Stories are bad for your intelligence: How Historians Make Themselves Stupid

Re:Stories are bad for your intelligence: How Historians Mak... by lsmeducation on Sunday September 03, 2023 @07:03PM (#37375468)

Oh, I meant subjective in terms of your own perspective (informed by world view and life experiences). However you can fit the square pegs into your own round holes.

Regardless, I suppose the bigger point I want to make is the truth for non clear cut things is only as true as the number of people that co-sign it. If there’s simply more people on one side, welp, that’s that. That’s the truth, as far as we know.

Right or wrong or true or false are almost not even in the equation (enter the conspiracy theorist).

I don’t know, based on what I just said, what do you believe?

You see?

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Re:Stories are bad for your intelligence: How Historians Mak... by chargingmarmot on Sunday September 03, 2023 @11:17PM (#37376810)

This reminds me of how historians trying to find out about the historical Jesus have come up with some (objective?) criteria about what to accept as true.

Examples:

* Multiple attestation. Do we have multiple independent sources telling us the same thing?

* Contextual credibility. Do people behave in a way that's plausible given their setting (the languages they spoke, what they knew at the time).

* Embarrassment. Is this detail actually inconvenient for the person relaying it (and not the sort of thing they'd make up)?

see "Criteria of authenticity" in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_for_the_historical_Jesus

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