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Chronically 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
by imbnwa 4y ago
Chronically 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.
- UncleMeat 4y agoYeah this is my experience too. A lot of "fans of history" who've never actually studied historiography make big bold claims about the limitations of the field like historians didn't learn that in their early 20s.
- Bakary 4y agoYou can say the Earth is shaped like a cube, or like a sphere. Both are hot takes because it is in fact shaped like something we circularily (no pun intended) called a geoid. Yet wouldn't you be more interested in listening to the "sphere" guy?
- jesuscript 4y agoIt’s complicated. We’re so sensory overloaded that I might wanna hear just how far the flat earth guy can take it. Tall tales are a guilty pleasure for many. Clinically we call this conspiratorial thinking (or really clinically, paranoid schizophrenia?). Some people really indulge in their campfire ghost stories. I would be interested in the “Lincoln actually loved slavery” lol, just want to see how far some asshole can take an idea.
- UncleMeat 4y agoI'm married to a historian. I don't think this would hurt historians feelings. The idea that there are an infinity of different narratives one can express through the archive and that each author places part of themselves into the writing and that one can never achieve the TRUE HISTORICAL RECORD (TM) is not interesting or frustrating information for historians. They teach that shit in year one of grad school at the latest. You will see books that are "here is my hot take on Lincoln" but you won't see them say "we got Lincoln all wrong." They'll simply see how their different view and analysis fits into the wider tapestry of historical writing.
- imbnwa 4y agoWritten history is just the most convenient artifact to elaborate his hypothesis upon, its not necessary, oral tradition isn't meaningfully distinct in his hypothesis, its just that its easier to parse change over time with written history.
- 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?