Hexter

When I opined to him somewhat apprehensively that Hexter appeared to have exposed the tendentious use of statistics in my professor's own prior work, he replied, "You're absolutely correct."

On the Sadness of Higher Education 2008

One thinks at once of the writings of Tawney, Notestein, Haller, and Neale, and more recently of Hill, Hexter, Trevor-Roper, and Stone, to mention only a few.

A Restless Lot Morgan, Edmund S. 1968

But surely Hexter can't say that in this sense all of the terms of science are wholly denotative whereas all of the terms of history are both denotative and connotative.

Letting Go White, Morton 1967

But so bent is Hexter on saddling me with the idea that narrative histories can "by reduction be assimilated to scientific language" that he is led to distort what I say by means of a polemically convenient excision from a quotation.

Letting Go White, Morton 1967

Furthermore, if Hexter were to reread or read page 254 of my book he would find me saying, after I have described certain aspects of historical narrative:

Letting Go White, Morton 1967

No wonder that Hexter is determined to defend the historian's right to use "imprecise, connotative, evocative, non-scientific rhetoric."

Letting Go White, Morton 1967

Now there is a point in Hexter's review in which he seems to say that I am not an orthodox analytical philosopher, whatever that is, and so, strictly speaking, he may not be condemning me in this passage, but it comes right after an attack on me which is calculated to show that I "reduce" history to science and therefore can't possibly raise the "difficult question" that Hexter raises.

Letting Go White, Morton 1967

I did not expect agreement but I did think that Hexter would accurately report what I said and fairly criticize my views where he disagreed with them.

Letting Go White, Morton 1967

And to make matters worse, Hexter attributes to me the exact opposite of what I assert, namely, that "all that we know about the structure of the human body, all the truth accessible to us about it, is what the roentgenologist finds by X-raying the skeleton."

Letting Go White, Morton 1967

In his pompous peroration Hexter says that a superior true narrative can be identified by making a distinction between what he calls "the wholly denotative" language of science and the language of history, which he says is both denotative and connotative.

Letting Go White, Morton 1967