Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Toto · 10-08-2010, 06:51 PM

More postmodernism.

April DeConick: Does Memory make history unreliable?

Quote:

The foundational premises of social memory theory are:
1. Memories are products of the present and not the preservation of the past.
2. Memories are ignited and limited by social frameworks.
3. Memory distortion is the difference between the memory of the past and the past actuality.
4. All memory is distorted or refracted.

This knowledge makes the work of the historian interesting. There are a range of opinions among social memory theorists regarding whether or not it is possible to recover the past actuality from memories,

The fundamental assumption is that the gospels are based on memories of Jesus. They are unreliable because memory is unreliable, but Jesus was there.

And somehow, one can take these unreliable memories and work back to the person who probably inspired them.

DeConick recommends Antony Le Donne, discussed in Refracted Memory of the Historical Jesus

Doug Shaver · 10-09-2010, 07:10 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Toto

And somehow, one can take these unreliable memories and work back to the person who probably inspired them.

I think it's been pretty well established that just because someone remembers X, we cannot reliably infer without further qualifications that X must have happened. It does not follow from this that there can be no reliable history based on people's memories.

In the case of the gospels, of course, the main problem is lack of any good reason to suppose that they are based on anyone's memories.

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