Gamera

That's the point: they would be fooling themselves to think something so naive, as if ancient writers didn't have an agenda and a political context, unlike every other person on the planet.

Essentially this is a nostalgic view and philologists tend to be nostalgic.

gstafleu

Gamera, are you saying the scientific method (sm) doesn't work for history? What sets the sm apart from other ways of thinking is purely pragmatic success, as gurugeorge pointed out. It works, witness out current method of communication. Look around you and you'll see lots of other things produced by the sm. So it works in a lot of cases. Just not for history?

Gerard Stafleu

mountainman

"Mostly in the form of writing" but their are other
parallel discourses happening, in the realms of:

* architectural building and design
* scientific and/or technological inventions
* inscriptions
* art work, statues, frescoes, etc.
* archeological relics of various forms
* coins (of bronze, of silver or of gold)
* graffiti
* carbon dating citations
* etc

There must be a consistent integration between
all these above discourses in a parallel fashion.

Gamera

Interesting point. This is exactly what I (and postmodern historians) are saying. The scientific method deals with observable facts. History is discourse (i.e., it is transmitted by texts). It is by its very nature not observable. What we always get is discourse about an event, and no further access to the event.

Contast that to the scientific method. A researcher makes an observation of an event, an experiment let's say, and records the result. Another scientists reads the result -- BUT TO VERIFY IT HE MUST REPEAT THE EVENT AND EXPERIENCE THE RESULT HIMSELF. And of course that's exactly what scientists do. If a result is not verifiable and repeated, it isn't a valid result and hence not part of scientific knowledge.

This is exactly what can never happen in historiography. History is the sum total of the unverifiable reports, not the results themselves, which can never be repeated or verified or observed. And so we are in a totally different realm.

Now that doesn't mean science can't be applied to past events. For instance, we can make an hypothesis about why Mayan culture collapsed (say it's because of overuse of resources). We have a concept of Mayan culture because we found artifacts and buildings (those are verifiable by others). We can test our hypothesis by researching the status of forests in the area at the time using various methods. If deforestation is verified, the hypothesis has some support. But the point is, some other researcher can verify the results -- he can do the same tests on the state of the forests during 1000 AD.

In that sense, the scientific method applies. But surely that isn't what we usually mean by history, which means the political and social events of a past time that get recorded in texts. If they dont' get recorded in texts, we don't even know about them, much less can we hypothesize about them.

Gamera

I agree these are forms of discourse other than texts. I agree that lack of consistency between them may influence our view of a particular text. But this is no different than saying that the same is true about lack of consistency between different texts (which are always inconsistent if they are truly different texts).

I agree that some forms of inconsistencies lead us to treat certain texts in certain ways. Thus carbon dating of a mss that purports to be written in Jesus time, showing it is from 1950, would lead me to believe it is a forgery and thus its meaning would be as a forgery.

But of course, the problem with the Christian scriptures is we don't have that easy kind of inconsistency. We have inconsistencies on the margins, relating to dates of kings and genaeologies. And we find those very kinds of inconsistencies in "historical" texts.

If you could prove that the NT was a vast forgery (and I know that's what you think it is), the NT would become very uninteresting to most people and that would be that. But that hasn't happened and I doubt it will.

mountainman

As beauty is in the eye of the beholder,
so are peoples' interest in the NT.
We share a common prenicene antiquity.

If it was "christian-free", antiquity needs
to be fully reinterpretted, commencing with
the historical figure calumnified by the
christian historiographer Eusebius,
Apollonius of Tyana, and his "burnt
writings".

neilgodfrey

Good history is like science insofar as it begins with theories, hypotheses and questions.

One cannot begin to write a history without first posing some sort of hypothesis or question or theory -- the less subliminally the better. The human brain needs to start with some constructed framework in order to be able to know what to look for among the mass of data available. Without some definable mental construct to begin with it would be impossible to ask questions or fit data into any meaningful system. One does not have to be a postmodernist to acknowledge these constraints essential to historiography.

That "mental construct" that is the starting point of any "history" is obviously going to be a fluid term. Theories of knowledge will define the range of phenomena admissable as evidence for the hypotheses. Variable values and assumptions unavoidably underpin all questions, hypotheses and theories.

Good history is more like science when it asks the same questions that can be applied to a range of case studies. Here history really overlaps with studies in sociology, anthropology, environmental studies and such.

Good history is more like good literature (such as a Shakespearean tragedy) when it explores the human condition with fresh insights and questions.

Good history also just patiently peels away at questions layer by layer, holding all "conclusions" as tentative only, alert to new questions and paradigms coming from left field that sometimes redirect or toss out the old questions.

So various histories are always going to be targets of wider community-interest debates about their "correctness". Many will always want "proofs" and "objective facts" from the "correct history" to support their particular value-systems. So history is subject to propaganda manipulations as much as, say, biological sciences are and have been. Historians have as much responsibility as scientists do to acknowledge the intellectual underpinnings and limitations of their methods and conclusions and engage in community debates as society seeks relevance in their work.


Neil Godfrey

http://vridar.wordpress.com

OneInFundieville

I'm a totally newbie around here but among science, history, and myth, it seems there's a bit of tyranny of the discontinuous mind going on here...

Can't any given meme have elements making it to varying degrees...

- scientific?
- historical?
- and/or mythical?

gstafleu

The "observable facts" in science are, in first instance, results from experiments. These can be written notes (e.g. Jane Goodall's notes on Chimp behaviour), a list of numbers (e.g. pollen counts in successive soil layers), graphs (e.g. output from a mass-spectrometer), photographs (of trajectories in a bubble chamber) and so on. Sounds a lot like documents, doesn't it? The "observable facts" are then deduced from the documents. Sounds a bit like history, doesn't it?

Now, you say, in science we can repeat experiments, not so in history. Let us consider our favorite topic (), the HJ/MJ debate. An HJer starts with adducing the NT as evidence. An MJer then answers, Well, that is fine, but I want to see more independent evidence. This, I would suggest, is the equivalent of asking for another experiment. The HJer then comes up with Tacitus. The MJer counters by saying that the Tacitus experiment does not really measure the existence of an HJ, rather it measures that the Christians of the time thought there was an HJ. The HJer then... etc. The two processes, science and history, are rather similar.

Similarly science is the sum total of unverifiable reports (the primary results of the experiments). No experiment can ever be completely repeated. For one thing, if you try to repeat it, it will be at another point in space-time. We just assume that when we "repeat" an experiment, we are in fact reproducing the relevant circumstances, and that any circumstances we do not reproduce are irrelevant to the hypothesis. Similarly, when we adduce independent evidence for a historical hypothesis, we are saying that the similarities between that and the previous evidence are relevant to the hypothesis, while the dissimilarities are not.

Now you might say, sure, that works for the Mayan collapse, but not for political and social events. But notice that in my reasoning above I do not mention the type of evidence (historical documents or pollen counts from which we deduce deforestation). My reasoning works for both types. So I do not think that there is a qualitative difference between History and Science. Maybe a quantitative, in that in Science it may be easier to get independent evidence than sometimes in History. But that is not a difference of principle.

Gerard Stafleu

aa5874

History is definitely not the sum total of unverifiable reports. You appear to be on a mission to re-write history.

You are confusing 'history' and 'interpretation of history', that is, if an earthquake occured 2000 years ago, depending on its magnitude and catastrophic effect, it may be able to be verified, but of course some may interpret the event as being caused by the resurrection of Jesus.

There are artifacts and other archaelogical findings that can help to verify the historicty of persons in antiquity, just because you have not found any for your Lord and Saviour is not a good reason to try and trash 'history' as if it is 'heresy'.