Abstract: This paper is based on a specific pragmatist account of language and knowledge:inferentialism.The suggestion is that historiographic knowledge is claiming correctly.The paper discusses the kinds of challenges that inferentialism poses for empiricism.Its main focus is on the rules of claiming correctly and incorrectly,as stipulated by the community of historians.This is done with the help of a case study dealing with the trial of David Irving and his scholarship,which exposes a number of errors that historians should avoid,if they are to make warranted claims about the past.

Key words: empiricism, inferentialism, pragmatism, David Irving, the Holocaust