Toto

Help your moderators out by identifying where you think the split should start.

Rick Sumner

I'd probably go with post 136, it's where the topic of anti-realism seems to have picked up.

spin

Even the worst lie seeks plausibility. To do history you need historical sources. And there aren't any for Jesus -- only for the Jesus tradition.

The old "hack out enough to assume the rest is ok" trick.

Let me check here... Do you have any doubt that there was a figure in the past we know as Julius Caesar, of whom there are several statues, who minted numerous coins, who performed a military expedition and fought battles there? We can definitely know some things about the past, can't we?

We need something less subjective than naked plausibility. People find tarot readings plausible source of information.

"[A]nti-realist"? Perhaps you could clarify this expression using something I have said. I tend to try to keep in the tangible when I post, giving examples as much as possible, so that people can see what I'm on about. Your apparent waxing contentless isn't communicating with me.

I'll wait till you tie this down so it doesn't float away before I comment.

You don't speculate enough, so you are too attached to your speculations. The more you speculate, the less you are attached to it.

Speculation is speculation, nothing more. Your critical facilities can sift through the dross. To use a metaphor from Edward de Bono, there are two types of thinking, lateral and vertical. Vertical thinking is what we use when we put together arguments. Lateral thinking is where we use tools to generate the bases for arguments. Most will be crap, but that's where critical analysis comes in.

Prejudice doesn't change the end results per se. Prejudice will change the what starting points you will consider, so it is irrelevant in the speculation process. You will either choose someone else's speculation because it appeals to your prejudices (or whatever facility you are driven by) or you will choose your own speculation.

You were "me too"ing yourself into a false sense of contentment.

Whinge about it to someone else then.

A veil of obscurity = increment of less accuracy.

It was where you introduced the idea of "anti-realism" into your discourse and lost me. Hence the question about relevance.

I'd like to meet this me.

Having got this far with your post, I guess your predilection of labeling positions that apparently require a higher standard of evidence to yours as "anti-realistic" is the driving force behind the relative incomprehensibility of the post.

When I try to make ideas tangible by supplying specific examples and references, you cut them out and aim for the waffle. Why don't you want to look at the examples or find ways to make your comments more grounded? It appears to me that you've built anti-realistic straw men to deal with.


spin

Rick Sumner

I'm going to get this one, since I think it's important to realize what everybody is talking about, but I'll still leave the rest until the risk of anyone digging their heels in diminishes.

Anti-realism is the essence of what you attributed to post-modernism (it's also not my term, though I'm flattered that you'd want to give it to me. It was coined by sharper minds than mine, however). Put most simply, anti-realism is the sentiment that there can be no fact when it is influenced by perception.

The usual example is the existence of other minds. You can conclude that there are no other minds, or you can conclude that there is no fact of other minds one way or the other. It's used a lot for morality too.

The tact you're taking is the latter--there is no fact of history one way or the other.

I think it's also important to distinguish between cataloging (which is, by and large, how we know Caesar existed), and reconstruction (which is how we decide why Alexander decided to marry--we'll never know for sure, we only speculate).

When I use the term "reconstruction" I'm referring to conjectural constructions. The anti-realist position in the examples above would be that we can never make a statement on why Alexander married.

It goes back, somewhat, to what ApostateAbe succinctly explained.

Modernist: uncertainty --> what is most probable? --> arguments --> conclusions.

Post-modernist: uncertainty --> no conclusions.

The post-modernist in Abe's example is exemplifying anti-realism. In our present discussion, that post-modernist is you.

It's my contention that the impossibility of employing anti-realism consistently (our brains just don't work that way), and it is counter-productive (well-grounded speculation is not inherently false, and sometimes clearly isn't). I think we get nowhere if we throw our hands-up and declare the endeavour impossible. I think we're even less benefited by declaring others closed-minded because they decline to adhere to it.

I sympathize with the anti-realist position, and think it's fundamentally correct. I just don't think that it inherently precludes grounded speculation. We only need follow it through when we address things as certainties. And, of course, preference for it is just another prejudice.

Until next time.

PS

The bit about the scrolls and the temple was the real deal. Meet this other you!

http://www.freeratio.org/thearchives...4&postcount=27

spin

Are we reading the same thread? I mentioned post-modernism with respect to our (for want of another term) inclination to judge the past not from the past, but from the present, while constructing the past, construct it in the image of the present. Part of the historian's job is to attempt to circumvent this process, because it will take us closer to the past.

In your polarization of the discussion you have made a straw man.

It's "tack" and you are incorrect in your analysis. I've already signaled that I have no problem with facts about the past. They are available.

You at least start with things you know about. You don't have a doubt in the world that Julius Caesar or Alexander were real. You work from knowns about what lies just outside the known.

If we go back to Jesus, there is no starting point, no facts. You are deluded if you try to compare Julius Caesar or Alexander with Jesus. The former are already part of the knowledge base we work with for the real world. I'm amazed at how easy it is for the distinction to be blurred.

You truly need to get a more realistic example. There is a reason I use figures like Robin Hood. For them also there is no starting point, no facts.

I'm certainly no post-modernist. The process in history that I work from is simple:

(body of established knowledge) + (analysis of edges of knowledge) may -> (extension of knowledge)

Your speculations about the historicity of Jesus lack the first element.

(Not the issue.)

It was this me:

The hard anti-realist position you pretend to endorse precludes that sort of speculation, precludes that sort of appeal to plausibility. If you really want to take the position you're promoting, you'd have two things: 1) The scrolls exist. 2) The temple had the resources.

This straw me.


spin

Celsus

@spin's OP: fantastically well-put!
I'd consider myself an anti-realist in terms of history, but I would certainly disagree completely with this characterisation of it. Realism in science is not as easy to demonstrate as you might think, and saves itself through recourse to a lot of things that simply aren't available in historiography (note: I'm a scientific realist). Without things like repeatability, fecundity, consilience and a number of other features of science, the problem for history rests in its underdetermination: That is, that multiple theories can account for the same phenomena observed. Or put another way, that there are multiple ways to tell the same story that can account for the same number of phenomena observed. Given this principle (and it's especially applicable to a purely literary affair like HJ/MJ, never mind even relatively scientific disputes like when human-controlled fires appeared in the Levant), a historical anti-realist position is one which recognises that historical constructions do not approximate reality, they can only reconstruct it, using a specific set of theories about the historical past as an interpretive lens.
This appears to be a hopeless straw man of 'postmodernist' positions. I can't speak for spin, but in my pomo view, we can draw conclusions, the problem is what happens when other people draw conclusions nested in a different theoretical framework accounting for a different (but possibly overlapping) set of phenomena: how do we rationally compare these theories? The question is not nearly as easy to resolve as positivists like to pretend.
I think when you understand what the different constructivist views of history are (e.g. Hayden White or Alun Munslow or Keith Jenkins), you'll see that they do employ their different critiques consistently but I don't think you've understood what that is. I don't necessarily go as far as they do (well other than White - but my sense is spin doesn't go even as far as me), but I don't think you've yet fully grasped it.

Rick Sumner

I know. I thought about suggesting Toto call it "historical anti-realism" with your name in it somewhere to try and flag down your input.

I'm not sure that we're saying anything fundamentally different, so much as you're saying it better. Though, in my defense, I did say it was "put most simply."

The problem, as I see it, is that there is no objective way to compare theories (or interpretive paradigms, to use a much abused term). Consequently there's no way to tell which theory is more likely to be accurate. A problem that, as you and spin both note, is hugely amplified in the "HJ/MJ" debate, because of the nature of the evidence.

Where spin and I dispute is whether or not that impossibility demands agnosticism.

Heh, I don't know that it's so much a straw-man--at least in all cases--as it is a reductio ad absurdum, but in either event it isn't mine. I was just using hit as an illustration to heighten the contrast, not as a "post-modernism for dummies in 8 words." I doubt it could be handled so simply in any event.

Spin thinks he's not promoting anything post-modern. I suspect he's mistaken. Maybe we shouldn't tell him.

And I agree completely with this. At least at this point, we can't rationally compare them.

Perhaps they do for history. Do they everywhere else? My caveat is not simply that it cannot be maintained at an arbitrary line of subject matter, it's that it can't be maintained throughout all of one's thought. Like the solipsist who can't carry on as though no one else exists, not out of conviction, but out of practical necessity.

Before you answer, doesn't the anti-realist position you apply to history demand that you can't answer? Or at least that you have no means of knowing if your answer is any better than mine?

Once you've started, how do you justify how far you go? At what point is the line "far enough" without the line being arbitrary?

Celsus

It worked regardless
And on what grounds do you actually draw evidential certitude from texts?
His OP is certainly instrumentalist in content, but that doesn't have to be postmodern. Ernst Mach was an instrumentalist/anti-realist, and Einstein wrote that Mach inspired his Theory of Relativity. But I suggest the postmodern turn since has actually strengthened Mach's position, except everyone's forgotten Mach and only remember Planck (if at all). If you define postmodern as relativist/nihilist, then he's quite right he's not those things, but if you define it in terms of a post-structuralist (i.e. post-Saussurian/Levi-Straussian) position, then sorry spin, you're in the muck with me
Neither question is relevant, because the anti-realist position isn't looking for the 'real' past.
There isn't a real line. There's an imperative to any historical theory, and recognising what a theory is trying to flesh out is the critical point. I think what's missing in the more radical views is an ontology of evidential epistemology, understanding artifacts (they rely on the linguistic critique that I think is partially correct, not because of absolute relativism, but because the majority of intersubjective elements we'd need to decipher meaning are lost to us). That sounds hopelessly complicated, but the simplified version is: they're right that we don't know how historical societies saw things for certain, but where we can know (especially in the more recent past) we should recognise that intersubjective elements are intelligible and linguistic nihilism isn't the only conclusion. Maybe you want to call that postpostmodern.

ETA: To bring this back to the HJ/MJ arguments, it strikes me that most of the debate is literary criticism, not history. And they'll be very disappointed if they actually ventured into lit crit theory to see what they might learn from current academic thinking. If history can only salvage some parts of science to shield it from the postmodern problem, literary criticism is naked.

steve_bnk

What else are we going to talk about? It woulden't be much fun if we all agreed, would it?

Celsus

There once was a time in BC&H when there was a much more varied amount of discussion across all sorts of topics in ancient history. Now half the forum is HJ/MJ threads, and the other half are HJ/MJ spin-off threads.