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Siivola posted:You haven't actually presented any argument as to how the author accidentally ends up arguing against the entire concept of truth. It's not actually obvious. I still don't see it in the original article, which I see as asserting 3 claims: 1. Historians broadly agree that history is framed by the tellers. 2. Historians online seem to nitpick facts which are not necessarily relevant to the broader political topic being espoused. 3. Historians may be doing this to try and stay relevant through showing their expertise in a time* when academic life sucks. *This turns out to be most times.
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Mar 11, 2019 17:56
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Nebakenezzer posted:2) the guy is a goddamn English professor, which is like saying a physicist is bad at thinking logically. This doesn't really follow, though. The academic discipline of English is not 'how to communicate things well' and plenty of academics in the discipline are in fact terrible at it.
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Mar 11, 2019 17:56
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SeanBeansShako posted:I imagine during it's original run it propped up a lot of wonky table legs in France. For a book from the 90s?  Either way, buying it from France (because nobody else has it for less than 500$) was somehow an easier process than any rare book I have to get from the US. Oh and as an aside, an Intro to German Bombs should be dropping tonight. There's at least one mention to concrete bombs, although its not extensive (for the poster who was curious about them).
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Mar 11, 2019 18:00
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feedmegin posted:This doesn't really follow, though. The academic discipline of English is not 'how to communicate things well' and plenty of academics in the discipline are in fact terrible at it. 
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Mar 11, 2019 18:00
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Siivola posted:Also, take a STEM dude out of their field and they lose all function. Practically all my friends in computer science have failed the maths department's course on formal logic at least once. Not if you hear them tell it
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Mar 11, 2019 18:01
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As a mathematician, lol if you think physicists are good at being logical
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Mar 11, 2019 18:25
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ulmont posted:*This turns out to be most times. at least since 1088
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Mar 11, 2019 18:46
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Amazon is having a Kindle sale on some of Norman Friedman's books. British Battleships, Fighters Over the Fleet, British Cruisers (WW1&2), Naval Firepower, and Fighting the Great War at Sea are all $1.30. Other authors seem to be included, I see DK Brown's Rebuilding the Royal Navy, Dodson's Kaiser's Battlefleet, and Burt's British Battleships. I've got Friedman's British Battleships loaded now, the illustration quality is high. Diagrams are very clear, and the photos are reproduced at an acceptably high quality. https://smile.amazon.com/British-Battleship-1906-1946-Norman-Friedman-ebook/dp/B019EJVJT8/ e. https://smile.amazon.com/Armoured-Trains-Paul-Malmassari-ebook/dp/B01NCU46DV/
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Mar 11, 2019 18:48
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As a dirty Rorty-lovin’ philosophy type I also want to stick up for the relative valuelessness of capital-T Truth a little here. Reality is a subjective experience framed by the written and spoken word—in the end, our knowledge of anything outside the immediate scope of our own senses is language games all the way down. Now, yes, there are surely some annoying types who get taught this and proceed no farther, content to be self-satisfied in the knowledge that Nothing Matters and It’s, Like, All Relative, Man, but they’re not taking the argument seriously, just justifying their own cynical apathy. Anyone who does take it seriously proceeds to the next step, which is realizing that, hey, we still have to live in a society and get along and communicate, and in that sense Truth being a dead-end actually doesn’t matter that much. What matters is utility, and utility changes heavily based on audience, but retains similar characteristics: internal consistency is useful. Validity is useful. Communicability/ease of understanding is useful. Reproducibility is useful. Speaking within a discipline, to an audience that has already internalized narratives and frameworks for understanding the topic being discussed, small nuances & absolute precision absolutely have utility. Outside it, speaking to the larger world... well, what are you trying to communicate, and to whom? What is motivating your speech act? The article is suggesting that when the answer to that question is ‘refuting a popular narrative solely by pointing out factual flaws’ then effective communication is not occurring, because the audience in question is paying attention to the narrative, not the factoids. To give a physics analogy, take classical Newtonian mechanics. The equations drilled into you in high school physics are gross approximations that get thrown out the window the second physicists attuned to the nuances and intricacies of subatomic particles start writing and speaking to one another—in other words they’re completely fake & very much untrue. But they’re so useful as a model for macro-level physical phenomena that it’s utterly beside the point whether they’re true or not. And, at a very very gross level, for probably the vast majority of people it’s enough to know that gravity is a constant and objects in motion want to stay in motion. History is no different, I think. The average person is gonna be pretty nonplussed when you answer ‘things fall when you drop them’ level argument with an ‘actually we have no idea what gravity is other than an observable rippling of space time correlated with the presence of matter’ refutation, even if the second is more accurate. They may go ‘huh,’ but nothing is going to change in the way they conceptualize the world. (also I do find it a little ironic given whose dander this article got up enough to broadcast it here that these arguments are well-trod ground to me mostly from pushing back against New Atheist types whose smugness in denying the utility of religion rests in that self-assured ‘facts don’t care about your feelings’ gently caress-yeah-Science point of view. A major turning point in my growth as a student of history came early on in college when my professor, a Carolignian scholar, very patiently explained to a skeptical class of edgy atheists in our discussion of relics that it doesn’t matter whether the miracles attested to “actually happened” or not because what matters, what has utility in understanding our subjects, is their understanding of their world, and they certainly seemed convinced)
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Mar 11, 2019 19:04
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HookedOnChthonics posted:Reality is a subjective experience framed by the written and spoken word No. Reality is reality. If a tree falls in the forest, that means a tree fell no matter if someone was there to hear it make a sound (or not, as the case may be). The problem is that human senses are imperfect and human language is a subjective medium.
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Mar 11, 2019 19:09
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HookedOnChthonics posted:Reality is a subjective experience framed by the written and spoken word. quote:A major turning point in my growth as a student of history came early on in college when my professor, a Carolignian scholar, very patiently explained to a skeptical class of edgy atheists in our discussion of relics that it doesn’t matter whether the miracles attested to “actually happened” or not because what matters, what has utility in understanding our subjects, is their understanding of their world, and they certainly seemed convinced Vincent Van Goatse posted:No. Reality is reality. If a tree falls in the forest, that means a tree fell no matter if someone was there to hear it make a sound (or not, as the case may be). The problem is that human senses are imperfect and human language is a subjective medium. edit quote:also I do find it a little ironic given whose dander this article got up enough to broadcast it here that these arguments are well-trod ground to me mostly from pushing back against New Atheist types whose smugness in denying the utility of religion rests in that self-assured ‘facts don’t care about your feelings’ gently caress-yeah-Science point of view. it not only got my dander up, it raised my hackles. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 19:29 on Mar 11, 2019 |
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Mar 11, 2019 19:17
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I'd go further and argue that reality matters when it comes to interpreting historical events, despite our imperfect senses and abilities to record real-life events. For example, if we're discussing the Battle of Midway in 1942, if you dispute that a total of five aircraft carriers were sunk in that battle you'd better have a drat good argument to back your claim up, because you're disputing a known, confirmed fact.
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Mar 11, 2019 19:23
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:I'd go further and argue that reality matters when it comes to interpreting historical events, despite our imperfect senses and abilities to record real-life events.
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Mar 11, 2019 19:26
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HEY GUNS posted:That the muster rolls I read for my dissertation said certain things is a true fact. What we interpret those things to mean in terms of the military of the time, and whether or not we want to use our knowledge of that military to make arguments about our own lives, are interpretations. Yes, exactly. But history is not a science because it doesn't really produce testable hypotheses.
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Mar 11, 2019 19:26
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:No. Reality is reality. If a tree falls in the forest, that means a tree fell no matter if someone was there to hear it make a sound (or not, as the case may be). The problem is that human senses are imperfect and human language is a subjective medium. I disagree, that forest is clearly a mere copse, that tree is just a scrub, and it only kinda slouched, not fell.
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Mar 11, 2019 19:27
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Fangz posted:I disagree, that forest is clearly a mere copse, that tree is just a scrub, and it only kinda slouched, not fell. This isn't disputing reality, though. It's just playing games with language.
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Mar 11, 2019 19:27
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HookedOnChthonics posted:in the end, our knowledge of anything outside the immediate scope of our own senses is language games all the way down
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Mar 11, 2019 19:28
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I submit this thread and its past is kinda ample evidence that a *ton* of disagreements boil down to this stuff. There's maybe some questions that are concrete matters of fact, but there's *plenty* of questions that are not so. Remember the question of "how good were tank destroyers?"
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Mar 11, 2019 19:31
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on an astoundingly different noteultrafilter posted:How naked World War II sailors ended up riding Mongolian ponies in the Gobi Desert to shoot bazookas at the Japanese
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Mar 11, 2019 19:33
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HEY GUNS posted:all times Man, this is the worst era to be a failed scholar, though. I could have been an Anatolian bandit Vincent Van Goatse posted:No. Reality is reality. If a tree falls in the forest, that means a tree fell no matter if someone was there to hear it make a sound (or not, as the case may be). The problem is that human senses are imperfect and human language is a subjective medium. The problem with history is we have no way of independently verifying that reality beyond documents (in the broadest possible sense of the word, encompassing everything from artifacts through eye witness testimony) which may or may not be accurate. That's the problem with history. We have a limited amount of crap to investigate. There is a finite amount of "ancient Egypt" left on the planet. If a magician magically transported every single piece of Ancient Egypt left on earth to one place it could all be counted, and there is no way we can make more of it. There are going to be holes, there are going to be gaps, and anything we don't know we have to infer. At best we can speak with absolute authority on completely mundane poo poo like "the US dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan" but that doesn't get us to the more interesting bits. Even with that mundane poo poo we can't speak authoritatively when you get out of the relatively modern era. Even poo poo like the precise names and order of Pharaohs becomes an issue of contention. The material issues are less of an issue with recent stuff - we can reconstruct a pretty good picture of what happened yesterday vs. March 10, 380BC - but that doesnt mean we'll have as good a view of it even ten years down the road. This poo poo is already creeping in with 9/11 stuff, for example. If the records are bad/incorrect - either through error or malice - you're doubly hosed. Because of that history is inherently interpretive, which is where the breakdown with your average person begins. From day 1 of school we approach students with "this is the poo poo that happened, memorize it for the test" which means that when you start moving away from capital-H History Books as received, infallible capital-W Wisdom and Knowledge they struggle. It's also worth noting that the more-or-less Rankian method of history that we are mostly operating within to this day is itself a product of the culture and preoccupation of a specific place (Europe, more specifically Germany) at a specific time (19th Century). I'm too lazy to unpack all that right now, but it's something to at least nod to when we get deep into the methodological waters of "what is history, anyway?"
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Mar 11, 2019 19:36
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Fangz posted:I submit this thread and its past is kinda ample evidence that a *ton* of disagreements boil down to this stuff. There's maybe some questions that are concrete matters of fact, but there's *plenty* of questions that are not so. Remember the question of "how good were tank destroyers?" my counterargument to that would be assuming his premise it doesn't really matter since a sufficiently developed language game is indistinguishable from a "real reality" and nobody on my side is claiming knowledge can be perfect anyway.
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Mar 11, 2019 19:36
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:For example, if we're discussing the Battle of Midway in 1942, if you dispute that a total of five aircraft carriers were sunk in that battle you'd better have a drat good argument to back your claim up, because you're disputing a known, confirmed fact. I don't think anyone is going to argue that there were five IJN carrier sunk, but there's plenty of room for interpretation as regards how important that was to the overall course and outcome of the war. A non-Historian looking at an argument between "it turned the tide and made Japanese defeat inevitable" and "in the big picture Japan was going to lose anyway" may see that as an argument over facts. It isn't - it's different interpretations - but that may be at the root of the misconception.
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Mar 11, 2019 19:36
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Cyrano4747 posted:we have no way of independently verifying that reality beyond documents (in the broadest possible sense of the word, encompassing everything from artifacts through eye witness testimony) which may or may not be accurate.
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Mar 11, 2019 19:38
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Cessna posted:I don't think anyone is going to argue that there were five IJN carrier sunk I would, because only four IJN carriers were sunk. The fifth was the USN's Yorktown.
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Mar 11, 2019 19:38
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HEY GUNS posted:on an astoundingly different note clicked link, no pictures of naked GIs riding ponies, disappointed. Have my favorite marine: 
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Mar 11, 2019 19:38
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Cyrano4747 posted:Man, this is the worst era to be a failed scholar, though.
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Mar 11, 2019 19:39
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:I would, because only four IJN carriers were sunk. The fifth was the USN's Yorktown. "No one is going to argue that five IJN carriers were sunk" because, no, five IJN carriers were NOT sunk at Midway. I was presenting an incorrect statement and saying that no one would argue for that. Yes, I know, you said "total." That wasn't what I was addressing.
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Mar 11, 2019 19:43
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Cyrano4747 posted:Have my favorite marine: Overdressed for a jarhead.
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Mar 11, 2019 19:43
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HEY GUNS posted:this is so with literally everything though, and most people don't flip the hell out over whether texting your friends is "real". history is as real as anything else that's based on reading words is. People love to anchor huge policies and arguments outside of the sphere of history on what is "real" though. Just pick any controversial subject that people argue over how it's presented in high school text books out of a hat. There are people who are very, very concerned with saying what was "real" and what the Absolute Historical Truth is when the issue at stake is almost always an issue of interpretation. Flat out "no this poo poo did happen we can prove it" stuff like Holocaust denial is the rarity, far more common are things like people really, really digging in on what the root cause of the Civil War was. Now, you can pick an interpretation you like more or less than the other and I think most people end up settling on a middle ground position for a lot of things. That doesn't stop the people who care deeply about any one of these issues from trying to stake out an extremist position and make sure it gets in the official textbooks.
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Mar 11, 2019 19:44
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Cyrano4747 posted:cause
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Mar 11, 2019 19:48
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Cessna posted:"No one is going to argue that five IJN carriers were sunk" because, no, five IJN carriers were NOT sunk at Midway. I was presenting an incorrect statement and saying that no one would argue for that. Sorry, I misread your post. Otherwise we're basically in violent agreement. I wasn't arguing about interpretations, I was explaining that absolute facts, such as the number of aircraft carriers sunk at the Battle of Midway, do in fact exist.
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Mar 11, 2019 19:53
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Yes, exactly. That is one backward definition of science.
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Mar 11, 2019 19:56
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Sorry, I misread your post. Otherwise we're basically in violent agreement. I wasn't arguing about interpretations, I was explaining that absolute facts, such as the number of aircraft carriers sunk at the Battle of Midway, do in fact exist. Sure, agreed!
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Mar 11, 2019 19:59
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HEY GUNS posted:the vast majority of these are arguments of interpretation, which nobody is arguing is not subjective Sure, but I would argue that to a non-expert audience issues of interpretation are often presented as issues of fact, which is where you get the major problems. I think there are two arguments happening here in parallel. 1) the "is there such a thing as objective truth" argument where the academics start breaking out theories of knowledge etc. 2) the "what you accept as hard facts are really just common interpretations" issue of non-academics interfacing with the historical literature. The second is the one that I think is the bigger issue, because that's precisely where you see people, for example, lamenting that we can't just have the "objective, basic facts" taught in AP US history.
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Mar 11, 2019 19:59
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Cyrano4747 posted:I think there are two arguments happening here in parallel. most people who say "it's all relative" (i am NOT including hooked on cthonics here) are confusing all of these levels
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Mar 11, 2019 20:04
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Hey, remember that time https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3585027&userid=209074#post442198831 I talked about German explosives 4 years ago? Don't go dying on me, Lowtax! 
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Mar 11, 2019 20:04
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:No. Reality is reality. If a tree falls in the forest, that means a tree fell no matter if someone was there to hear it make a sound (or not, as the case may be). The problem is that human senses are imperfect and human language is a subjective medium. I think we agree; what I’m driving at is that because of the imperfection of senses and subjectivity of experience ‘useful’ and ‘true’ are synonymous and both actually just mean ‘useful,’ not that the physical world itself is different for each person. HEY GUNS posted:If you have children, will you take them to the doctor when they're sick? Of course—modern medicine is a very well-honed instrument for usefully delivering positive outcomes. I don’t think anything in my post would indicate otherwise. HEY GUNS posted:that's what matters if you are a Carolingian scholar whose aim is to explain your subjects and their culture as best as you can to people who aren't them. Whether miracles happen for real matters very much to people who believe in miracles, or to people arguing against them. I can describe what early seventeenth century soldiers from Saxony believed about their lives as accurately as possible (which is never perfect), whether or not I think they were correct. Was speaking specifically about history, not apologetics, sorry if that was unclear—“explaining your subjects and their culture to people who aren’t them” is actually a pretty great concise summary of what I think the social value of history is, and I think the article’s point is that mere recitation of fact is a poor way to do it. If you encountered someone who heard what you studied and authoritatively told you that all your guys are dumb idiots not worth learning about because their superstitions aren’t empirically verifiable, and considered that the last word that needed to be said on the subject, how would you respond? I’m guessing it wouldn’t be throwing up your hands and saying ‘welp, you got me’ and burning your dissertation, but I’m also pretty sure you wouldn’t be personally offended on their behalf. If you’re anything like me, you’d try to explain why the present-day empirical verifiability of their beliefs is beside the point of understanding them as human actors in a specific societal moment and doesn’t preclude considering them as worthy subjects whose experiences can be learned from. You might even explain why superstitious belief was for them a rational response to the world they lived in given the material & knowledge culture they were immersed in—that their experience of reality was... HEY GUNS posted:i may be religious, but i also believe history is a science--which the last time I said it led to a huge slapfight with...Xiahou Dun I think? Want to be clear I was being complimentary. I have a really high opinion of your posting in this thread and the liturgical Christianity thread; it wasn’t a dig. I just meant that, if you’ll forgive the presumption, I had thought someone with as much experience consciously & conscientiously navigating disparate identities as you seem to have would have gained an intuitive grasp for the value of utility over pure capital-T law-of-nature Truth. Anyway yes this argument should not continue, I’ve said my bit and will shut up about it except for recommending Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature as the long form version.
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Mar 11, 2019 20:13
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Yes, exactly. That is definitely false. You can trivially produce good hypothesis tests. For example, if I have a letter sent from one individual to another thanking someone for sending them a message, I can with some confidence predict that that the other message will also exist. While in many cases it will not be possible to empirically verify the existence of this this letter, If the people corresponding did so recently in official capacities it is reasonably likely that letter was archived and you can reasonably expect to find it. Another example would be finding the wrecks of lost battleships. The remains of ships like the Yamato were found by careful analysis of historical records. Consider trying to find these kinds of artifacts without resort to the historical record, it would just be impossible. That we cannot exactly quantify their accuracy or precision does not mean these predictions are not scientific.
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Mar 11, 2019 20:18
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Squalid posted:That is definitely false. You can trivially produce good hypothesis tests. For example, if I have a letter sent from one individual to another thanking someone for sending them a message, I can with some confidence predict that that the other message will also exist. While in many cases it will not be possible to empirically verify the existence of this this letter, If the people corresponding did so recently in official capacities it is reasonably likely that letter was archived and you can reasonably expect to find it. Um, that letter example is a kind of bad one. It presumes that the correspondence is 100% truthful in the first place. This can be a big issue when working with sources. Famously you see cooked books in totalitarian regimes to make it look like Department X is meeting the bullshit state quota, for example. You also see bullshit correspondence when people know their letters are being read. With enough context that poo poo is amazing from a historical standpoint, of course, but it makes accepting any single piece of evidence authoritative proof of something problematic. History isn't a science. I don't want to get into the whole provable hypothesis thing, but history isn't a science, full stop.
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Mar 11, 2019 20:34
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Both those examples are pretty bad, the Yamato in that we've had the historical data and pretty good submarines for a long time, the world more just needed enough excess idle billionaires to start funding expeditions with often bad outcomes. As soon as we got enough bored billionaires with literally no way to spend their money wrecks started lighting up all over the ocean floor.
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Mar 11, 2019 20:41
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