Are historical revisionists scientists or troublemakers?

Why is it that I should believe a claim that a historical figure was a myth by someone who is not a scientist and has less temporal attachment to the time period than the original sources?

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

I think people get lulled into a sense of belief, this is exacerbated by the internet and the proliferation of information...most of it BS.

One thing i noticed is that everone wants to be a filmmaker, reporter, author or webmaster. You break out the camcorder and add some flashy graphics with titles and all of a sudden you have some crediblity. Since the viewer was not around when the events took place it is easy to say 'that could have happened' and dismiss recorded data from that time period.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

I think people are very careless in what they choose to believe, because they form emotional attachments of some sort to the idea. Emotion overrides the intellect.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Why should I believe a claim by someone who was not there and is not a historian or a scientist?

 

Good point. But double so of someone who lived even further from the events.

 

History is a selective record anyway, so there being multiple opinions is no big deal.

Most revisionism is either due to vested interests or due to uncovering of new evidence. Its essential to see the reasoning behind the revisionism I would say, not all can be in the same category.

 

That is unfortunately true. The reasoning for the revisionism is what colors the work and makes it potentially misleading. Of course, why would someone investigate a matter if that didn't care about it? Too bad we don't have scientists investigating things they care nothing about, because we would get better results.

 

You clearly place a lot of importance on the how close the source was to the events that they claimed happened. Obviously that’s one thing that should be considered, but it’s hardly the only thing. You should also consider things like:

1. Whether or not the person making the claim might have had a reason to lie or exaggerate.

2. Whether or not other people who lived around the same time who should have noticed the event also record it.

3. The general plausibility of the claims - are they ordinary and believable, or fantastic and outlandish?

That seems pretty obvious. I mean, suppose you found a 200 year-old book that claimed that there was an American general during the revolutionary war who personally killed hundreds of British soldiers in single combat, who was able to summon dragons and pixies to aid his men in battle, and who was able to bring his dead soldiers back to life. Would you believe it simply because it was written around the time of the Revolutionary War? Probably not. Yeah, it’s old, but its claims are laughably implausible. Also, if such a person had actually existed there would surely be accounts from other sources – and the fact that there aren’t any such records is good evidence that the figure described in our 200 year old book is fictional.

 

I don't disagree with you. But on the whole, an account close in time to the actual events will generally be more reliable than a later account (generally - but not always).

 

But why? People don't even agree that well on the World trade centre attacks, so the question is, what is your threshold for belief?

 

You seem to have a number of misconceptions here. Is history fully a science? Not quite.

Also, centuries of experience show that the only way your going to get scientific results is to have people who are interested in something doing the science on that thing they are interested in.

So, are you actually worried about something in particular, or are you fishing for something else?

 

An account given close to the event will more likely rely on eyewitness testimony or even hearsay of eyewitness testimony. Do you think an account of 911 would be more accurate 100 years from now?

 

Of course, that's the problem. The scientists studying something are studying it because they're interested in it. That care is what kills the objectivity. Kill the care, and get better results.

 

What makes you think it wouldn't be?
It has been demonstrated time and time again that eyewitnesses are the the least reliable form of evidence for anything.
Documentation might be forthcoming which gives a better overall picture.
Those directly and not-so-directly involved will be long gone and vested interests one way or the other will have blown over - making an impartial and more factual account possible.
It could happen.

 

In many respects, yes.

The first, early accounts of the San Francisco Bay earthquake in the early 1900s were not nearly as accurate, about many important matters, as the subsequent accounts many years later, for example.

We have photography and such, now, which helps a little - but 9/11 has been a fog of rumor and conflicting story, settling out over the years.

 

Ah, it is so intesting to read that! In a way, you see, I can ever so much agree -- except that I was always certain that Josephus had to have been forged. Did you ever really doubt it yourself?

 

What on earth do you mean? People carry out scientific type investigations into things they are not personally involved in all the time, e.g. forensics. However actual scientific breakthroughs, e.g. Newton and gravity, antibiotics, etc, all are done by people who are interested in certain problems and questions. If they weren't so, the chances are that the discoveries wouldn't have been made, since someone less interested would take less care and have assembled less information around the topic.

 

I'm talking about emotional attachment to the science - not the specific experiment. If you care about the results of your work, you are more likely to find what your looking for - even if wrong. What's better - results from a truly disimpassioned scientist or reams of work from a scientist who wants to find a particular result?