4 ms·

The article goes straight for a big payoff by talking about the accepted canon of a fictional universe and drawing parallels to history. I don’t think the artic

The article goes straight for a big payoff by talking about the accepted canon of a fictional universe and drawing parallels to history. I don’t think the article reaches its goal here. If you are going to say “Captain Kirk is captain of the Enterprise”, it’s assumed that you’re making some kind of statement about canon, but if you say “Richard III was king of England”, it’s assumed you’re talking about the real historical person, unless you’re doing historiography. I think in order to accept this conceit of the article you have to kind of take an extreme, Baudrillardian viewpoint on who Richard III is in the first place—you have to take the viewpoint that Richard III is a character, a cultural product in the same sense that Captain Kirk is a cultural product. Or you have to conflate different meanings of the word “canon”.

deleted 3y ago
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kemayo 3y ago
> you have to take the viewpoint that Richard III is a character, a cultural product in the same sense that Captain Kirk is a cultural product The piece seems to be arguing that Richard III's motives, and specifically the circumstances around why he became king, are somewhat uncertain. As such, it feels that the popular historical narrative around what happened (treachery! usurpation!) is a cultural product without too much concrete evidence supporting it. This feels reasonable to me. "We know facts X and Y", is true. "As such, Z is what we think explains X and Y" can be convincing, but is also inherently speculation.
- dietrichepp 3y ago
  > The piece seems to be arguing that Richard III's motives, and specifically the circumstances around why he became king, are somewhat uncertain. Yes, but do you see how this question has a fundamentally different nature to it from the questions about Captain Kirk? The answer to “what were Richard III’s motives”, in some sense, is tied to some actual historical person, or our understanding of that person. We may find new historical evidence that sways our opinion one way or another, but that evidence either exists or it does not, it cannot be created. Douglas Adams talks about these kinds of questions about fiction, like, “What kind of Apple Mac did Arthur Dent have?” https://douglasadams.com/cgi-bin/mboard/info/dnathread.cgi?1546,2 https://douglasadams.com/cgi-bin/mboard/info/dnathread.cgi?1... > So what you're doing if you ask me what sort of computer Arthur Dent had is 'please would you make up a story for me which has to do with what sort of computer Arthur had'. > ... > So you see the problem? "What kind of Apple Mac did Arthur Dent have?" is a completely unanswerable question. Whereas if we were talking about a real person like Richard III, the questions often have answers, even if we don’t know them. I don’t think that this is some detail to gloss over—if you want to make the case that the questions about real people have the same nature as questions about fictional people, then I think you would have to support that case very carefully. Like, if we are arguing along those lines, then we can talk about George Washington cutting down the cherry tree as fact, because George Washington’s relationship to an actual historical person is increasingly incidental. I’m not saying that you can’t argue along those lines, just that this kind of argument doesn’t crop up by chance, and isn’t made by the article. > This feels reasonable to me. "We know facts X and Y", is true. "As such, Z is what we think explains X and Y" can be convincing, but is also inherently speculation. This is true for history, but fiction works differently.

deleted 3y ago

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kemayo 3y ago

> you have to take the viewpoint that Richard III is a character, a cultural product in the same sense that Captain Kirk is a cultural product The piece seems to be arguing that Richard III's motives, and specifically the circumstances around why he became king, are somewhat uncertain. As such, it feels that the popular historical narrative around what happened (treachery! usurpation!) is a cultural product without too much concrete evidence supporting it. This feels reasonable to me. "We know facts X and Y", is true. "As such, Z is what we think explains X and Y" can be convincing, but is also inherently speculation.

dietrichepp 3y ago
> The piece seems to be arguing that Richard III's motives, and specifically the circumstances around why he became king, are somewhat uncertain. Yes, but do you see how this question has a fundamentally different nature to it from the questions about Captain Kirk? The answer to “what were Richard III’s motives”, in some sense, is tied to some actual historical person, or our understanding of that person. We may find new historical evidence that sways our opinion one way or another, but that evidence either exists or it does not, it cannot be created. Douglas Adams talks about these kinds of questions about fiction, like, “What kind of Apple Mac did Arthur Dent have?” https://douglasadams.com/cgi-bin/mboard/info/dnathread.cgi?1546,2 https://douglasadams.com/cgi-bin/mboard/info/dnathread.cgi?1... > So what you're doing if you ask me what sort of computer Arthur Dent had is 'please would you make up a story for me which has to do with what sort of computer Arthur had'. > ... > So you see the problem? "What kind of Apple Mac did Arthur Dent have?" is a completely unanswerable question. Whereas if we were talking about a real person like Richard III, the questions often have answers, even if we don’t know them. I don’t think that this is some detail to gloss over—if you want to make the case that the questions about real people have the same nature as questions about fictional people, then I think you would have to support that case very carefully. Like, if we are arguing along those lines, then we can talk about George Washington cutting down the cherry tree as fact, because George Washington’s relationship to an actual historical person is increasingly incidental. I’m not saying that you can’t argue along those lines, just that this kind of argument doesn’t crop up by chance, and isn’t made by the article. > This feels reasonable to me. "We know facts X and Y", is true. "As such, Z is what we think explains X and Y" can be convincing, but is also inherently speculation. This is true for history, but fiction works differently.