UBB.classicTM 6.5.0
quote:that's really one of whether you think the New Testament is describing events that actually happened. That is not the same as whether you think you are supposed to believe in literal inerrancy. Saying one is not persuaded of the latter doesn't let a person off coming to terms with the former.
When Jesus meets Pilate, is it that Jesus is a ‘Biblical character’ but Pilate is a ‘really existing person’?
quote:As far as I can see, you've introduced something into the discussion above that was not included in the original blog discussion; Jesus and Pilate.
Originally posted by peter damian:
Bill Vallicella replies here to my post here on reference to ‘Biblical characters’. Bill makes the interesting (and IMO incoherent) distinction between reference to Biblical characters and ‘reference to really existent persons’, or ‘beings in external reality’. When Jesus meets Pilate, is it that Jesus is a ‘Biblical character’ but Pilate is a ‘really existing person’?
quote:I think it comes down to truth. Some want to insist that the scriptures must be accepted to be 100% true in all respects - historically, archaeologically, philosophically - because for any of it to be myth would be an attack upon their sacred cow.
This is connected with the idea of the ‘historicity’ of a character or event. What do we mean by ‘historicity’? Do we mean whether the character really existed or the event really took place? Or do we mean whether there is a reference available in external or independent textual sources?
quote:This really touches on how we understand the type of literature that the gospels are, and even whether we are able at the remove to know that. So in most fiction books, the characters are made-up characters, but it is not uncommon for the author to introduce characters into their novels who obviously refers to real existing people, and this is commonplace in historical novels.
When Jesus meets Pilate, is it that Jesus is a ‘Biblical character’ but Pilate is a ‘really existing person’?
quote:There are certainly contexts in which we can make the distinction. We can talk about Hilary Mantel's Cromwell or Shakespeare's Prince Hal in distinction from the actually existent persons in historical reality. Even so, it would be meaningful for some purposes (but not for others) to say that Prince Hal is a really existing person but that Falstaff is pretty much fictional.
Originally posted by peter damian:
Bill makes the interesting (and IMO incoherent) distinction between reference to Biblical characters and ‘reference to really existent persons’, or ‘beings in external reality’. When Jesus meets Pilate, is it that Jesus is a ‘Biblical character’ but Pilate is a ‘really existing person’?
quote:It would depend on context. Normally it would refer to whether the character really existed.
This is connected with the idea of the ‘historicity’ of a character or event. What do we mean by ‘historicity’? Do we mean whether the character really existed or the event really took place? Or do we mean whether there is a reference available in external or independent textual sources?
quote:This touches on what type of literature the gospels are. In novels, the characters are made-up characters, but it is quite common for the author to introduce characters into their novels which are obviously really existing persons. We can miss this when the novel is before our time and the really existing person is not that famous.
When Jesus meets Pilate, is it that Jesus is a ‘Biblical character’ but Pilate is a ‘really existing person’?
quote:I think most of us want to take "historicity" as referring to something that actually happened, but there is the problem of the non availability of time-machines, which makes us dependent on historical records or artefacts. So that seems to lead us to the second definition. But what is an "independent textual source"? And what can we know about the intention of the author? I don't know anybody who believes that Swift was intending to present Gulliver as a really existing person, but some people would take a different view of the Arthurian Legends, and most people woud assume that Bede's history was all about really existing persons.
What do we mean by ‘historicity’? Do we mean whether the character really existed or the event really took place? Or do we mean whether there is a reference available in external or independent textual sources?
quote:There seems little wrong in an a priori position that what the modern observer finds in the historical records is likely to a be a mixture of what happened and story, legend or myth about what happened. As a result we have partial pictures of people who really existed.
Questions regarding historicity concern not just the issue of "what really happened," but also the issue of how modern observers can come to know "what really happened." This second issue is closely tied to historical research practices and methodologies for analyzing the reliability of primary sources and other evidence.
quote:Nice phrase "submerged value commitments".
Because various methodologies thematize historicity differently, it's not possible to reduce historicity to a single structure to be represented. Some methodologies (for example historicism), can make historicity subject to constructions of history based on submerged value commitments.
quote:First, conversion belongs to the Lord. Nobody ought to be "trying to convert" anyone.
Originally posted by peter damian:
Simontoad: “We must remember that the gospels are not reportage or accounts of facts but aids to conversion.”
But presumably these ‘aids to conversion’ only work if the reportage is believed to be true. So, I report that Jesus walked on water to convince you that Jesus had supernatural powers, with the aim of converting you. This depends on you believing that my report is true. Or is it that I preface this by saying ‘It didn’t really happen, I am just trying to convert you by telling you this false story’. Hmm.
quote:Well, that's certainly true, because Hilary Mantel has been providing a fascinating historical portrait of Thomas Cromwell. Mantel's portrait builds on generally accepted information about Thomas Cromwell's life - as can be seen from the Wiki article - and seeks to present a possible (or probable) view both of his character and his place in the history of these turbulent times.
Originally posted by peter damian:
On this view, the person that Hilary Mantel called ‘Cromwell’ in her book Wolf Hall is not numerically the same person as the one called ‘Oliver Cromwell’ in this Wikipedia article, who lived from 1599 to 1658.
quote:I don't understand the question of "whether this is the same person". What does that even mean in the context of a writer using some factual basis for a character in a book?
Originally posted by Barnabas62:
Mantel's portrait builds on generally accepted information about Thomas Cromwell's life - as can be seen from the Wiki article - and seeks to present a possible (or probable) view both of his character and his place in the history of these turbulent times.
Strictly speaking, what Mantel gives us is not history. I suspect I'm not the only one who thinks she has done a remarkable job in providing a plausible illumination of what actually happened. She is a convincing story-teller.
quote:I don't think it matters, to be honest. Parables are true in a much deeper sense than whether or not the characters existed in the way they are depicted.
Originally posted by Galloping Granny:
The story of Jonah is a great yarn (that big sulk at the end always gets me) but does anyone here think he was a real character?
quote:
Stories set in the past, but created long enough ago that they were published closer to their setting than to today.
Modern audiences may not recognize which parts were supposed to sound old.
quote:Leaving aside the confusion about Cromwells, I don't see the point here, and for me it has a whif of arcane philosophy about it.
On this view, the person that Hilary Mantel called ‘Cromwell’ in her book Wolf Hall is not numerically the same person as the one called ‘Oliver Cromwell’ in this Wikipedia article, who lived from 1599 to 1658.
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quote:I don't believe that historical fiction is making claims, true or false. Certainly my reaction to the statement that Mantel is filling out her sources by making stuff up is different from the reaction I'd have to a historian filling out her sources. Likewise, my reaction to the discovery that Mantel has altered details in pursuit of a more interesting story.
Originally posted by peter damian:
Dafyd: “We can talk about Hilary Mantel's Cromwell or Shakespeare's Prince Hal in distinction from the actually existent persons in historical reality.”
On this view, the person that Hilary Mantel called ‘Cromwell’ in her book Wolf Hall is not numerically the same person as the one called ‘Oliver Cromwell’ in this Wikipedia article, who lived from 1599 to 1658. On that same view, the characters called ‘Napoleon’, ‘Alexander’, ‘Kutuzov’ etc in War and Peace are not one and the same people as those referred to by historians. That’s a challenging idea. I would say that historical fiction is a mixture of claims about characters who really existed, some of which claims are true, others of which are clearly false, and claims about individuals who never existed at all. Some of the false claims about the historical characters involve them meeting the fictional characters.
quote:Funny, this would be an extremely accurate description of most of what we call History.
Originally posted by peter damian:
I would say that historical fiction is a mixture of claims about characters who really existed, some of which claims are true, others of which are clearly false, and claims about individuals who never existed at all. Some of the false claims about the historical characters
quote:PeterDamian is paraphrasing what he thinks are the consequences of my views, which he disagrees with (unless I've completely misunderstood him). You're really addressing your criticisms to me rather than to him.
Originally posted by anteater:
But I see no basis for your assertion. If you asked HM, I'm sure she would tell you that she is talking about the "real" Thomas Cromwell, and would probably admit that she has a slant on him which is not universally accepted. Like Josephine Tey's slant on Richard III.
quote:I believe from what the OP has said in other threads that he's coming from a background in analytic philosophy. I'm afraid that analytic philosophers have a tendency to be interested in things that are slightly skew to what people who haven't read a lot of analytic philosophy are interested in.
Originally posted by anteater:
Is there any purpose in stating that by portraying the real Richard III according to a writer's partial knowledge and prejudices, the writer has created a new person? I just don't think it makes common sense to say there are multiple Richards, or Cromwell's, as opposed to varying and often contradictory portrayals of him.
quote:I am relatively historicist about Jesus; I don't think every detail of the gospels matters, and there are clearly some bits which can't all be accurate (you need some arbitrary criteria to make out that they all accurately report Pilate's inscription on the cross for example), but I think it must be broad strokes the kind of thing that actually happened.
And the reason why this matters to me is that I am trying to get into the mindset of those, like my Vicar, who talk naturally about Christ as portrayed in the Gospels, such that if you didn't know, you'd assume he believed it all happened just like it is told. Except I know he doesn't believe any such thing. He would accept that a lot is non-objective, but will still cheerfully talk about Jesus walking on the water.
quote:Surely there has to be a point where the portrayal of a real person is so divergent from reality that the portrayal has to be considered a different person? For example, it seems likely that Bram Stoker did little more than borrow Vlad Țepeș' nickname when creating Count Dracula. I'm not sure considering Stoker's Dracula (or Lugosi's) to be the same "person" as Vlad the Impaler is in any way clarifying.
Originally posted by anteater:
Is there any purpose in stating that by portraying the real Richard III according to a writer's partial knowledge and prejudices, the writer has created a new person? I just don't think it makes common sense to say there are multiple Richards, or Cromwell's, as opposed to varying and often contradictory portrayals of him.
quote:It’s a philosophical thing just to clear up any confusion between qualitative identity or difference, and numerical identity or difference. We say ‘Thomas is not himself’, meaning he is behaving differently, not feeling well, and so on. We don’t mean ‘Thomas is not Thomas’, in the sense that he and himself are two different yet oddly identical people. That’s all.
anteater I assume you think that by adding the word "numerically" you are saying more than "they are not the same person". But I can't see what? Can you explain.
quote:Agree.
If you asked HM, I'm sure she would tell you that she is talking about the "real" Thomas Cromwell, and would probably admit that she has a slant on him which is not universally accepted. Like Josephine Tey's slant on Richard III.
quote:Do you mean simply making statements about Anne Boleyn that are false, or is there something deeper signified by the ‘as they appear’ qualifier? As though there is this different Anne-Boleyn intentional entity, drifting inbetween the real world and fictionality, numerically different from the really real Anne Boleyn. Normally when people use the ‘as’ locution, they are signalling something like this.
Dafyd My main argument is that if I'm talking about Wolf Hall, I can make statements about Cromwell or Henry or Anne Boleyn as they appear in the novel that do not necessarily refer back to the real world.
quote:Do you mean it was the vision of his wife that said goodbye? I.e. that the subject of the verb ‘said goodbye’ was the vision of his wife? Or did he falsely imagine or envision that his wife said goodbye?
Likewise, Mantel writes that Cromwell on the morning that his wife and children died had a vision of his wife saying goodbye to him which he mistook for the living woman saying goodbye for the day.
quote:Here again the difficulty of what ‘the same’ and ‘different’ mean. Qualitative difference is when one and the same person (numerically) is portrayed as being qualitatively different. I think you mean this.
Brenda Clough I think the OP is trying to grapple with the multiplicity of characters on the page. The Richard III in Shakespeare is not the same person as the Richard in the novel by Josephine Tey, who is slightly but clearly different from the character in the novels by Sharon Kay Penman.
quote:I would say that a skeleton is not numerically or qualitatively the same as the living man. Surely the skeleton is of a man who was once living?
And all those Richards are not the same as the skeleton found under the car park recently, who is not quite the same as the actual man who sat on the throne.
quote:Not sure about this. The portrayal of a person is not a person, any more than a picture of a person is a person. There can be two pictures of Richard III. These are numerically different (because they are two), but they are of one and the same person.
Anteater So I tend to reserve the word "person" for a real person, and would naturally rewrite Branda's opening statement as: "The [portrayal of] Richard III in Shakespeare is not the same (person) as the [portrayal of] Richard in the novel by Josephine Tey . . ". Which of course is true.
quote:I disagree. Shakespeare's Richard III is certainly a person, but Shakespeare says many things about him that are probably not true. But then you say that fictional persons and real persons are not different types of person, which I agree with.
Dafyd Shakespeare's Richard III isn't a person. He's a fictional person (fictional persons and real persons are not different types of person).
quote:That’s a difficult question. Another difficult question is whether Mr Bennet in Pride and Prejudice is the same person as Jane Austen’s father, who she based the character on.
Croeos Surely there has to be a point where the portrayal of a real person is so divergent from reality that the portrayal has to be considered a different person? For example, it seems likely that Bram Stoker did little more than borrow Vlad Țepeș' nickname when creating Count Dracula. I'm not sure considering Stoker's Dracula (or Lugosi's) to be the same "person" as Vlad the Impaler is in any way clarifying.
quote:Is it the conceptual distinction between numerical and qualitative identity that you find problematic. It’s very important in philosoph. This SEP article has something about it. In short, the same person can change, or be portrayed as having different characteristics or qualities. That is qualitative difference. The characteristics are different, not the person. Or we can ask whether George Orwell was the same as Eric Blair. In this case not, because they were numerically one, one and the same person, identical in number etc.
Originally posted by mr cheesy:
I'm sorry, I must be thick because I'm not following the significance of something being "numerically" the same person in fiction and in real life.
If Shakespeare made up a load of stuff about King Richard, what does it matter if it has any relationship to the historical truth? How does it make any difference knowing that there was indeed a King Richard? Does that mean it is a "more real" character than Shylock if the latter was not a historical character?
I really don't understand what this hair is that is being sliced. It seems to be suggested above that the only useful character is the one based on a real character (even if the only relationship to the real person is the name). That's nonsense, surely.
quote:So you are saying that the principle of excluded middle does not apply to historical statements? The principle says that any statement or its denial must be true. I.e. either ‘snow is white’ is true, or ‘snow is not white’ is true, no third possibility.
Barnabas62 I'm not sure that historical representations, (reconstructions, accounts, views, analyses) of past people, or events (whether by historians or imaginative authors) are subject to simple true-false distinctions. Our understandings of the past are fluid, subject to change by the uncovering of fresh information, or prior inaccuracies or misinterpretations.
quote:No, my problem is that is bullshit. It makes no difference if the person is an invented name or has the same name as a person who really exists. If they're fiction, they're both made up - neither has any relationship to the true person.
Originally posted by peter damian:
Is it the conceptual distinction between numerical and qualitative identity that you find problematic. It’s very important in philosoph. This SEP article has something about it. In short, the same person can change, or be portrayed as having different characteristics or qualities. That is qualitative difference. The characteristics are different, not the person. Or we can ask whether George Orwell was the same as Eric Blair. In this case not, because they were numerically one, one and the same person, identical in number etc.
quote:No it doesn't. I don't do this kind of stupid philosophy. The reality is that people perceive things in different ways, so it is utterly consistent for there to be a deity and at the same time for different groups to have different perceptions and understandings of what he is like.
Or is it that the distinction makes perfect sense, but you don’t see the applicability? Well it’s fantasticall important in the theology of the trinity, for example. Also for the ‘God’/ ‘Allah’ problem. Is it that Muslims think that Allah is one and the same deity as the Christian God, i.e. that they are one and the same? In that case, one or the other side is heretical. Or is it that the conception embedded in the name ‘Allah’ is so utterly different from that embedded in ‘God’, as understood by Christians, that they are referring to, or aiming to refer to, different beings? In this case, there is no heresy. Neither side is claiming that there is more than one God. However, since they regard the referents as different, there must be idolatry. The Christian thinks that there is only one God. S/he also thinks that God is the only God. Since s/he also thinks that if there were such a being as Allah, Allah would be numerically different from God, which is impossible, since God is the only God. Therefore there is no such being as Allah, ergo etc.
Does that make sense now?
quote:I don’t understand ‘truth in a different way’. Truth is saying of what is the case, that it is the case. If I say that snow is white, and if snow is white, then I speak truly. If I deny that which is not so, I also speak the truth. E.g. If I say that snow is not black, and it is not black, I am speaking the truth.
Brenda Where I come from, we talk about how fiction is both true and not true. Certainly fiction is fictional -- not fact. But it is not not-true either. It is truth, but in a different way.
quote:The answer is probably closer to, yes, there is a different intentional entity. Though I'm not sure that's a question that is worth asking directly, as opposed to reducing it to various subquestions For example, 'are there true statements about Mantel's depiction of Anne that are not true about the historical Anne?'; 'should we be concerned that Mantel in the novel asserts things about Anne that might be false?' (The answer to that one is itself a good deal more complex than a plain yes/no).
Originally posted by peter damian:
quote:Do you mean simply making statements about Anne Boleyn that are false, or is there something deeper signified by the ‘as they appear’ qualifier? As though there is this different Anne-Boleyn intentional entity, drifting inbetween the real world and fictionality, numerically different from the really real Anne Boleyn. Normally when people use the ‘as’ locution, they are signalling something like this.
Dafyd My main argument is that if I'm talking about Wolf Hall, I can make statements about Cromwell or Henry or Anne Boleyn as they appear in the novel that do not necessarily refer back to the real world.
quote:As I remember Mantel leaves the matter deliberately ambiguous.
quote:Do you mean it was the vision of his wife that said goodbye? I.e. that the subject of the verb ‘said goodbye’ was the vision of his wife? Or did he falsely imagine or envision that his wife said goodbye?
Likewise, Mantel writes that Cromwell on the morning that his wife and children died had a vision of his wife saying goodbye to him which he mistook for the living woman saying goodbye for the day.
quote:Existent and non-existent are not predicates. In the same way, fictional and real are not predicates. The set of people includes real people but not fictional people.
quote:I disagree. Shakespeare's Richard III is certainly a person, but Shakespeare says many things about him that are probably not true. But then you say that fictional persons and real persons are not different types of person, which I agree with.
Dafyd Shakespeare's Richard III isn't a person. He's a fictional person (fictional persons and real persons are not different types of person).
quote:Jane Austen's father had adult male children. I think any claim that '"Mr Bennet had adult male children" is true' is just too big a bullet to bite. So any theory having that consequence must be wrong.
Another difficult question is whether Mr Bennet in Pride and Prejudice is the same person as Jane Austen’s father, who she based the character on.
quote:I'm going to say social convention.
Originally posted by moonlitdoor:
Dafyd, could you clarify what from your point of view determines whether a person or fictional person is being referred to ?
Presumably if I say something to my friend about Thomas Cromwell which I know to be untrue in order to make my friend dislike him, that is a reference to the person Thomas Cromwell. If I decide to make people dislike Cromwell by writing a story about him, where do I cross the boundary into creating a fictional person ?
quote:But consider how you, the reader, react to the fiction. People say all the time that they love Harry Potter, or Frodo, or Elizabeth Bennett, because 'they are so real.' In what sense are they real? They have emotional versimilitude; we believe in their travails as we read them.
Originally posted by peter damian:
quote:I don’t understand ‘truth in a different way’. Truth is saying of what is the case, that it is the case. If I say that snow is white, and if snow is white, then I speak truly. If I deny that which is not so, I also speak the truth. E.g. If I say that snow is not black, and it is not black, I am speaking the truth.
Brenda Where I come from, we talk about how fiction is both true and not true. Certainly fiction is fictional -- not fact. But it is not not-true either. It is truth, but in a different way.
‘Fiction’ just means ‘invented’, or made up (fingere). I would distinguish (1) saying something you believe to be true, but which is false, which is not lying, (2) saying something you believe to be false, and which is false, but without the intention to deceive, which is fiction in the literary sense. Tolkien says that a hobbit once lived in a hole. False, but there is no intention to deceive, since everyone knows and accepts it is a work of fiction. And (3) saying something you believe to be false, and which is false, and with the intention to deceive. This is ‘lying’.
We can also have true statements about fictional characters. E.g. it is true that Holmes lived in Baker Street. Philosophers find these statements troubling. I would say they really mean ‘In the Holmes stories, Holmes lived in Baker St’, but there are problems with that view too.
quote:I'm always a little puzzled by this point of view, although in a way it is the most obvious one.
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
Jesus and Pilate. The two likely exist. What exactly might have transpired between them? We'd have to know who it was who reported Pilate's questioning of him so that it could be put into the gospels. The source is unlikely to have been Pilate, a Roman soldier or other Roman. Which then leaves some Jewish council person who would seem unlikely to have reported things quite like it is written. Thus, I'd tend to declare the quizzing of Jesus by Pilate as pious but not factual. It has truthiness but isn't true.
quote:I notice no prophet discounts one of the obvious potential sources - Jesus Himself.
Originally posted by Freddy:
quote:I'm always a little puzzled by this point of view, although in a way it is the most obvious one.
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
Jesus and Pilate. The two likely exist. What exactly might have transpired between them? We'd have to know who it was who reported Pilate's questioning of him so that it could be put into the gospels. The source is unlikely to have been Pilate, a Roman soldier or other Roman. Which then leaves some Jewish council person who would seem unlikely to have reported things quite like it is written. Thus, I'd tend to declare the quizzing of Jesus by Pilate as pious but not factual. It has truthiness but isn't true.
The gospel accounts are written as if they were recorded by someone who was there. As you point out, there are numerous instances where this is unlikely to have been the case.
Other eras would get around this by believing that the actual dialogue was revealed by God to the gospel writer.
quote:That's close to what I am saying. I think you have not covered the dynamic of historical inquiry. It is possible for one false belief to be replaced by another more plausible belief, treated as true for a while, but subsequently invalidated by further investigation.
Originally posted by peter damian:
Or are you saying, as your second statement suggests, that our beliefs about truth and falsity can change? That is certainly the case. Before Pythagoras, the Greeks believed that the Morning Star and the Evening Star were two heavenly bodies (another question of numerical identity, of course). Then they discovered they were one and the same (i.e. Venus). I would argue that before the discovery, it was still true that they were one and the same, but people had a false belief about Venus. Then they acquired knowledge. So it was the belief, rather than the fact, that changed.
quote:To quote a wise person on this thread, those things are not mutually exclusive.
Originally posted by mr cheesy:
And which Socrates are we talking about anyway - the great ironic philosophical genius, the private-eye style satirist, the man who liked to go to the baths to get his rocks off with the boys?
quote:Well, that's what Luke (or the author of the introduction to the gospel which historically has been known as Luke's, if one must) says of his motives. The other evangelists make no such claim. I have read that they were writing so that the memories of the events of the life of Christ would not be lost when the last of the eyewitnesses died. (Which by the way does not require that they were actually written by the people whose names they are associated with, only that they are preserving the accounts given by people who were there, and not made up whole cloth by people who weren't.)
Originally posted by simontoad:
We must remember that the gospels are not reportage or accounts of facts but aids to conversion.
quote:This is interesting as the original meeting of the Etruscan word is "mask" and it specifically referred to a non-real person, a representation of a person on the stage.
Originally posted by anteater:
So I tend to reserve the word "person" for a real person,
quote:So are two historians who believe conflicting things about, say Oliver Cromwell, talking about the same person, or different persons? If the same person, then why aren't fiction writers also talking about the same person? If different persons, then why would they argue about, or change their minds about based on new evidence, which is right? "You're right about YOUR Cromwell, and I'm right about MY Cromwell" would suffice, and that would be that.
Originally posted by mr cheesy:
And history is all subjective anyway. That's the thing that others have been saying above: every historian perceives the facts in a different way (and facts may indeed change) so the reality is that there is always more than one vision of any individual available.
quote:I remember learning about this back when I was studying analytic philosophy back in grad school. The concept was called "true to a story" and I don't remember it being terribly problematic then (we're talking mid 1980s).
Originally posted by peter damian:
We can also have true statements about fictional characters. E.g. it is true that Holmes lived in Baker Street. Philosophers find these statements troubling. I would say they really mean ‘In the Holmes stories, Holmes lived in Baker St’, but there are problems with that view too.
quote:Which is what the Orthodox Church believes, also. (As you might expect.)
Originally posted by Chesterbelloc:
I notice no prophet discounts one of the obvious potential sources - Jesus Himself.
Naturally, it is only an obvious source if you believe He was raised from the dead and spent a hefty part of forty days with His apostles, but this is what the Church has tended to believe these 2000 years or so.
quote:But this didn't change their beliefs about truth and falsity, rather their beliefs about Venus. Their epistemology needn't have changed at all.
Originally posted by peter damian:
Or are you saying, as your second statement suggests, that our beliefs about truth and falsity can change? That is certainly the case. Before Pythagoras, the Greeks believed that the Morning Star and the Evening Star were two heavenly bodies (another question of numerical identity, of course). Then they discovered they were one and the same (i.e. Venus).
quote:It cannot be that simple. If it were, satirical fiction would be impossible. Spitting Image is fictional, yet clearly the sketches have some relationship to the real politicians. Napoleon in Animal Farm has some relationship to Stalin.
Originally posted by mr cheesy:
It makes no difference if the person is an invented name or has the same name as a person who really exists. If they're fiction, they're both made up - neither has any relationship to the true person.
quote:If you'd said 'history is all to a greater or lesser extent subjective' you might have a point.
And history is all subjective anyway.
quote:You say, at the start of a paragraph in which you do exactly this kind of philosophy, only not well.
I don't do this kind of stupid philosophy.
quote:Kind of like the blind men and the elephant?
Originally posted by mr cheesy:
The reality is that people perceive things in different ways, so it is utterly consistent for there to be a deity and at the same time for different groups to have different perceptions and understandings of what he is like.
quote:Yes, that's a helpful distinction. I think, in the exchanges with me at least, that peter damian was talking about the truth or falseness of specific historical accounts. At any rate, that is how I read him. But your general epistemological point is well worth making in the context of this discussion.
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:But this didn't change their beliefs about truth and falsity, rather their beliefs about Venus. Their epistemology needn't have changed at all.
Originally posted by peter damian:
Or are you saying, as your second statement suggests, that our beliefs about truth and falsity can change? That is certainly the case. Before Pythagoras, the Greeks believed that the Morning Star and the Evening Star were two heavenly bodies (another question of numerical identity, of course). Then they discovered they were one and the same (i.e. Venus).
quote:The Gospels give me the impression that there were a couple of appearances, not that He hung out with them a lot. Wasn't there a whole week between those two times with Thomas?
Chesterbelloc: He was raised from the dead and spent a hefty part of forty days with His apostles
quote:How does this convention relate to the point you made about being able to say things about Mantel's Cromwell that don't relate to the real Cromwell ?
originally posted by Dafyd
I'm going to say social convention. ( determines whether a person or fictional person is being referred to )
quote:My thoughts exactly. Ish. He DIDN'T spend a hefty part of the 40 days with any one. But enough obviously.
Originally posted by Chesterbelloc:
quote:I notice no prophet discounts one of the obvious potential sources - Jesus Himself.
Originally posted by Freddy:
quote:I'm always a little puzzled by this point of view, although in a way it is the most obvious one.
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
Jesus and Pilate. The two likely exist. What exactly might have transpired between them? We'd have to know who it was who reported Pilate's questioning of him so that it could be put into the gospels. The source is unlikely to have been Pilate, a Roman soldier or other Roman. Which then leaves some Jewish council person who would seem unlikely to have reported things quite like it is written. Thus, I'd tend to declare the quizzing of Jesus by Pilate as pious but not factual. It has truthiness but isn't true.
The gospel accounts are written as if they were recorded by someone who was there. As you point out, there are numerous instances where this is unlikely to have been the case.
Other eras would get around this by believing that the actual dialogue was revealed by God to the gospel writer.
Naturally, it is only an obvious source if you believe He was raised from the dead and spent a hefty part of forty days with His apostles, but this is what the Church has tended to believe these 2000 years or so.
quote:Yup. However, this relies on the possibility of attaching a ‘sentential operator’ to sentences, for example ‘According to the Bible, Adam was created out of clay’. Atheists, non-literalists and literalists can all agree with that.
mousethief I remember learning about this back when I was studying analytic philosophy back in grad school. The concept was called "true to a story" and I don't remember it being terribly problematic then (we're talking mid 1980s).
quote:This is a similar problem. Many people admire Lizzie Bennet. But there was no such person as Lizzie Bennet! How can anyone stand in the relation ‘a admires b’, when there is no such thing as b? That is, if ‘a admires b’ is true, then for some x and for some y, x admires y. But there isn’t such a y! If you love Harry Potter, then you love someone, right? So there is someone, at least one person that you love. But there isn’t such a person.
Brenda Clough But consider how you, the reader, react to the fiction. People say all the time that they love Harry Potter, or Frodo, or Elizabeth Bennett, because 'they are so real.' In what sense are they real? They have emotional versimilitude; we believe in their travails as we read them.
quote:Well, you can argue that there is a fictional person, created in a certain narrative world. 'David Cameron' is also created via narrative, images, and so on, but also linked with a flesh and blood human. But the personhood is still a construct.
Many people admire Lizzie Bennet. But there was no such person as Lizzie Bennet! How can anyone stand in the relation ‘a admires b’, when there is no such thing as b? That is, if ‘a admires b’ is true, then for some x and for some y, x admires y. But there isn’t such a y! If you love Harry Potter, then you love someone, right? So there is someone, at least one person that you love. But there isn’t such a person.
quote:I thought the whole point about a fictional person is that there isn't such a person?
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
Well, you can argue that there is a fictional person, created in a certain narrative world.
quote:Well, it depends on how you are defining 'person'. For me, to say that Hamlet is the kind of person I would like to meet, makes sense.
Originally posted by peter damian:
quote:I thought the whole point about a fictional person is that there isn't such a person?
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
Well, you can argue that there is a fictional person, created in a certain narrative world.
quote:If there is nothing to dislike, how can there be dislike.
Originally posted by Enoch:
A fictional person in a novel is precisely that. We can like them or dislike them, but they don't exist.
quote:I'm not sure I see the difference. You can add "as presented in the Bible" to the latter, and you have the exact same thing as the former.
Originally posted by peter damian:
quote:Yup. However, this relies on the possibility of attaching a ‘sentential operator’ to sentences, for example ‘According to the Bible, Adam was created out of clay’. Atheists, non-literalists and literalists can all agree with that.
mousethief I remember learning about this back when I was studying analytic philosophy back in grad school. The concept was called "true to a story" and I don't remember it being terribly problematic then (we're talking mid 1980s).
The problem is when we have relational verbs where the accusative is a name of a putatively fictional character. For example ‘Feminists admire Judith’ (meaning the one who chopped off the guy’s head, I think she was the one). These present great difficulty.
quote:But there's a SOMETHING because it makes perfect sense for people to admire her. Nobody has any problem with this. No analytic philosopher is going to say, "Stop it! Stop admiring Lizzie Bennet! I won't let you! She doesn't exist! "
Originally posted by peter damian:
quote:I thought the whole point about a fictional person is that there isn't such a person?
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
Well, you can argue that there is a fictional person, created in a certain narrative world.
quote:There were more than "a couple" of appearances for sure (John records at least three), though we don't know precisely how much time Jesus spent with the apostles after the Resurrection; but Acts 1:3 says:
Originally posted by LeRoc:
quote:The Gospels give me the impression that there were a couple of appearances, not that He hung out with them a lot. Wasn't there a whole week between those two times with Thomas?
Chesterbelloc: He was raised from the dead and spent a hefty part of forty days with His apostles
quote:Sounds to me like they had quite a bit of "face time" with the Lord.
He presented himself alive to them after his suffering by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God.
quote:You're like totally begging the question, dude. How do you know how much of what the evangelists recorded came directly from Jesus after the Resurrection? And John does say:
Originally posted by LeRoc:
Also, if He spent this time teaching them things, they apparently didn't feel it was worth mentioning those things in the Gospels.
quote:
Now there are also many other things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.
quote:Me too.
Originally posted by LeRoc:
Or perhaps they had a couple more barbecues at the beach? (I would like that.)
![[Cool]](cool.gif)
quote:You're overlooking the servants, who would have been ubiquitous in Pilate's household, and we know that the early Christian church had a particular attraction for such people. There's also the 21st century assumption that everybody back then had the same amount of living space / privacy as we do ourselves, which is really really unlikely (take a look at the archaeological digs). It isn't surprising that these things were witnessed and then later recorded; under ancient circumstances it would be more surprising if nobody heard or witnessed anything but Jesus and Pilate themselves. And all the more so as both people in the conversation were "celebrities" and apt to inspire snooping.
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
Jesus and Pilate. The two likely exist. What exactly might have transpired between them? We'd have to know who it was who reported Pilate's questioning of him so that it could be put into the gospels. The source is unlikely to have been Pilate, a Roman soldier or other Roman. Which then leaves some Jewish council person who would seem unlikely to have reported things quite like it is written. Thus, I'd tend to declare the quizzing of Jesus by Pilate as pious but not factual. It has truthiness but isn't true.
quote:That’s precisely what analytic philosophers are not trying to do. Quite the opposite.
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:But there's a SOMETHING because it makes perfect sense for people to admire her. Nobody has any problem with this. No analytic philosopher is going to say, "Stop it! Stop admiring Lizzie Bennet! I won't let you! She doesn't exist! "
Originally posted by peter damian:
quote:I thought the whole point about a fictional person is that there isn't such a person?
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
Well, you can argue that there is a fictional person, created in a certain narrative world.
The problem is not in the admirers. It's in the analytic philosophers who are trying to chop the logic of natural language into little bits that fit their own theories. The real world is not beholden to those theories, however. The philosophers are in a cleft stick of their own making, and it's up to them to logic their way out of it.
quote:Indeed, and it also presupposes that the purpose of the gospels is to record everything Jesus said. They didn't feel it was worth mentioning these things in the Gospels because the purpose of the Gospels was by and large to record certain things. They obviously had to edit (as per the quote from John about filling the world with books that Chesterbelloc gives). They recorded some of the things Jesus said post-resurrection.
Originally posted by Chesterbelloc:
quote:You're like totally begging the question, dude. How do you know how much of what the evangelists recorded came directly from Jesus after the Resurrection?
Originally posted by LeRoc:
Also, if He spent this time teaching them things, they apparently didn't feel it was worth mentioning those things in the Gospels.
quote:They're not trying to create theories that model how natural language is used? Bulltookey. Kripke was a fine fellow but he was fooling himself when he said he wasn't presenting a theory. He most certainly was.
Originally posted by peter damian:
That’s precisely what analytic philosophers are not trying to do. Quite the opposite.
quote:Not so much an argument as an article of faith. Nobody is trying to make an argument for that position. Certainly not me or Chesterbelloc or our churches.
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
I think that suggesting servants or Jesus himself post death is a nice explanation, though also would seem to be more an argument than anything provable.
quote:How "better"? For whom? To what end?
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
Better to accept that some segments of the bible were written to make rhetorical or faith points and are not true in the sense we consider today.
quote:I'm not sure what that's supposed to show, exactly. Would you expect each specific account of each encounter/event/conversation to include such a provenance statement? Cos that's going to lead to some distracting diversions and clunky prose.
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
None of the accounts say Jesus or someone else told the story.
quote:That's way too vague for me, I'm afraid. What precisely makes it unlikely in the context of what we are told about Jesus's post-resurrection ministry? I can see why it would seem unlikely if one rejected the accounts of the Resurrection and post-R appearances, but if we are arguing from "the basis of info we have" (i.e., those very same scriptural accounts) what makes it seem implausible in that context?
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
It isa question of likeliness. It is unlikely on the basis of info we have. Faith or belief: it is possible to believe anything, and we should really use our reason too.
quote:What makes you think that when he says 'there's a problem when people say X' he means there's a problem for natural language? rather than that he means there's a problem for any theory to cope with?
Originally posted by mousethief:
When you say, "There's a problem when people say, 'Feminists admire Judith'," you can only mean that there is a problem reconciling this with some theory of meaning and ontology. To which the users of natural language are entitled to say, "Who gives a fuck if our use doesn't fit into your theory? Fix your theory."
quote:Lamb Chopped beat me to it on the servant explanation for the Pilate interviews- and it's entirely possible that records of some sort were kept.
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
Jesus and Pilate. The two likely exist. What exactly might have transpired between them? We'd have to know who it was who reported Pilate's questioning of him so that it could be put into the gospels. The source is unlikely to have been Pilate, a Roman soldier or other Roman. Which then leaves some Jewish council person who would seem unlikely to have reported things quite like it is written. Thus, I'd tend to declare the quizzing of Jesus by Pilate as pious but not factual. It has truthiness but isn't true.
Likewise, it is very unlikely that the interaction and temptation of Jesus and Satan after Jesus' baptism occurred as written. If so, who reported it to the gospel writers? It is more obviously fictitious, but designed to indicate something the original story inventors thought was important.
quote:I would say the practice of writing and reading historical novels including real characters has built up over time in such a way that now readers and writers have different ways of talking about those historical novels.
Originally posted by moonlitdoor:
quote:How does this convention relate to the point you made about being able to say things about Mantel's Cromwell that don't relate to the real Cromwell ?
originally posted by Dafyd
I'm going to say social convention. ( determines whether a person or fictional person is being referred to )
quote:One of the conventions is that it's permissible to depict Mary as European rather than as Middle Eastern. And therefore it should also be permissible to depict her as an African.
If we consider paintings of the virgin Mary, I think we consider them by convention to refer to the real virgin Mary. But it is also true that I can say things about the depictions that don't relate to the real person, like what colour eyes they have, since we don't know what colour her eyes were.
quote:It's true that we don't have a lot of information about what Jesus did during those forty days.
Originally posted by LeRoc:
The Gospels give me the impression that there were a couple of appearances, not that He hung out with them a lot. Wasn't there a whole week between those two times with Thomas?
quote:Re re clunky prose. Some of it is, and some of it isn't. Luke, for instance.
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
It isa question of likeliness. It is unlikely on the basis of info we have. Faith or belief: it is possible to believe anything, and we should really use our reason too. Otherwise history and historicity differentiation is irrelevant.
Re clunky prose. It is already that in the Greek.
quote:Yes. Because iconography has its own set of conventions with their own meanings, and doesn't claim to be historically accurate. That's not its purpose.
Originally posted by Dafyd:
Equally it's permissible to depict the Virgin Mary wearing an ultramarine robe and in among Roman ruins, either of which are unlikely from a perspective of realistic history painting. That's a sign that pictures of the Virgin Mary are not subject to the conventions of realistic history painting.
quote:I don't mean that. I said precisely the opposite.
Originally posted by Dafyd:
quote:What makes you think that when he says 'there's a problem when people say X' he means there's a problem for natural language?
Originally posted by mousethief:
When you say, "There's a problem when people say, 'Feminists admire Judith'," you can only mean that there is a problem reconciling this with some theory of meaning and ontology. To which the users of natural language are entitled to say, "Who gives a fuck if our use doesn't fit into your theory? Fix your theory."
quote:Yes. Exactly. Did you read what I wrote, or what you think I wrote? Because you are claiming I said the opposite of what I said, and countering it with exactly what I did say.
rather than that he means there's a problem for any theory to cope with?
quote:Indeed, so do they refer to the real virgin Mary even though there are things once can say about them that do not relate back to the real person ? I would have thought that they go well with Peter Damian's idea of descriptions of real people that are inaccurate but not deceptive.
originally posted by Dafyd
That's a sign that pictures of the Virgin Mary are not subject to the conventions of realistic history painting.
quote:I think this tends to underplay the subjective nature of history, which is more than simply identifying facts that can be asserted with confidence.
Originally posted by Dafyd:
If you'd said 'history is all to a greater or lesser extent subjective' you might have a point.
quote:Right, exactly. Historical accuracy is not the only fruit, as it were. Things which are not historically accurate can still be useful. In this example, the varying artistic impressions may help the faithful to engage with particular aspects of the narrative.
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:Yes. Because iconography has its own set of conventions with their own meanings, and doesn't claim to be historically accurate. That's not its purpose.
Originally posted by Dafyd:
Equally it's permissible to depict the Virgin Mary wearing an ultramarine robe and in among Roman ruins, either of which are unlikely from a perspective of realistic history painting. That's a sign that pictures of the Virgin Mary are not subject to the conventions of realistic history painting.
quote:This is what you believe? Yikes! Makes me glad I'm not Catholic or Orthodox.
mousethief: The Caffix and Orfies believe that some of what he said to the apostles post-rez had to do with the running of the Church.
quote:Sorry for misunderstanding.
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:Yes. Exactly. Did you read what I wrote, or what you think I wrote? Because you are claiming I said the opposite of what I said, and countering it with exactly what I did say.
Originally posted by Dafyd:
[QUOTE][qb]rather than that he means there's a problem for any theory to cope with?
quote:I thought you were disagreeing with me when I said history was to a greater or lesser extent subjective. Now you're saying some history is more subjective than other history.
Originally posted by mr cheesy:
quote:I think this tends to underplay the subjective nature of history, which is more than simply identifying facts that can be asserted with confidence.
Originally posted by Dafyd:
If you'd said 'history is all to a greater or lesser extent subjective' you might have a point.
History is narrative. Making sense of any history is the business of tying together known facts into a wider narrative of some kind, which must be the work of a subjective mind. Hence it is perfectly plausible to have good histories which come to wildly different conclusions. The poorer the available information (or the wider the subject), the more subjective it will be.
quote:If all history is subjective then criticising history for ignoring or fobbing off facts is a subjective judgement, and cannot be grounds for calling a different narrative 'really bad' except as far as 'really bad' means 'expresses views I do not want to hear'.
Indeed, a really bad history is one which ignores or fobs off known facts in order to shoe-horn an agenda into the narrative.
quote:If narrative is subjective then it is meaningless to assert that the facts cast doubt upon the validity of any narrative.
The problem comes when a particular narrative is so long and strongly held that it becomes impossible to dislodge even when alternative factual information comes available which casts doubt on the validity of that interpretation. It seems that it often happens that the more romantic, dramatic narrative is more likely to be accepted as accurate because it is so engaging.
quote:Well, we all think we get the intent, don't we? But the "specifics of these incidents" might conceivably have some bearing on the intent, it seems to me. Also "the specifics of these incidents" seem to matter to you enough to reject them.
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
I'm on another page with this. That the specifics of these incidents don't really matter. I get the intent of all of it, and that's sufficient.
quote:[My emphasis]. This makes it sound as if the only reasonable conclusion we can draw is that the "details" are invented for effect. But this is begging the question.
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
Better to admit to myself that the details are there to make points.
quote:It is pretty well known that neither Catholics nor the Orthodox are "bible-ians" either. But that doesn't mean that we don't take scripture very seriously indeed. We would never claim to "understand the example of Jesus" without the help of scripture - taken seriously and in its entirety - and its authentic interpretation in the apostolic tradition. What makes you sure that you can dispense with what seems to you to be implausible in these accounts? Do these passages give you the impression that the authors didn't want you to take them at face value? What is your criterion for exclusion and how do you validate it?
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
A friend of mine constantly asserts that we are not bible-ians, and thus it is okay to not accept or know about some of these stories. We understand the example of Jesus and that's quite enough.
quote:No, I'm not really. I'm saying it is all subjective. I'm not sure it is very helpful to try to assign how some is more subjective than another.
Originally posted by Dafyd:
I thought you were disagreeing with me when I said history was to a greater or lesser extent subjective. Now you're saying some history is more subjective than other history.
quote:I think it has meaning beyond, for example, the way that we talk about experimental science. We can say things about science that we can't say about history because we are able to conduct experiments. Yes, there is also a sense that we don't "know anything" about science, but there is something to measure when we're talking about science, so any interpretation is based on the things we can measure about reality.
Identifying facts must be the work of a subjective mind. In fact, everything must be the work of a subjective mind - in which case the phrase 'the work of a subjective mind' fails to make any meaningful argument.
quote:That's true. And, of course, even the way facts are presented can be manipulated or perceived in totally different ways.
Nor is the distinction between fact and narrative fixed.
What is a fact at one level is a narrative at another. At one level the death of a Polish boy at the hands of a German soldier is a narrative comprised of more basic facts; at another it is one of the facts that comprises the narrative of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. At another level the Warsaw ghetto uprising is a fact that forms part of the narrative of the Holocaust. And at a higher level the Holocaust is a fact that forms part of the narrative of the twentieth century.
quote:I'm not sure what you mean here.
That being the case, rejecting a positivist account of history as based on objective facts can't be a matter of simply asserting the primacy of subjective narrative.
It must be to reject the positivist division into objective facts and subjective everything else altogether and adopt a critical realist account of narrative.
quote:No, I don't think that's true. The "good/bad" distinction in history isn't related to the fact that one is subjective and another is objective. They're all subjective. So trying to wrestle with anything in history is to try to make sensible judgements about the way any given historian is manipulating the narrative. In my view, it is a fairly straightforward exercise to reject Holocaust denial as history - because it appears to reject facts that are hard to deny.
If all history is subjective then criticising history for ignoring or fobbing off facts is a subjective judgement, and cannot be grounds for calling a different narrative 'really bad' except as far as 'really bad' means 'expresses views I do not want to hear'.
quote:Only if we're going with a subjective-bad, objective-good model. If we're accepting that all are narratives, and we're also accepting that some are good and some are bad historical narratives, then it certainly makes sense to think about how we're distinguishing the one from the other.
If narrative is subjective then it is meaningless to assert that the facts cast doubt upon the validity of any narrative.
quote:Not unless I understood him as badly as you understood me. Which is certainly not impossible.
Originally posted by Dafyd:
So just so I'm sure I'm not misunderstanding any more. You are saying that you agreed with peter damian?
quote:Yes, even the facts of science are only available to most of us as narrative.
Originally posted by Dafyd:
If narrative is subjective then it is meaningless to assert that the facts cast doubt upon the validity of any narrative.
quote:Taking it seriously does not mean that all of the stories within are factual. There are inconsistencies between the 4 canonical gospels that tell us that. If someone wants to accept that particular scenes or sequences of events occurred factually, and someone else does not, they still meet each other and God at the communion rail.
Originally posted by Chesterbelloc:
It is pretty well known that neither Catholics nor the Orthodox are "bible-ians" either. But that doesn't mean that we don't take scripture very seriously indeed.
quote:We are required to reason in addition to read. The intent of the authors is probably not the intent you imply: that these are factual historical accounts. The bible is a story of belief and faith, not a factual account of events. I'm not sure where the trouble is with that.
We would never claim to "understand the example of Jesus" without the help of scripture - taken seriously and in its entirety - and its authentic interpretation in the apostolic tradition. What makes you sure that you can dispense with what seems to you to be implausible in these accounts? Do these passages give you the impression that the authors didn't want you to take them at face value? What is your criterion for exclusion and how do you validate it?
quote:I find this very interesting. Straight away, I recall Freud saying that there is no negation in the unconscious, in other words, that what we deny, we are also asserting.
Historical accuracy is not the only fruit, as it were. Things which are not historically accurate can still be useful. In this example, the varying artistic impressions may help the faithful to engage with particular aspects of the narrative.
We might also say that studying the various lineages of the iconography could say something about the beliefs and perceptions of those who painted and/or commissioned the art.
I don't see how it is a given that inaccurate paintings are useless in helping understand the character of the person depicted.
quote:Quite.
Originally posted by Dafyd:
quote:What makes you think that when he says 'there's a problem when people say X' he means there's a problem for natural language? rather than that he means there's a problem for any theory to cope with?
Originally posted by mousethief:
When you say, "There's a problem when people say, 'Feminists admire Judith'," you can only mean that there is a problem reconciling this with some theory of meaning and ontology. To which the users of natural language are entitled to say, "Who gives a fuck if our use doesn't fit into your theory? Fix your theory."
quote:He admits there is no theory. Just a puzzle.
Kripke ‘My main thesis is a simple one: that the puzzle is a puzzle’, he said, noting that ‘As any theory of truth must deal with the Liar Paradox, so any theory of belief and names must deal with this puzzle’.
quote:Let me suggest an alternative possibility, which is that you've misunderstood me.
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:Not unless I understood him as badly as you understood me. Which is certainly not impossible.
Originally posted by Dafyd:
So just so I'm sure I'm not misunderstanding any more. You are saying that you agreed with peter damian?
quote:If I take something to be a factual account of events, that means I believe it.
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
The bible is a story of belief and faith, not a factual account of events. I'm not sure where the trouble is with that.
quote:This doesn't stop you from saying that physics is less subjective than history later on in your post.
Originally posted by mr cheesy:
quote:No, I'm not really. I'm saying it is all subjective. I'm not sure it is very helpful to try to assign how some is more subjective than another.
Originally posted by Dafyd:
I thought you were disagreeing with me when I said history was to a greater or lesser extent subjective. Now you're saying some history is more subjective than other history.
quote:And yet any measuring has to be done by a subjective mind. So somehow being made by a subjective mind isn't incompatible with being based on things in reality.
quote:I think it has meaning beyond, for example, the way that we talk about experimental science. We can say things about science that we can't say about history because we are able to conduct experiments. Yes, there is also a sense that we don't "know anything" about science, but there is something to measure when we're talking about science, so any interpretation is based on the things we can measure about reality.
Identifying facts must be the work of a subjective mind. In fact, everything must be the work of a subjective mind - in which case the phrase 'the work of a subjective mind' fails to make any meaningful argument.
quote:This I think rather depends. In many cases, I think the problem for the historian in constructing a narrative is having too much data and having to select from it.
That doesn't happen with history, because we're usually presented with a very incomplete amount of information, and this usually isn't collected for the purposes of later analysis.
quote:Positivism is the belief that ideas can be divided into factual ideas (good and proper) about which we can be objective and everything else, which is merely subjective and thus ought to be rejected as useless.
quote:I'm not sure what you mean here.
That being the case, rejecting a positivist account of history as based on objective facts can't be a matter of simply asserting the primacy of subjective narrative.
It must be to reject the positivist division into objective facts and subjective everything else altogether and adopt a critical realist account of narrative.
quote:If you say history is subjective do you mean it is subjective in sense three or subjective in sense four?
quote:No, I don't think that's true. The "good/bad" distinction in history isn't related to the fact that one is subjective and another is objective. They're all subjective. So trying to wrestle with anything in history is to try to make sensible judgements about the way any given historian is manipulating the narrative. In my view, it is a fairly straightforward exercise to reject Holocaust denial as history - because it appears to reject facts that are hard to deny.
Criticising history for ignoring or fobbing off facts is a subjective judgement, and cannot be grounds for calling a different narrative 'really bad' except as far as 'really bad' means 'expresses views I do not want to hear'.
quote:I don't think facts are subjective.
But I do accept what you've said about about the subjective nature even of the facts, which means that the whole exercise is complicated and meta.
quote:I forgot two big ones.
Originally posted by Dafyd:
There may be other senses.
quote:That story doesn't work as a comparison. It would better to say that Boris is long dead but said by someone else, who we don't know anything much about, and it may be that the attribution of that authorship is not factual, to have said something. And we don't have anything like a first or second hand account, we have a 47th or 15th hand account. And we don't know exactly the sources of the account, and whether the person who told them meant them all literally or to make points.
Originally posted by Dafyd:
quote:If I take something to be a factual account of events, that means I believe it.
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
The bible is a story of belief and faith, not a factual account of events. I'm not sure where the trouble is with that.
If Boris Johnson asserts that the EU is costing us 350 bananas a week and I have faith in Boris Johnson then I will believe that it is a fact that the EU is costing us 350 bananas a week. If on the other hand I do not have faith in Boris Johnson then I will not believe that what he says is a fact. Likewise, if I know that it is not a fact then I will not have any faith in Boris Johnson when he says it.
It's no good someone replying to me saying that Boris Johnson doesn't intend it as a fact; he intends it as a statement of belief and faith. That is precisely the problem.
I am not here arguing that a fictional story can't be a story of belief and faith. I'm just arguing against one invalid shortcut to that position.
quote:No, that's what I took you to be saying. It turns out, apparently, that I did misunderstand Peter, nor you. As I suggested. Not sure why this needed to be about you.
Originally posted by Dafyd:
quote:Let me suggest an alternative possibility, which is that you've misunderstood me.
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:Not unless I understood him as badly as you understood me. Which is certainly not impossible.
Originally posted by Dafyd:
So just so I'm sure I'm not misunderstanding any more. You are saying that you agreed with peter damian?
I think you think I asked: 'what makes you (mousethief) think there's a problem for natural language'?
What I actually asked was 'What makes you think that ...(Peter Damian)... means there's a problem for natural language?'.
quote:Well, no, it doesn't. That's because I wasn't talking about the challenges that historians face when looking at historical data.
Originally posted by Barnabas62:
I'm not entirely sure that it illuminates fully the challenges historians face when looking at historical data.
quote:I think you're omitting administrative paperwork and other records of people trying to get things done.
When one looks at earlier events, the data tend to fall into two categories. Witness statements of various kinds, which may or may not have been subject to critical examination of any kind to determine validity, and artifacts from storage or obtained by excavation.
quote:In what sense of subjective are you saying any history is a subjective narrative?
Originally posted by mr cheesy:
OK, I accept that there are various ways to define subjective.
My point is just that there are a bunch of facts about the past - which vary in certainty - overlayed with perception and interpretation, which means that any history is a subjective narrative.
quote:In what sense of subjective are you saying facts are subjective? And in what sense of subjective are you saying that we're subjective beings? (I doubt it's the same sense of subjective in both cases.)
The sense that facts are subjective is a different one on a different meta level, I think. As we're subjective beings doing the observations, it isn't possible for us to be totally fail-proof in our observations, never mind the interpretations we make upon those observations.
quote:This is of course true. It all depends.
A fiction author may not have access to many of the sources and may be making up a load of shit about the character. But that doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong about that character, providing the stuff they make up is not in contradiction with the quote unquote known facts about that person.
quote:The story is not a comparison. It's an example.
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
quote:That story doesn't work as a comparison.
Originally posted by Dafyd:
If I take something to be a factual account of events, that means I believe it.
If Boris Johnson asserts that the EU is costing us 350 bananas a week and I have faith in Boris Johnson then I will believe that it is a fact that the EU is costing us 350 bananas a week.
quote:I'm not sure anyone would write a book which contained only facts about the war tunnels, because that would be boring to read. As soon as it becomes a narrative, in my view, it becomes subjective. When a historian writes about the wider context, the importance of the coastal tunnels, their contribution to the wider war effort, etc, then they've mixed in a whole lot of their own interpretation and perceptions.
Originally posted by Dafyd:
In what sense of subjective are you saying any history is a subjective narrative?
Being based upon incomplete evidence does not of itself make history subjective. A historian trying to decide on incomplete evidence how many people used the shelters can describe the evidence. Maybe the last step when the historian says 'probably only about 40 000 people used them' is subjective. That doesn't make the whole subjective. (Especially not when the way in which the statement goes beyond the evidence is made clear.)
If there are a range of valid interpretations based on the evidence, but a historian dismisses or rules out one interpretation based on something other than the evidence, then that is subjective in a bad sense.
quote:Well see the thing that I'm not sure that I agree is the suggestion, which you also made to Barnabas62 above, that the challenge for the historian is to "their pre-existing beliefs about what happened and human motivation and so on."
Interpretation goes beyond the subjective-objective distinction.
If I read one of your posts I start from my prior experience. I've read people saying something a bit like what you're saying, and so I think you might be coming from the same place. And that colours my attitude. Then I read what you're actually saying in the light of that, and I revise my prior interpretation in so far as what you're saying doesn't quite fit, and adjust my attitude, to see if I've got a better handle on where you're coming from. In the case of someone coming from a similar background to me this isn't really a conscious process; it's basic reading comprehension. But my final opinion as to your meaning doesn't fit into a straight objective-subjective binary - it starts out incorporating subjective factors such as prior experience, but hopefully I end up actually understanding what you said, which is objective.
Now that process, which isn't conscious in this case, is how all interpretation works. It's a collaboration between prior experience and evidence.
quote:In microbiology, the microbes which are studied are those which can be grown - or "plated". There are thought to be a very large number of microbes which are not studied because they can't be plated, and we're only just getting some understanding of them by widespread DNA analysis which shows that they exist. In microbiological science, we're massively over-studying the organisms which are easy to study and massively under-studying those which are hard to study.
In what sense of subjective are you saying facts are subjective? And in what sense of subjective are you saying that we're subjective beings? (I doubt it's the same sense of subjective in both cases.)
quote:I agree in general but disagree with your conclusion. I believe there are always a valid range of interpretations in almost all historical research.
This is of course true. It all depends.
Fiction can be good in lots of different ways. One of the ways it can be good is in trying to present a plausible interpretation of the past. If so, it needs to be consistent with all relevant known facts. On the other hand, a fiction writer can alter the known facts in pursuit of other ways of being good.
One thing to note is that fiction writers with pretence at being realistic don't normally present us with a range of evidence and show how they evaluate it. They just show us the conclusion that they're going with for the sake of the story. Whereas we would expect a historian to give at least a basic account of where there's a valid range of interpretations.
quote:The trouble with that is that it is, for Catholics and for countless other Christians, simply not true. The Gospels (and Acts) are not just "morality tales ... designed to educate us about something" - they are most definitely putting themselves forward as factual accounts of historical events. They just are.
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
We are required to reason in addition to read. The intent of the authors is probably not the intent you imply: that these are factual historical accounts. The bible is a story of belief and faith, not a factual account of events. I'm not sure where the trouble is with that.
quote:That's what I believe, and it is not contrary to reason to do so, it seems to me. The Catholic faith is religion of divine revelation - the ulitmate revelation being the person of Jesus Christ, true God and true man.
18. It is common knowledge that among all the Scriptures, even those of the New Testament, the Gospels have a special preeminence, and rightly so, for they are the principal witness for the life and teaching of the incarnate Word, our savior.
The Church has always and everywhere held and continues to hold that the four Gospels are of apostolic origin. For what the Apostles preached in fulfillment of the commission of Christ, afterwards they themselves and apostolic men, under the inspiration of the divine Spirit, handed on to us in writing: the foundation of faith, namely, the fourfold Gospel, according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
Holy Mother Church has firmly and with absolute constancy held, and continues to hold, that the four Gospels just named, whose historical character the Church unhesitatingly asserts, faithfully hand on what Jesus Christ, while living among men, really did and taught for their eternal salvation until the day He was taken up into heaven (see Acts 1:1).
Indeed, after the Ascension of the Lord the Apostles handed on to their hearers what He had said and done. This they did with that clearer understanding which they enjoyed after they had been instructed by the gloriousevents of Christ's life and taught by the light of the Spirit of truth.
The sacred authors wrote the four Gospels, selecting some things from the many which had been handed on by word of mouth or in writing, reducing some of them to a synthesis, explaining some things in view of the situation of their churches and preserving the form of proclamation but always in such fashion that they told us the honest truth about Jesus.
quote:
What precisely makes it [i.e., that He told his apostles things about Himself they did not yet know] unlikely in the context of what we are told about Jesus's post-resurrection ministry? I can see why it would seem unlikely if one rejected the accounts of the Resurrection and post-R appearances, but if we are arguing from "the basis of info we have" (i.e., those very same scriptural accounts) what makes it seem implausible in that context?
quote:Isn't this a collective, hopefully progressive, process? In the same sort of ballpark as the logic of scientific discovery. Pre-existing beliefs are, or ought to be, held lightly by anyone using historical-critical methodology. Thought experiments, speculative hypotheses, can help and can also be tested against the data.
Originally posted by Dafyd:
The question is how the historian mediates between what the data supports and the fact that the historian needs to use their pre-existing beliefs about motivation to work out what the data supports. The historian is ideally trying to enter a critical equilibrium where they flesh out the data with their pre-existing beliefs, and use the data to change their pre-existing beliefs, and hopefully settle somewhere that's as close to the truth as they can get from where they started.
quote:I think that you name the obvious dividing line.
Originally posted by Chesterbelloc:
I can see why it would seem unlikely if one rejected the accounts of the Resurrection and post-R appearances, but if we are arguing from "the basis of info we have" (i.e., those very same scriptural accounts) what makes it seem implausible in that context?
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quote:I have been trying to get beyond this idea that on the one hand we have the facts (which are objectively available) and on the other we have the interpretation and perceptions (which are subjective), and then they get mixed together.
Originally posted by mr cheesy:
quote:I'm not sure anyone would write a book which contained only facts about the war tunnels, because that would be boring to read. As soon as it becomes a narrative, in my view, it becomes subjective. When a historian writes about the wider context, the importance of the coastal tunnels, their contribution to the wider war effort, etc, then they've mixed in a whole lot of their own interpretation and perceptions.
Originally posted by Dafyd:
In what sense of subjective are you saying any history is a subjective narrative?
Being based upon incomplete evidence does not of itself make history subjective. A historian trying to decide on incomplete evidence how many people used the shelters can describe the evidence. Maybe the last step when the historian says 'probably only about 40 000 people used them' is subjective. That doesn't make the whole subjective. (Especially not when the way in which the statement goes beyond the evidence is made clear.)
If there are a range of valid interpretations based on the evidence, but a historian dismisses or rules out one interpretation based on something other than the evidence, then that is subjective in a bad sense.
quote:I'm really not sure you're responding to what I said.
quote:Well see the thing that I'm not sure that I agree is the suggestion, which you also made to Barnabas62 above, that the challenge for the historian is to "their pre-existing beliefs about what happened and human motivation and so on."
Interpretation goes beyond the subjective-objective distinction.
If I read one of your posts I start from my prior experience.
Now that process, which isn't conscious in this case, is how all interpretation works. It's a collaboration between prior experience and evidence.
That to me seems to underestimate the influence of perception. We might understand the idea that a Marxist historian looks at a particular event within the framework of that wider meta-narrative. But I'm not sure it is possible for anyone to look objectively at anything, even if they do not hold to a wider meta-narrative like Marxism or Christianity.
quote:My argument here is not that you would still experience it subjectively. It's that you would be experiencing it entirely subjectively.
If I was to examine the history of something to which I am totally ignorant and which is alien to everything I've ever experienced - I believe that I would still be experiencing it subjectively.
quote:I dispute the equation of subjective with flawed. Not because I think subjective isn't flawed, but because I dispute the whole terms.
So the way we collect and analyse information is subjective, flawed, incomplete. It isn't just that we'd be objective if we avoided making interpretations of the facts, the facts themselves are a function of the subjective nature of humanity.
quote:My point is that you'd expect a good historian to at least gesture at the whole range of interpretations that they consider valid.
quote:I agree in general but disagree with your conclusion. I believe there are always a valid range of interpretations in almost all historical research.
Whereas we would expect a historian to give at least a basic account of where there's a valid range of interpretations.
quote:I don't believe that I objective experience my room. In fact there is almost nothing about it that I could be sure about. I doubt that I could accurately describe the wallpaper from memory. I probably would be wrong on the size and so on.
Originally posted by Dafyd:
My argument here is not that you would still experience it subjectively. It's that you would be experiencing it entirely subjectively.
Now take your room. You have a lot of experience and emotional baggage attached to it. Nevertheless, your experience of it is about as objective as your experience of anything gets (sense one but not sense six). You can find your way around it without thinking about it. You have a much better chance of drawing it accurately or finding your way about it with your eyes closed than you do of finding your way about a room about which you have no prior experience.
quote:Well, that's where we differ in a nutshell. We can't be objective because we have in-built biases, including those we are not aware of.
I further add that you seem to take presuppositions entirely as givens which cannot be changed. That seems to me untrue. If we couldn't change our presuppositions we could never learn anything. Admittedly frequently ideas that don't fit into people's preexisting conceptual schemes do run off people like water off a duck's back. But I don't think that's inevitable.
quote:I've no real idea of what you mean by that.
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
How about, as I also noted earlier in this thread, neither complete acceptance nor rejection?
quote:Likewise confused by this. What I did (if this is directed at me) was cite a document that encapsulates my and many millions of other Catholics' understanding of the historicity of documents to which you deny any historicity. Why is explaining my take on the issues separating livestock any more than you expressing yours is?
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
When people begin to quote doctrinal stuff, I gather the separation of sheep and goats is afoot.
quote:I think there are cases where the historicity of particular events can be left open even as we accept the immediate arguments presented in the text. Obvious examples in the NT would be certain cases where extra-biblical sources are brought in (which were often earlier attempts at harmonising the OT).
Originally posted by Chesterbelloc:
quote:I've no real idea of what you mean by that.
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
How about, as I also noted earlier in this thread, neither complete acceptance nor rejection?
quote:Absolutely agreed, Chris.
Originally posted by chris stiles:
quote:I think there are cases where the historicity of particular events can be left open even as we accept the immediate arguments presented in the text. Obvious examples in the NT would be certain cases where extra-biblical sources are brought in (which were often earlier attempts at harmonising the OT).
Originally posted by Chesterbelloc:
quote:I've no real idea of what you mean by that.
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
How about, as I also noted earlier in this thread, neither complete acceptance nor rejection?
So it's not necessary to the core of 1 Corinthians 10 to believe that the rock that Moses struck literally followed the Israelites from place to place as they moved around the desert. Similarly, one does not have to accept that Michael and Satan literally argued over the corpse of Moses in order to accept the overall argument of Jude.
quote:The interesting point there to me is that were that visual experience of a genuine solid object, we would be quite correct to judge that the colours were different. If that were the solid object it's imitating then the colours would be objectively different even though the effect on the retina is subjectively the same. It's only because the colours have been created by an aberrant route that we're judging wrongly.
Originally posted by mr cheesy:
Colour is one of those in-built human perceptions which are easily deceived. Take the famous Lotto Lab cube. I have seen it many times, I've even used computer software to prove that the centre squares of the front and top face are the same colour.
quote:Really? I've never heard that to be the case. I don't think this is anything about the fact it is on the screen and everything about the shadows in the picture.
Originally posted by Dafyd:
The interesting point there to me is that were that visual experience of a genuine solid object, we would be quite correct to judge that the colours were different. If that were the solid object it's imitating then the colours would be objectively different even though the effect on the retina is subjectively the same. It's only because the colours have been created by an aberrant route that we're judging wrongly.
quote:We're back to the difference between fictional representations and real objects. Those aren't real shadows in the picture. They're imitations of shadows made by selecting darker colours to represent the side in shadow than the lighter colours used to represent the brightly-lit top.
Originally posted by mr cheesy:
I've never heard that to be the case. I don't think this is anything about the fact it is on the screen and everything about the shadows in the picture.
quote:I think you are missing the point. It might be a set-up, but it illustrates something about perspective. If the thing had been set up in the same way in "real life" it would still work.
Originally posted by Dafyd:
We're back to the difference between fictional representations and real objects. Those aren't real shadows in the picture. They're imitations of shadows made by selecting darker colours to represent the side in shadow than the lighter colours used to represent the brightly-lit top.
To represent yellow on the side in shadow one has to use a darker shade than would be used on the top; it's been set up so that the darker shade used to represent yellow on the side is the same that represents a dark brown on the top.
The fact that it's a screen doesn't matter - you could reproduce it on a painting. But it does have to be an imitation of a shadow rather than the real thing. I apologise if I'm pointing out the obvious.
quote:Your statements provide a much more strident and rigid perspective.
Originally posted by Chesterbelloc:
quote:I've no real idea of what you mean by that.
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
How about, as I also noted earlier in this thread, neither complete acceptance nor rejection?
quote:Likewise confused by this. What I did (if this is directed at me) was cite a document that encapsulates my and many millions of other Catholics' understanding of the historicity of documents to which you deny any historicity. Why is explaining my take on the issues separating livestock any more than you expressing yours is?
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
When people begin to quote doctrinal stuff, I gather the separation of sheep and goats is afoot.
And I still don't see why, in the context of "the info we have", Jesus continuing to teach and enlighten His apostles after His resurrection is so very unlikely. There's a very long (i.e., dating back to apostolic times) tradition to that effect. And as Freddy says, why strain at the gnat of that after swallowing the camel of the scriptural Resurrection and post-R accounts?
quote:That's not really very fair. Clearly CB is working from a different frame of reference from you, but that doesn't make his perspective "strident and rigid" compared to (presumably) your moderate and flexible perspective.
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
Your statements provide a much more strident and rigid perspective.
quote:If so, how would we know?
Originally posted by mr cheesy:
And there is plenty of evidence to suggest that there are forms of systematic bias that mean we are subject to all kinds of subjectivity in the rest of our lives, so that when we think we're able to objectively assess something - such as colour in this example - we can't.
quote:If you don't hack your shins on the furniture every time you walk across it you're being objective about it.
Saying that one can be objective about a room one knows well is clearly wrong.
quote:We can't. That's part of the problem.
Originally posted by Dafyd:
If so, how would we know?
quote:It wouldn't take very much to show that I couldn't walk across the room without hacking my shins. For example me having a stroke, becoming blind, losing my memory.
f you don't hack your shins on the furniture every time you walk across it you're being objective about it.