No Robots

In a response to a review of his book, The New Nature of History: Knowledge, Evidence, Language, Marwick writes:

'Forget Facts, Foreground sources' is a chapter title in which I permit myself a touch of rhetoric. My point is that 'fact', 'facts', and 'the facts' can be rather imprecise terms: I suggest that for the historian, rather than asking, 'is it a fact?', it is better to ask 'is it based on evidence?'

He quotes from his book, where he stresses:

the fallible and intractable nature of the [primary] sources, numbingly copious in some areas, scarce and fragmentary in others. Much has to be garnered indirectly and by inference.

He continues:

I also stress that while historians may well be looking in the primary sources 'for events, great and small, their dates and chronology', they will also 'be looking for interconnections between them, and between them and "facts"'.

He quotes again from his book:

More generally, historians are looking for material conditions, and changes in them; states of mind; the working of institutions; motivations, mentalities, values; the balances between intention and accomplishment.

All of this is a caution against overly reductive approaches to sources.

patcleaver

Nobody believes that all religious writings and oral traditions are reliable. They are all too contradictory and full of magical events to be taken seriously.

Generally, Muslim, Hindu, Christian historians and other scholars think that the religious writings of their own religion are reliable and that the religious writings of the others are fictional.

Secular historians and other scholars usually reject all religious writings as fictional, but sometimes they are trapped in the ideas of their societies and still believe that the religious writings that they grew up with are more reliable in some way than other religious writing.

In order to be a scholar, you have to be able to overcome your prejudices and biases regarding your field of study. Religion is a set of prejudices and biases that disqualify the religious from being scholarly about anything closely related to their own religion. Usually, anyone claiming to be a scholar about something related to their own religion is not a scholar at all, but just an irrational quack. For example, the only New Testament scholars who are really New Testament scholars are non-Christian New Testament Scholars, because being a Christian disqualifies someone from really being a New Testament Scholar.

Ben C Smith

Could you please supply a reference (dictionary, encyclopedia, monograph) for your idea that one is a scholar only when one is unbiased, and that the religious cannot be scholars of their own religion?

Thanks in advance.

Ben.

Scholar entry at dictionary.com.
Scholar entry at Wikipedia.

Johnny Skeptic

Please start a new thread and state where 2nd century church fathers got their information from. If you can't, then you should never promote testimonies of second century church fathers.

I made that request because I suspect that all that you will be able to offer offer is poor quality hearsay evidence of frequently unknown origins, or origins that are difficult to verify.

patcleaver

A scholar employs wisdom to honestly pursue knowledge for the sake of its distribution. A scholar has to overcomes his prejudices and biases, to gather evidence, to adopt effective methodologies for analyzing the evidence, and to critically analyze evidence to reach accurate conclusions. He has to provide a careful detailed explanation of exactly what the evidence is, what methodologies he is using to analyzed it, and how he analyzed it to reach his conclusions, so they can be independently verified, and obtain the opinion of other scholars prior to distribution.

A quack is a person who pretends to be something that they are not. A quack scholar is someone who cannot overcome his prejudices and biases, ignores evidence, substitutes presuppositions for evidence, adopts inferior methodologies, uses logical fallacies to justify false irrational conclusions, or refuses to explain the evidence or his methodologies or how he analyzed the data to reach his conclusions.

Someone who cannot overcome their prejudices and biases in their field of scholarship cannot be a scholar – they can only be quacks or quack scholars.

How can a religious person claim to be religious scholar without being quack?

spin

Keep it up.


spin

Ben C Smith

I asked you to justify from established references your definition of the word scholar. A careful scan of your four paragraphs of descending lengths reveals none.

May I assume that you simply made up this part of the definition of the word scholar?

Ben.

No Robots

Alrighty, then:

The British reconstructionist social historian Arthur Marwick has delighted in suggesting that Croce (whom he lumps in with Hegel) meant little to him as a historian because of the relativism that was Croce's legacy (Marwick 1989 [1970]: 8, 79). While these realists have little time for Croce's variety of history, his pursuit of historical truth through the intuitive historian remains some kind of balance to the hard-hat empiricism of reconstructionist history and the 'probable' history of constructionism.--"Croce, Benedetto". In The Routledge Companion to Historical Studies / Alun Munslow (Routledge, 2000), p. 63.

Croce was consciously aware that historiography derives from Hegel. Hegel was following Spinoza, who established the principles of scientific method in the discipline of history. History and historiography as scientific disciplines cannot overcome Spinoza and Hegel, but can only develop on their work. It seems to me that many Anglo-American historiographers resist this unavoidable reality.

show_no_mercy

pat seems to be equating "scholar" with "good scholar".

bacht

I think you're using a particular definition of "religious person" here. I don't think religious belief is incompatible with professional scholarship, at least in principle. The problem of objectivity occurs in all fields, hence the need for peer review.

Typically the quack or faker avoids peers and turns to non-specialists for support. Our bookstores sell lots of material written by "experts" who never allow their ideas to be challenged by professionals from the field in question.