn the facts, but starts to become an historian.