dear colleagues:
At the risk of annoying some people and being taken to task for not
responding to each of the arguments in the discussion I would like to
offer the following statements
1) Language is a form of representation; it is a system of signs
through which we seek to communicate experiences both actual and
imaginative
2) We can't say that anything is absolutely true but we can make
assumptions based on our own experience. I would use the term
'fiction' to refer to acts of the imagination that do not purport to
be actual experiences. I would say otherwise that language may be
more or less persuasive in convincing us that something actually
happened
3) Events that individuals experience are real, presuming that we
accept that sensory experience more often than not corresponds to the
real; linguistic representations of so called real events are more or
less persuasive; they can be verified by multiple accounts or refuted
by similar means; to the degree that we live through representations
we need to make judgements about what to accept as actual and what to
discount as fiction (something that is not actual)
4) linguistic representation is a form of mediation between
individuals; it can be critiqued in terms of its capacity (in a
particular instance) to accurately or fairly represent something that
happened.
I will stop here. This is simply my attempt to be reasonable. It is
crazy to deny experience. Holocaust deniers, for example, are not
credible. There is too much evidence to contradict their claims. We
develop our own capacities to judge the accuracy of linguistic
representation, i.e. to judge whether something said is likely to be
an accurate representation. It also helps to use the term 'fiction'
for works that are self-consciously imaginative. To call history
writing, for example, fiction, is to suggest that there is no claim
to any degree of veracity. Of course some historians try to cover up
the truth and to the degree that they do, they depart from actuality
and present a work that is purely imaginative. To the degree that
they try to create a narrative based on events, they may be taken
seriously as historians. Of course, any work in the humanities is
subject to interpretation and that is what, in my opinion
differentiates the humanities from the sciences. They expose
themselves as representations and allow for interpretation and debate
as legitimate forms of response.
Enough.
Victor Margolin
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Victor Margolin
Professor Emeritus of Design History
Department of Art History
University of Illinois at Chicago
935 W. Harrison St.
Chicago, IL 60607-7039
Tel. 1-312-583-0608
Fax 1-312-413-2460
website: www.uic.edu/~victor
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