On the nature of historical facts

Ruv Draba

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I agree that ideally the "facts" that fill people's heads would all be authenticated...but this does not seem to be even remotely what is going on. When somebody tells you the facts about something, chances are none of them are authentic.
Then perhaps what they are communicating is opinion expressed as fact. But the astute listener can translate "Britney Spears is stalking you" into the more semantically accurate "I believe that Britney is stalking you", and decide whether the opinion requires fact-based evidence.

[...] my concern is not with facts except in so far as they can be diagnosed as symptoms of a mentally dysfunctional collision between the Person A and World B
That sounds almost like a pomo manifesto, Higgins. Put wryly: "I'm not interested in the facts unless they embarrass someone." ;) (We've had the conversation about clowns and pie-tossing, so I won't resurrect it). But is that history or politics on the topic of history? And aren't some historians still interested in facts (or must I give up on the whole discipline as anything but a pie-chucking contest)?

Better I think to insist that historical methodology doesn't deal with facts but with evidence, authentication, chronology, causality and so on...
But what does evidence mean without facts? Should unsubstantiated opinion be considered evidence, and if so how do you weigh it? And is the study of opinion alone more properly a subject for historians or sociologist and anthropologists?

(A disclosure of bias here: my mind is atypical -- only about 3% of the population have INTP sorts of thoughts. But unsubstantiated opinion tends to register as noise to my lot, regardless of who holds the opinion or how popular it is... I'd need some strong argument to support the proposition that just because some people use unsupported opinion as evidence, it is evidence.)
 

Higgins

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That sounds almost like a pomo manifesto, Higgins. Put wryly: "I'm not interested in the facts unless they embarrass someone." ;) (We've had the conversation about clowns and pie-tossing, so I won't resurrect it). But is that history or politics on the topic of history? And aren't some historians still interested in facts (or must I give up on the whole discipline as anything but a pie-chucking contest)?

I'm just talking about the usage of the words "historical facts"...in fact I would say that one would be fortunate if the standard repetoire of such facts actually rose to the discursive level of opinion. I agree that history should be better based on evidence than opinion, but that one ought to be very wary of:

1) accepting the idea that anything about historical methodology is more subjective than anything else people do (in fact it is likely to be far more objective than most things people do)
2) using the fact versus subjectivity diacotomy since this supports 1)
3) accepting the idea that there are "historical facts" just sitting out there waiting for your subjective appraisal (see 1 and 2)...ie that history is accessible without some careful work.

Anyway, I naturally have some pomo manifestos in reserve, but the current discussion hasn't wandered that way so..I'll reserve them for now.
 

Higgins

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I'm just talking about the usage of the words "historical facts"...in fact I would say that one would be fortunate if the standard repetoire of such facts actually rose to the discursive level of opinion. I agree that history should be better based on evidence than opinion, but that one ought to be very wary of:

1) accepting the idea that anything about historical methodology is more subjective than anything else people do (in fact it is likely to be far more objective than most things people do)
2) using the fact versus subjectivity diacotomy since this supports 1)
3) accepting the idea that there are "historical facts" just sitting out there waiting for your subjective appraisal (see 1 and 2)...ie that history is accessible without some careful work.

Anyway, I naturally have some pomo manifestos in reserve, but the current discussion hasn't wandered that way so..I'll reserve them for now.

reply to self: getting rid of facts and subjectivity: at least rhetorically a more direct confrontation with things as they are.
 

Higgins

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reply to self: getting rid of facts and subjectivity: at least rhetorically a more direct confrontation with things as they are.

More reply to self:

Our culture is like any other, only moreso. In any culture there are areas that are in flux and areas that are relatively fixed. It's nearly impossible to even traverse the fixed areas at all in terms that are engaging for most of the participants. Look at what happens whenever I post about Classical or Mayan Art in this subforum. Zero. That's all obviously in a fixed area. There's nothing engaging about it. Kind of strange. It may be that since our culture at least seems to have methods for representing aspects of other cultures (such as the Classic Mayan Art) or cultures that are not quite entirely other cultures (such as Classic Art) this very apparent ability has to be to some degree frozen or fixed or ignored or else this culture would become something other than a culture. A non-cultural post-culture or a purely technical realm with its own very rapidly evolving ways of evaluating things. Well...sort of like parts of the online world already are. Sort of like an Art or a Science at the moment they move into new territory with new techniques.
But what about an idea about re-evaluating Picasso? Let's suppose Picasso is still in a part of some culture that is in flux (but not either in the frozen realm that must be kept at bay if cultures are to remain cultural and not in the possibly post-cultural realm)...how do people manipulate their own cultures without introducing anything from "elsewhere" (the frozen nothing inside or the outside altogether)? I'm thinking there are some well-known possibilities:

Via personal power and influence (say when Saatchi buys some of Hirst's stuff)
Via symbolic manipulations such as myth or religion or purity cults or Ghost Dances
Via entertaining manipulations such as paintings or hallucinagens or online games or writing
Via statelike ideological power (as in the authorities burn all paintings of type x or command a pyramid to be errected or )
Via an address to the structural relations between reality and culture (science and scholarship)

Of course you can mix and match these options and have say an Entertaining Cult of Saatchi or a church with mosaics of the Empress Theodora...but those are the universal options. Individual freedom is a legal theory, not a cultural one.

from:

http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=62444&page=4

And from the same thread:

This "subjectivity" is entirely in terms of what happens to pass through the various contexts of whatever box full of Western Civ you happen to be soaking in. Just to gain a little perspective, I always find it useful to try to look at all artiality as an Art of some kind, where the dreaded capital that signals abstraction to some actually signals an ellided attempt at making the generality and the subjectivity into something concrete with a non-subjective history that asymptotically approaches the incredibly elaborate. For example in a thread below in this subforum (called "A Beard of Mary Beards"), I put forward the idea of Classical Art as perhaps the most instructive case of relatively simple and generally forged and reconstructed objects that illuminate a whole series of Arts all more or less built out of the same repetoire of objects. Mary Beard herself in her book provides a vaguely D. Hirstian context with rooms full of reproductions of casts of dogs that died at Pompeii and so on. So there is a region of symbology (so to speak) where the evaluations that get juxtaposed are definitely aesthetic (at least in retrospect ...but then what musings and mullings over are not retrospective?)...So I think you can isolate some areas of symbolic comprehension and exchange that can only be adequately defined with reference to some objective schema of successive aesthetic juxtapositions and there you have your Art.
 
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