dear ken,
you are saying:
"one kind of epistemological baggage would be the notion that we cannot sort
out reasonably well that some things have happened, even though we did not
see them or experience them personally.
That's what historians do -- imperfectly, as Victor notes, but not
unreasonably"
i don't think there is an epistemological baggage involved when historians
try to SORT out REASONABLY WELL what happened.
what you don't seem to get is that SORTING things out means rearranging
things, selecting what fits, omitting what doesn't, putting things into
plausible categories, filling in gaps, creating narratives from texts and
artifacts that survived the time between an event that may have occurred in
the past and the time of writing a history of it. surely, as i suggested
earlier, historians do not record the past the way video cameras would.
they make it interesting, relevant, and far shorter to read than what they
describe. good history is a creative enterprise as every historian will
readily agree. (bad historians are not particularly creative)
yes, in composing their narratives, historians are REASONABLE, employ
REASONS for their claims. plausibility is an important criterion for all
stories. perhaps more important is coherence. coherence has nothing to do
with representational truth but much with the claim that things hang
together logically, are REASONABLE, can withstand critical examination by
competing historians who would dismiss a history if they contained
contradictions.
if fiction is created, composed, sorted out and rearranged for others to
make sense of, as i suggested, history is fiction with the claim that it is
based on what happened. their representational truth is not accessible.
klaus
-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related
research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Ken
Friedman
Sent: Friday, January 25, 2008 5:30 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: language and fiction
Friends,
It seems to me that many people on a list such as this don't know what
people do to understand and assess the evidence of events and accounts that
they have not themselves experienced.
For reasons not worth explaining, I occasionally read material on distant
moments in history, attempting to sort out questions of how memory and
transmission work, and trying to distinguish between genuine historical
accounts of what people believed or said to each other. (This includes the
possibility that what they told each other may not have taken place.)
Historians such as Victor will understand the difficulty and the importance
of this task. If all accounts are fictional, one must ask whether we have
any reason to believe any account -- including an account of something we
believe that we observed happening today at lunch. It is true that all
accounts are imperfect and selective, but I'd argue that some kind of
epistemological and political baggage accompanies the notion that we cannot
know and say anything reliable about the past.
Is history simply a tale told by the victors?
Isn't there some way to know whether there was or was not a Holocaust?
In October, 2006, the science journal Nature published a study estimating
the civilian death toll in Iraq that resulted from the US-led invasion at
655,000. George Bush called the study flawed, claiming that the research
methods were "discredited." Bush stood by his proposed estimate of 30,000
civilian deaths to that date.
Are both accounts fictional? Is there some reasonable way to sort them out?
The issue of epistemological baggage has come up here several times. I'll
try to answer for my baggage when I respond to Klaus. At this point, I'll
suggest that everyone in this debate is carrying some kind of
epistemological baggage.
For those who want to learn a little more about how historians sort through
information that comes from our own planet at times long, long ago and
places far, far away might enjoy reading Birger Gerhardsson's work. He works
with accounts that go back to stories and traditions written down long after
the events described took place, and shows how historians sort through these
kinds of issues.
There is a more recent series of accounts that will be known to some of you.
For many years, scholars insisted that the Iliad and the Odyssey count not
have been composed and memorized in oral form by one man. In the twentieth
century, a scholar named Milman Parry travelled around, finding bards who
memorized and recited huge epic oral poems. Another scholar named Albert
Lord carried the line of inquiry forward. Today, scholars agree that
lengthy, detailed accounts can survive in an oral tradition relatively
intact. Those who know the scaldic tradition of the sagas will know similar
traditions. I'm not saying any of these accounts repeat true events
-- I do not believe that Odin hung for nine nights on a tree or traveled
about with two ravens named Hugin and Munin. But I certainly believe that
people carried these tales forward for centuries in unwritten form, along
with accounts of battles, royal deeds, and genealogy.
Things grow dim with distance in time space. But one kind of epistemological
baggage would be the notion that we cannot sort out reasonably well that
some things have happened, even though we did not see them or experience
them personally.
That's what historians do -- imperfectly, as Victor notes, but not
unreasonably.
Ken
--
Gerhardsson, Birger. 1964a. Memory and
Manuscript. Oral Tradition and Written
Transmission in Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity. 2nd Edition. Lund:
C. W. K. Gleerup.
Gerhardsson, Birger. 1964b. Tradition and Transmission in Early
Christianity. Lund: C. W.
K. Gleerup.
Gerhardsson, Birger. 1977. Evangeliernas förhistoria. Lund: Verbum-Håkan
Ohlssons Förlag.
Gerhardsson, Birger. 1979. The Origins of the Gospel Tradition.
Philadelphia: Fortress Press.
Gerhardsson, Birger. 2001. The Reliability of the Gospel Tradition. Peabody,
Massachusetts:
Hendrickson Publishing.
--
--
Ken Friedman
Professor
Dean, Swinburne Design
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Australia
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