Gamera

Since I'm an attorney and a mediaevalist, that may explain my poststructural bent.

Gamera

[QUOTE=militant agnostic;4039954]As an attorney, and one who tries cases, I can say with some authority, that any lawyer who tried cases like this would go out of business. The rules of evidence are what they are, but you win at trial by creating a theme, a narrative that explains the evidence in a manner the trier of facts finds more satisfying. Attorneys are essentially story tellers.

Again, evidence gets in or it doesn't. It's what you show the evidence means that counts. And that means putting it into a narrative.


Simpson's attorneys told them a better story. They accepted the story, silly though it is. Narratives are much more powerful than apodictic truth.

You know nothing about the case, or rather you only know what the media (which has its own agenda, including the rightwing "this is a dumb case" trope). If you had the facts you'd think differently but it's not the place here to go into it.

As opposed to logical decisions? Do you really think epistomology is about logic?


So you use one form of discourse (buildings, trade records) to verify or disproof another form of discourse (biblical narratives). And you don't see the epistomological problem in that?

You mean the facts as disclosed in other texts? You think you have access to the facts of Iron Age Egypt without discourse?

RAFH

Sometimes I see dead people writing.

RAFH

Hey, I once saw a defense lawyer convict his client via the improbable story of guilt he presented to the jury (I was on it despite my extensive efforts, including insulting the judge and both the defense and prosecuting attorneys), mostly because the prosecutor was even more inept at presenting an equally improbable story indicating the defendants innocence.

Yah, you got that right, the defense essentially presented a case for which the only reasonable conclusion was his client was guilty as could be and this despite the prosecutor's very sincere effort of presenting a much less convincing case the only conclusion of which made any sense was the defendant was probably innocent. They both screwed up so badly even the judge was asking them if they really wanted to enter items of evidence or if they really wanted their witnesses to actually testify.

As it turned out, I am pretty sure we came to the correct judgment of guilty. Some of the defense attorney's evidence was hard to refute and most of the prosecutor's evidence was weak, being second hand testimony we mostly had to disregard.

Weltall

^ I know this is off-topic but since the OP hasn't been seen for two weeks... so what you're saying is that the prosecution and defence were basically doing each other's jobs? Are you certain you weren't on the set of Twilight Zone?

Sven

Of course it's naive. But it's also naive to ignore archeology in this picture, which often backs up certain writers and exposes others as being wrong (either deliberate or not). This way, history certainly is empirical.

Gamera

Can you give us an example of how archeology has resolved a question about the historicity of a figure in a text? I would think that the archeology might just reduplicate the intial problem.

militant agnostic

No one is pretending that they have magical way of deciding what texts are accurate. We have ways of checking them against physical reality and seeing who is getting their testable facts strait. And even if we don't have things to physically test we can still make some base assertions based on probability. If a hundred historians relate exacting data about a celestial body brightening one day and vanishing all around the world at a time when their is no way they could have been in contact with each other then we can make two safe presumtions:

If every writters testamony about the event is in agreement about even trivial details all recorded at the same time then the chances of them all just being a coincidental bunch of writtings is astronomically low.

The chances are good then that a celestial body realy did do what they record.

As a by product of all this we can also now see that at least some ancient writters do (at least sometimes) report events accuratly and fairly.

With other texts we can simply check against achaeology and other writters with to make determinations about their validity on a certain subject in the same way as the example above.

How historians judge the soundness of these documnets is not unfair or unreasonable in any way.

So your saying that no history book can be more accurate than another? If their is a reality that exists independent of how we percieve the world then even with personal and cultural factors taken into account, one text must report reality better than the other or both report it with the same truthfulness or falseness. If they say different things then one will most deffidently be more in line than the other. If a war happens it must happen in one year and not another. If we have enough reports that we have one to claim that the war occured in every year since the big bang then at least one is more accurate than the others.

Also, is it impossible that the agenda of the writters and the readers could be truthfulness? Is that impossible?

So what? If he writes with good reasoning power and his reports can be tested and hold out then he is correct, regardless of his political beliefs. Not only that but you say that his bias in favor of Rome was a polution of his reports. Is it possible his support for Rome was justified?

No. The point you have been making about postmodernism is that shows that we can make absolutly no assurtions or guesses about history with any accuracy. You pretty much said that no text is more accurate than another. If that is true then we should ignore research altogether and just forget history is even worth examining.

I think that probability is an important thing to consider in any science whether its lab or field. If we look at anything like the study of any physically testable science then we could just a easily say that because a chuck of evidence can (acording to quantum physics) pop out of nowhere or just as quickly vanish, then we are not doing empircal research, just interepetation of chance existance of matter. Or maybe the scientists are all lying and its all a conspiricy so they can watch people like us debate these things on forums.

Both of those things are at least concievably possible, But are they likely? Should we throw out these sciences and there related knowledge for this?

The study of history's reports is no doubt more likely to have errors based on bad data than something that is set in stone like geology. But the same reasoning aplies. We can still ask what reports are more likely to be true than others.

All science does is study the availible evidence and make certain extrapolations about the data which is then used to make models meant to describe reality. These are always up for grabs as to whether or not they may be change in the future, but they are at least meant to be considered likely to be real.

Science does not ask us to make presumtions about what must be absolutly true or absolutly false. It is asking what is probable. Empirical research included. History can be probable and improbable. It is therfore just as legitimate as science as anything else.

militant agnostic

In other words, the job of an attorney is create a model of the events that describes what happened and in what order they happened in and show that the available physical evidence fits this model better than the others "narrative". How is this different from regular empirical research?

Having a narrative just means that the person telling the story of their model does so in a fashion that imparts meaning to the events and ties it together in a "point" that they feel the jury should consider when deciding what is a just sentence after they have concluded what facts mean what and what model is more realistic. Does any of that make the trial postmodern? No. It just means that the attorney is presenting their facts as accurate with some emotional or philosophical spice. That is designed to effect the evaluation of the sentence, not the evaluation of whether or not a testable fact is true.


So the evidence is looked over and then it is debated what model of events it supports. Again, I don't see this as having anything to do with questioning if facts themselves are relevant. What facts should be considered relevant is always up for grabs for obvious reasons, but I don't see this as having any conflict with standard models of scientific evaluation and its interpretation of what the revealed facts tell us about physical reality.

In other words they accepted a model of events that used bad data to support it because they believed false evidence. So what? I don't see a metaphysical disagreement here. I just see a case of bad reasoning in regards to their evaluation of the evidence that lead to them choosing the a model that is poorly reasoned and does not reflect reality.

But that just means that my data is wrong and therefore my model of reality regarding the subject is inaccurate. How is that a metaphysical difference that somehow means that my view is somehow "affirmed" because my reasoning supports it? My reasoning does not support it. My bad data supports it. If you can show that the coffee cups placed people in danger, that the consumer both cannot take responsibility for it and the danger is beyond a reasonable amount of risk that someone buying coffee in a car should be aware of then by my reasoning I am wrong. You are accusing me of using bad data, not having a different method of evaluating reality.

We are discussing a branch of thought that is designed to evaluate how our mental constructs evaluate the physical world and its meaning. It is supposed to give us a better way of reading the written work of others by examining the mental processes of human beings and how they effect reports and documentation, as well as how much our mind's constructs reflect physical reality. Sounds like a reason driven practice to me.

Well, yes. We look at the writings of others and check there claims against the physically testable facts that exist and conclude who reflects reality better than others. We also examine how much a certain person's documents can be trusted based on knowledge of their motivation. If that is an epistemological problem then I guess that it is trying to raise doubts about how fairly we are evaluating the sources and if the chain disciplines involved in those evaluations are factually valid. If it’s not doing any of the above and epistemology just makes a stink about some weird gobbledygook and offers no solution then maybe we should just ignore it. Is anything in this field bringing us closer to a model of science that’s better than empirical realism?

I don’t even understand the problem you are positing here. Discourse is involved in the processing of raw data into historical knowledge. There is always here a chance that everyone is laying or totally wrong in everything they write. And a much better chance that some of what is written is incorrect because of bias or faulty reasoning and memory.
But what are the probabilities of those two scenarios?

Sven

Did I claim that this necessarily already happened? But of course finding coins (in the case of rulers), paintings, statues, or writings of the person in question would provide evidence in favor of his/herexistence.

Well, I think differently. After all, finding artefacts is something entirely differently than only intepreting texts.

And I note that you did not even address that what I said refuted your basic claim: That nothing in history is empirical. Archeology is empirical, no matter how hard you try to cast doubt on its findings.