» On The Unknowability of Historical Facts
All history is an urban legend. Unless you can experimentally verify a fact, it’s just “true” because it’s popular. In the end, life is about picking the narratives you find useful. You probably believe Napoleon existed on the same basis that Christians believe Jesus existed: Someone you trust told you so, or you read it in a book you were told was authoritative.
But the transmitted Napoleon never existed. He’s a gestalt of politically-motivated storytelling in France, Prussia, Austria, Russia, Italy, England, all of Europe. Across languages, cultures, decades, politics, and editorial analysis, any kind of objective truth is unknowable. All that is left are useful narratives: Napoleon the Ogre, Napoleon the Emperor, Napoleon the Blasphemous, Napoleon the General, Napoleon the Entertaining.
Napoleon the Man, who I think most would consider “the true Napoleon”, died almost two hundred years ago and was lost, instantly and forever. If this wasn’t the case there’d be exactly one book about him, which contained The Truth.
So: true or not, Cortes burned his ships because that narrative is useful to me. If it’s more useful to believe that he didn’t, for example if I was writing a historical book about him, then he didn’t.
Whether he was a firebug, or even whether he actually existed, is totally secondary — an unnecessary attachment to something essentially unknowable. Our culture assigns a kind of moral high ground to “what actually happened” without acknowledging that such knowledge cannot exist. For whatever reason we strive for objective accuracy, even if subjective, romantic, poetic accuracy would actually be more useful.
The only objectivity is subjectivity made self-aware. Try comparing stories from high school with your friends some time to see what I mean. “What actually happened” is an average of self-serving subjective viewpoints, weighted by the political power of the story tellers, not ever what actually happened (further: I claim that none of us knows what actually happened).
More: I exist on that same basis, and maybe you do too. But that’s another post.
Say:
Alice believes X
Alice has poor justification for believing X
I take that as evidence that X is false. So I think Cortés didn’t burn his boats because you believe it without (in my eyes) adequate justification.
I’m not sure this is good reasoning, but epistemology is too complicated for me to think about.
Jared
29 Apr 09 at 2:06 pm
I take your point, but just for giggles:
Alice believes the shape of Earth is very close to that of an oblate spheroid.
Alice believes this because a psychotic delusion told her.
Then: This is evidence that the shape of Earth is NOT “very close to that of an oblate spheroid”. But, as far as Wikipedia is concerned, it is*.
My point is that if you replace the phrase “a psychotic delusion” with anything except “a rational experiment” it’s no more meaningful. She could believe it because the Bible or the government or a teacher or a homeless person or Wikipedia told her so — but those are ALL bad reasons.
In the end though, does it really matter as long as her belief is useful? The concept of believing the right thing for the wrong reasons is pretty neat. Reminds me of Plato’s idea that the fastest route to a happy society is to lie to people about the nature of that society.
* Part of the fun discussing the unknowability of things is that concrete examples degenerate quickly — which seems to support my argument.
Jack
29 Apr 09 at 2:17 pm
This is the opposite of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: if you aren’t there to see it yourself, how do you know that it is really true.
Kevin
29 Apr 09 at 7:17 pm
@Kevin: Yeah, exactly.
I mean: It’s obviously useful to have faith. It would be impractical to require people to, for example, start at philosophy, build number theory, build math, build science, and then build engineering, just so they could build a house.
But I’m a big fan of questioning faith. If you’re indifferent to certain chunks of knowledge you might as well believe whatever’s most useful, or most fun.
Jack
29 Apr 09 at 8:27 pm
As I said, I’m not sure that’s good reasoning, it’s just something I do to be difficult.
Jared
30 Apr 09 at 9:03 am
I am not saying that it isn’t true, but that there is a possibility that it isn’t true. it relates to the situations in the Gettier Problem. Just because it is written down, or someone believes it to be true doesn’t mean that it is. Although as you look at specific situations, it become more and more likely that it is. Blind faith isn’t something I believe in.
Kevin
30 Apr 09 at 12:40 pm