Amaleq13

What is invalid IMO is holding historical studies to the rigor of "hard" science. The MJ hypothesis is no more falsifiable as far as I can tell.

It is always good to try to approximate the rigor of science but it seems foolish to me to judge the results as though it was something other than an approximation.

gstafleu

I'm pretty sure we have been over that extensively in the forum here, and the best that can be said here is that such indirect evidence does not unambiguously point to an HJ.
MJ is entirely falsifiable: just come up with a convincing HJ, like there is a convincing Alexander e.g.

I think there may be a common thought between you and GD here. It is indeed possible that there is an HJ, just of the sort that is not detectable. In that case one could say that MJ cannot be falsified because the HJ is undetectable. But note that this only works when you first posit the methodologically invalid type of HJ. IOW, you make MJ unfalsifiable by first positing an invalid HJ. That doesn't count!

This leads to a perhaps counter intuitive result: Even if such an (indetectable) HJ existed, we will never know it and the hypothesis, even though "true," has to be rejected.

Gerard Stafleu

gstafleu

MJ is eminently falsifiable, as I show above. As to not holding holding historical studies to the rigor of "hard" science, that is a bit of a testimonium paupertatis, isn't it?
I'm not sure if this, even if perhaps valid sometimes, goes for something as fundamental as a non-falsifiable hypothesis. If an hypothesis is non-falsifiable there is something fundamentally wrong with its structure. Compare this to a hypothesis that is self-contradictory if you will: it too has a fundamental (though different) flaw. If you allow non-falsifiable hypotheses you create a free for all where people can propose all kinds of nonsense, safe in the knowledge that it never can be disproved. As my (or rather: Lee Smolin's) tale of theoretical physics shows, there are very good reasons why not to allow unfalsifiability. These have nothing to do with individual disciplines and everything with trying to make sure that what science/scholarship proposes is sensible.

Gerard Stafleu

KrisK10

Gerard,

The only thing I would clarify is that I was never arguing that there was an HJ, I presupposed this. I was arguing for a low historical footprint of people who were not historically significant in their time from the perspective a historian centuries later. If such people are legendized by followers, then the later historian would, I propose, be left with only the legendized records. This seems like common sense. Further, I would disagree with you and say that this hypothesis is actually falsifiable or verifiable (depending how you look at it). It's just that the ability to set up such an experiment and then wait several centuries would be difficult. As for past historical examples, we have billions of people who were not historically significant in their time, but not many of those were legendized by followers. So a hypothesis based on reasonable inferences seems reasonable. Further, I disagree that a hypothesis is "invalid" (untrue?) if it is not experimentally testable.

That's it for me. I would be interested in Vinni's response if he does respond, but I won't be able to check until next week.

Kris

gstafleu

I realize Kris has left the building for a while, but I would just point out that "invalid" and "untrue" are not the same here. The hypothesis may be true (it really happened that way), it is just that if the hypothesis is invalid, we will never know that it is true (or untrue, for that matter) and hence there is nothing we can do with it (except stare at it in silent admiration, I suppose). So yes, a hypothesis that is not "experimentally" testable is invalid and useless. I put "experimentally" in quotes here, because in historical scholarship "experimentally" would mean digging up documents, artifacts, circumstances, that point in the right way (as opposed to doing an experiment as you would in physics).

Gerard Stafleu

Solitary Man

If that's the case, then coming up with a convincing MJ would falsify the HJ position. Why you must persist in special pleading and circular logic escapes me, though.

aa5874

There is no such premise by JM.

Orthodox Christianity could not cover-up evidence when none existed.

The Jesus Myth propose that the Jesus of the NT was only BELIEVED to exist.

Mormons believe Joseph Smith's version of Jesus. No mormon ever saw Jesus alive, they just believed and today they are millions of them.

The Orthodox Christians believed "the memoirs of the apostles" or the Gospels version of Jesus and today there are billions.

It can be shown that a BELIEVER does not need a figure of history to believe in.

This a partial list of the hundreds of Gods of BELIEVERS:

Jesus of the NT
Apollo
Zeus
Dionysus
Hercules
Allah
Vishnu


On the other hand, the HJ proposal that Jesus existed as human cannot be shown to be compulsory for BELIEVERS to have believed that Jesus lived.

And, it is really bizarre to compare Believers to Physicists.

andrewcriddle

I can't help feeling that this thread primarily illustrates the problematic nature of Popperian falsifiability as a criteria for deciding between different hypotheses.

Andrew Criddle

the_cave

While attention to evidence is a very helpful principle in historical research, I think it is wrong to hold history to the same level of scrutiny as physics--surely among the most empirical of the sciences. Our sample of the historical data is worefully incomplete no matter which way you slice it, and it will probalby always be that way. History has to rely much more frequently on arguments from plausibility. For example, which is a more plausible argument: that a metaphorical character became mistaken for a historical person, or that a historically unknown person became transformed into a metaphorical character? (I'm not saying the answer to this is obvious, I'm just providing it as an example.)

"Falsifiability" has to be understood in the context of the evidence available. There is non-falsifiable in principle, and then there is falsifiability in the context of the available evidence. Historical evidence is not always good enough to distinguish between the two--so, something could be unsupported by the available evidence, but if that evidence is poor to begin with, then so long as the idea is plausible, it could remain a reasonable interpretation of things. I'm not sure it gets a lot better than that, much of the time. Some ideas are supported better than others, and...that's it. That's all you get.

In other words, historical theories are not as falsifiable as physical theories, even when using historical evidence; they tend to rely also on arguments from plausibility. (For that matter, falsifiability is a controversial argument in the philosophy of science--it's not always clear exactly what's being falsified, for example, and ideas can come back in different guises.)


While we're on the subject, Smolin has his own axe to grind: loop quantum gravity, which also remains so far unconfirmed empirically. And I am not saying that Smolin is therefore a bad scientist! Far from it--he has a plausible theory, and is waiting (like everyone else) for a machine big enough to test it. And I agree that supersymmetry, from Smolin's description, has behaved more historically like a Popperian ad hoc psuedoscience than LQG--however, may I somewhat cynically suggest that this is simply because it's been around longer than LQG, and so has had more chances to make ad hoc alterations.

aa5874

I think a person just has to be reasonable to decide between the MJ and HJ hypotheses.

It is not very problematic to deduce that Matthew 1.18 and Acts 1.8-9 depicted a MYTH without applying Karl Popper's theories.

Matthew 1.18 Now the birth of Jesus was on this wise, When as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost.

Acts 1.8-9 " But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you, and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem and Judaea.....And when he [Jesus] had spoken these things, while they beheld, he [Jesus] was taken up, and a cloud receive him out of their sight.

You don't have to be a physicist or a philosopher of Science like Karl Popper to discern folklore and legendary tales as written in the NT.