When a historian reads a historical document, he needs to be able to interpret it in order to understand the thoughts of the author. He has to be able to imagine how the structure of the ideas and paragraphs fit together in the mind of the author. If he comes across a sentence or idea that does not seem to fit with his interpretation, he has a choice. Either he must revise his beliefs about the author’s conceptual framework or he must infer that the author changed his mind during the writing process.
This is the method of verstehen, which many of the members of the Historical School used to analyze socioeconomic trends in history, eschewing pure theory entirely.
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