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It's important to remember that this same problem haunted historiography for at least 2 centuries, if not much more. At least from the 1700s, and lasting well i
by lkrubner 4y ago
It's important to remember that this same problem haunted historiography for at least 2 centuries, if not much more. At least from the 1700s, and lasting well into the 1900s, historians considered themselves the historians of events, rather than non-events. As such, they automatically gave too much weight to change. That a different approach was possible was not even considered until modern anthropology got going in the late 1800s. But credit for the big change in historiography is typically assigned to the Annales school and to Fernand Braudel in particular, and his concept of the "Longue durée":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longue_durée https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longue_durée
"The longue durée is the French Annales School approach to the study of history. It gives priority to long-term historical structures over what François Simiand called histoire événementielle ("evental history", the short-term time-scale that is the domain of the chronicler and the journalist), concentrating instead on all-but-permanent or slowly evolving structures, and substitutes for elite biographies the broader syntheses of prosopography. The crux of the idea is to examine extended periods of time and draw conclusions from historical trends and patterns."
We should not expect ordinary layman to get things right when professional historians, until recently, had a strong bias toward events (and even now, many still demonstrate this bias).
- jschveibinz 4y agoInteresting. Thanks for this perspective.
- imbnwa 4y agoChronically misunderstood, early Michel Foucault goes one step forward than this and asks "Why not just remove the human as catalyst of truth entirely? What if humans are just the canvas for knowledges rather than the other way around?" Another way to look at his hypothesis: what if truth and knowledge are no differently anonymous automata than the processes of biological evolution with respect to individuals?
- barrysteve 4y agoThe ancient greeks did not have this relationship to (written) knowledge. Greeks had to have a human vouch for the validity of the written document. Tying truth to written history is noble but also flawed.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jesuscript 4y agoIt would hurt historians feelings to know that they are essentially just, what we call today, “hot takes” on history. It’s often well written and credentialed (appeal to authority), but ultimately it’s just one dude’s hot take on events. For example, many people in America have a hot-take about what life is like in China. How? We heard it from somewhere, never lived a day there. Can’t be that simple right? You say you heard it from a scholar? Welp, hate to break it to ya, but unless you were there yourself, it’s just not 100% the truth. It’s the main reason you’ll eventually see a book that says “we got Abraham Lincoln all wrong, let me tell you my hot take”. You’d have to read 30 of these hot takes before you can even mix the black and white into a gray truth (which the truth is, always gray). Anyway, word on the street is the Queen is a saint. Give it a year, we’ll get the other hot take. Then another one.
- kmonsen 4y agoHate to break it to ya, but if you were there yourself that is just an anecdote or a single data point and doesn’t tell you a lot about the general population.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- watwut 4y ago> It would hurt historians feelings to know that they are essentially just, what we call today, “hot takes” on history. Interestingly, the actual historians I came accros would not be shocked by such claim at all. They do make their own claims of that sort. However, arbitrary fans of Ancient Greece would be shocked.
- raspberry1337 4y agoEnlighten me, what does it mean that truth and knowledge are anonymous automata?
- ForHackernews 4y agoIt sounds to me like a variant on the idea of a "meme" (in its original sense): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme Consider that ideas (even facts!) might be like mind-viruses: you could imagine they propagate themselves in human minds, but are not actually produced by those minds. What if human minds are just the substrate?
- bryanrasmussen 4y agoat some point some ideas have to be created by some individual human who then transfers it to others, if we do not agree that the idea created by the individual human is created in their mind then we have to come up with another explanation of what they are created in. If we assume that a new idea, never before propagated creates itself we should have an explanation for how that works, which memetics does not have a current explanation for.
- ForHackernews 4y agoIMHO, this depends what you consider a "new" idea: ideas mutate and change, they are combined or applied in a different context but rarely (perhaps never) do they arise sui generis from nothing. Analogously, viruses mutate and change in their hosts, and at some point their lineage diverges enough that we declare it a "new" virus - but this is a categorization applied by an observer, and somewhat false. Perhaps the earliest "ur ideas" were something like instinctive emotions. Even very simple creatures seek food and avoid noxious stimuli. Is hunger an idea? Maybe from hunger arose desire, and from desire arose searching, and from searching arose planning... Ad astra per fame.
- schoen 4y agoPer famem, because per governs the accusative, right?