> 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 y

> 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.