> I think the quote you refer to speaks for itself.

With all due respect, you're missing my point. My point is that the quote doesn't speak for itself. It leaves all the really hard questions unanswered.

Here are some of the hard questions that I have in mind:

1) Are any statements concerning history not perspectival? (If so, why and what kind or kinds? If not, wow: not even (putatively) factual statements like 'World War I broke out in the year 1914'?)

2) If historical statements are so deeply perspectival, how do we rank or otherwise evaluate competing statements about history? If we don't rank or evaluate them at all, how do we form coherent sets of beliefs about the past (which many people appear to do)? How do people manage to choose between conflicting claims? How should they choose?

3) Are all statements about history equally valid? If so, does this run the risk of meaning that all statements about history are equally 'invalid'? If not, why not?

4) Are historical statements especially perspectival or are all statements of belief (period) perspectival? If historical statements are especially perspectival, why? If not - if everything anyone states is completely perspectival - wow. Again, that's a big claim.

Yes, my argument used a reductio ad absurdum, but I wan't trying to make your claim absurd. That is, I truly meant to take it seriously: seriously enough to dispute, to ask questions about and to discuss. Saying that all historical claims are perspectival is a big claim. I was genuinely asking you to clarify what you meant.

1) To answer that fully we will need to dig into what is a factual statement. I would gladly discuss the nature of facts but don't find this to to be the forum.

But my basic believe is that facts are true in context. Relative not objective. Facts (reductional interpretations of reality) are described from the vantage point of the observer. We can experience what we call reality in a certain way but not in all possible ways.

And that is all fine and good. We don't need true, just useful.

2) We evaluate them within the different clusters we live in. There are people who believe that holocaust never happened. There are people who believe that 9/11 was orchestrated by the US. Most people though believe the same things. World War I broke out in the year 1914.

That does not by any metrics mean that that is a true statement. You could very well argue that it broke out way before that. Cause I take it you agree that people didn't wake up one day in the year 1914 and thought, let's have a war.

The coherent sets of beliefs used to be mainly cultural now they'r exposed on the internet. And people form around various perspectives. So you have clusters of perspectives. That is why you have what seem to be agreement on those perspectives.

That is why there aren't anyone claiming that the Alpha Centaurions secretly invaded the planet to initiate I or II WW. It could be true but there is nothing factual (and again I refer you to 1) ) to construct that belief.

There are however many other conflicting and competing view. Less about the factual parts (D-Day) more about the meaning of that day. The factual parts are not really that interesting and they are certainly not important. Only to the people who actually where around at that time.

As long as you know that it happened 6 June 1944 +- a couple of days or months (with time and as the people who lived at that time dies, the accepted +- span will grow ever bigger) you are ok.

3) Again you are confusing two things here. There are factual statements (that might or might not be true and again I refer you to 1) and then there is the interpretation of these facts. I am more concerned with the latter part than the first.

4) There is nothing big in that claim. I would be happy to discuss this further but not here. Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyrabend have all done a fairly good job at describing some of the problems with believing in objective truths. I have my own views. We can discuss but then we should find a place to take it. Hmm maybe there is even a small side project idea there.

1) Facts exist. Often we have an incomplete understanding of facts, and there is something like a working mental model of facts. An educated mind allows for the possibility that the facts are sometimes subject to new information which can sometimes change them. Without these facts, we couldn't make buildings stand up, and they do. They do because we have an understanding of how to make them do so based on facts. Homicide detectives and heart surgeons have a notion of facts based on evidence and very very often they get it right because there are knowable, searchable, demonstrable facts. If you doubt objective reality then imagine sleepwalking in front of a train: your perspective is irrelevant. The train is coming whether you know it or not. 2) Sometimes people are wrong. Sometimes people aren't interested in facts because it conflicts with their agenda. Some people don't want to work to find the truth. That's why proof and evidence are so important. "When did WWI start?" might require years of study to understand the complexities of what touched off that where and provide a nuanced "answer". Hearing different voices on this topic is part of an education, but being able to differentiate credible voices from those who attempt to instrumentalize the past, or worse yet, provide some kind of hard and fast sense of history by omitting important facts, is NOT a good way to educate the populace.

3) Interpretation is also based on what you can back up. I can interpret "There are no aliens in Roswell New Mexico" to mean "There are DEFINITELY aliens in Roswell New Mexico". However, without some kind of proof behind that interpretation see number 1. A bad working model of the territory makes a bad map. Also, the claim that facts are neither interesting nor important is false and dangerous.

4)

You ar missing the point. Facts are not objective because interpretations are not. Man hit by train is not the only interpretation of two clusters of atoms hitting each other.

Death is not the only interpretation of the carbon based structure that is now smeared on to the front of the steel construction

Interpretations don't change conditions; conditions exist regardless of perception or interpretation. At the point where interpretation becomes so obtuse as to try to revise the immutable reality of death (and taxes?), something is wrong. When this kind of relativistic, obtuse, "subjective" argument is brought to bear it is usually driven by a political bias(I.E. "Our" history versus "Their" history.) Certainly interpretation can play a part in communication but more often misinterpreting reality leads to consequences of a nature not interpretable, such as the loss of a work situation. What I mean to say is, the limits of the subjective stretch only so far before playing with them leads to consequences in real life. Play semantic games with a spouse or boss and see how far it goes.