Pseudohistory

@Olivier5,

Olivier5 wrote:

I like "myth" the most. Myths are very strange cultural objects: not written by any single one author but the result of a collective creation, they are factually false (no real Zeus lives on mount Olympus) but symbolically useful for society.

'Myth' shouldn't be used exclusively to describe false myths. Actual historical events and realities can become mythologized so that they have cultural significance beyond what they would have if they were just something buried in a history book.

'Myth,' in other words, should refer to the cultural significance of something, not whether it is historically accurate or not.

Common usage of 'myth' as only referring to historically inaccurate cultural myths makes it confusing to talk about myths/legends that are rooted in actual history.

1 Reply

@livinglava,

Quote:

Common usage of 'myth' as only referring to historically inaccurate cultural myths makes it confusing to talk about myths/legends that are rooted in actual history.

I don't make dictionaries, and like the concept as it is. Even if some "myths/legends are rooted in actual history", it is still important to keep a conceptual distinction between the legend and the history.

1 Reply

@Olivier5,

Olivier5 wrote:

Quote:
Common usage of 'myth' as only referring to historically inaccurate cultural myths makes it confusing to talk about myths/legends that are rooted in actual history.

I don't make dictionaries, and like the concept as it is. Even if some "myths/legends are rooted in actual history", it is still important to keep a conceptual distinction between the legend and the history.

The anthropological meaning is more useful for value-neutral social-cultural analysis, but then you could analyze the culture of defining 'myth' as false by definition as a defining myth of modernist culture.

1 Reply

@Seizan,

Apocrypha, inter alia, are writings or statements of dubious historicity.

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@Olivier5,

Quote:

True history doesn't get written collectively, it's the product of largely individual research, still.

In science you have testable facts. These are objective... no matter what society runs an experiment, they will get the same result. If a society wants to build airplanes, they damn well better understand Bernoulli's principle, they might have a different name for it, but the underlying science must be the same or airplanes won't fly.

There is no "True Science". It is just Science.

"True History" is largely objective. There are facts that can be tested, but history isn't about names and dates. History is about constructing a narrative that is by its very nature subjective.

Take Christopher Columbus for example. The narrative of Christopher Columbus has changed dramatically in the past 50 years in spite of the fact that none of the facts have changed a bit. The facts are quite simple, in the end of the 15th century he got money from Isabella and sailed to the Americas where he interacted with Native Americans.

But history is about our understanding of who we are as Americans. One narrative has Columbus as a hero... an adventurer who discovered America and changed world history. Another (and there are more than two) has him as a villain, a rapist and slave trader who started a genocide.

Is either one of these narratives false? No. They are stories that are designed to reflect our values and sense of self. The facts are rather secondary to the narrative we tell.

1 Reply

@maxdancona,

Okay, so in history you have testable facts but their interpretation is necessarily subjective. Does that summarize your post well?

Where is it written that scientists are not subjects subjected to subjectivity? I think any and all effort by a human being to interpret facts is always necessarily subjective, especially so when the subject matter (mankind) is itself highly subjective.

1 Reply

@livinglava,

There's no such thing as a "value-neutral social-cultural analysis", honey. Analysis is done by people, and people have values.

1 Reply

@Olivier5,

Olivier5 wrote:

There's no such thing as a "value-neutral social-cultural analysis", honey. Analysis is done by people, and people have values.

Thanks, I'm familiar enough with that dogma to not need to hear it recited again here.

Instead of posting assertions of dogma, why don't you try thinking critically and analytically and actually responding to what I said about the use of the term, 'myth' to describe something culturally significant, regardless of whether its based on actual historical facts or not.

Star Wars, for example, is considered a contemporary myth, but the political story of the oppressive empire being subverted by the rebel alliance is somewhat generally representative of something that happens in history at various times in different ways.

So the term, 'myth' isn't really about whether something it totally historically accurate or not; it's about how significant it becomes as a cultural meaning that resonates with and/or informs popular interpretations of actual historical events/facts.

1 Reply

@livinglava,

Ratherthan criticize all the time, try and understand what is being said to you. I repeat: "value-free" is like "free meal". IT DOES NOT EXIST.

1 Reply

@Olivier5,

Olivier5 wrote:

Okay, so in history you have testable facts but their interpretation is necessarily subjective. Does that summarize your post well?

Where is it written that scientists are not subjects subjected to subjectivity? I think any and all effort by a human being to interpret facts is always necessarily subjective, especially so when the subject matter (mankind) is itself highly subjective.

This is not a science thread. I think that I have made my point clear in other threads, but I will summarize here.

Science is objective. Any scientific interpretations are themselves testable, and tested. Once you get to interpretations or speculations that can not be objectively tested, it is no longer science.

In history the end is an interpretation that can't be test (or falsified). Historians talk about big themes... human progress, the development of human rights. There is no way to objectively test what "human rights" are or "progress" is, these are defined by our current values.

There is a big difference between the way history is done and the way science is done.

2 Replies

@maxdancona,

You keep harping the same BS, and then you cut short and run every time I prove you wrong.

Science, as anything human occupation, has a degree of subjectivity in it. It's not done by robots.

History is a science precisely because, contrary to what you state, it is fact-based. The facts of science are the writings and other artifacts left by previous generations. To take an extreme example, we know for a fact that the ancient Egyptians didn't use cellphones because we found no cell phones whatsoever in any of their many many tombs. And if one day someone finds a cellphone in a untouched pharaonic tomb, egyptologists will have to change their historic narrative quite a bit.

The subject matter implies certain features though, including a high level of subjectivity. If one studies human beings as agents, as subjects (as history does - medicine is a different matter), then there will be subjectivity in this domain of study, by force. It goes with the territory.

In other words, humans find it much easier to study mice, planets or atoms with some degree of objectivity than to study their fellow human beings and themselves with objectivity.

1 Reply

@Olivier5,

Quote:

The facts of science are the writings and other artifacts left by previous generations.

I cut and run because you make nonsense responses that completely ignore the main point (although, this time you have goaded me into trying one more time).

Science is objective because every interpretation, every conclusion, has to be testable and tested in an objective way. In science there are right answers; all cultures that develop flight will necessarily have the same grasp of fluid dynamics. That is just objectively how flight works.

History deals with narrative that are based on value judgments. There are facts, but the conclusions developed from the same set of facts will be quite different from culture to culture and even from generation to generation of the same culture. Different cultures may have very different ideas on "human rights", and these differences will inform greatly different views of history. These are subjective value judgments.

You are bringing in a bunch of arguments that are irrelevant to the point.

1 Reply

@maxdancona,

Nope, you cut and run because you can't stand the idea of being proven wrong.

Whether history is a science is in the end a matter of how one defines science. You seem to entertain a very funny view of science as done by ethereal beings without passions and opinions... You are entitled to your opinion about that, of course, but don't expect historians to care too much.

In fact your opinion about science as a purely objective business is quite dated and has been proven false many times. Such opinions are in themselves historical objects: they come and go with the philosophical fashion of the day.

Note that there are right answers in history: the Holocaust happened, for instance.

1 Reply

@maxdancona,

maxdancona wrote:

In history the end is an interpretation that can't be test (or falsified). Historians talk about big themes... human progress, the development of human rights. There is no way to objectively test what "human rights" are or "progress" is, these are defined by our current values.

There are hard facts in history that can be falsified. I do it all the time with progressives who go into hysterics over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's not a big issue of discussion on a2k, but there are other places on the internet.

When progressives elsewhere on the internet claim that we nuked Japan after they already surrendered, I point out the hard verifiable fact that the date of the first surrender offer came one day after the date of the last A-bomb.

When progressives elsewhere on the internet claim that we nuked civilian targets, I point out the hard historical fact that both A-bombs were dropped on important military targets.

2 Replies

@oralloy,

And all those civilians died of the flu.

1 Reply

@Olivier5,

Olivier5 wrote:

Ratherthan criticize all the time, try and understand what is being said to you. I repeat: "value-free" is like "free meal". IT DOES NOT EXIST.

It was not related to what you are responding to. I could go off on you on a tangent discussing it, but it sort of irritates me that you are creating a such a tangent in the first place.

1 Reply

@edgarblythe,

edgarblythe wrote:

And all those civilians died of the flu.

Some civilians were killed. They were collateral damage. That happens sometimes when military targets are bombed.

We didn't ask Japan to inflict a reign of terror on us and the rest of their greater co prosperity sphere.

1 Reply

@oralloy,

I happen to believe that any collateral damage, except by unpremeditated accident, is criminal.

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@edgarblythe,

International law allows collateral damage that is proportionate to the military objective that is being attempted.

It can be debated whether the collateral damage from the A-bombs was proportionate, but we really needed to make Japan stop what they were doing.

Desperate times call for desperate measures.

1 Reply

@oralloy,

International law is decided by nations. Morality supersedes government pronouncements.

2 Replies

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