Ok, so let me rephrase that, so I will stop having similar comments about reality.
A reality that exists but cannot be understood universally, due to human interpretation that interfere, is more of a theoretical (or ideal, if you prefer) concept than a practical one. As long as I have no practical way to access it due to personal opinions, searching for it is futile.
The best I can do is to collect different accounts from different sources, put down my own understanding and form an opinion on the historical events. It does not guarantee perfect or exact interpretation of what happened, but I still prefer it than an arbitrary statement of the type: that is what really happened.
Ok, then what was the topic, when you spend all these paragraphs explaining that it is basically a matter of missing information and lack of sufficient context? I am essentially saying that it is not a matter of missing context or lack of information, it is a matter of personal interpretations of facts.
But ok, if you had different point and I missed it I apologize. You can disregard my total comment.
I think you mean that for explaining something, it has to be very simple and its causes have to be straightforward…. something like that?
You can see there how consensus has nothing to do with the topic at hand. It’s not a matter of having all people one interpretation - that wouldn’t “fix” it anyway.
You have a practical way to access it. But you cannot know that you did. It is futile for you, it doesn’t make it not futile
Well then, was disregarding what happened offtopic or not? I hope the last messages cleared that up for you.
Of course! That interpretations are not the same as the things themselves, but that the things (the facts) exist. If it wasn´t as such, Plato would have said that for knowing we should just agree on something.
Since consensus is not the same as truth, Plato pointed out that.
Plus, as Abraham Lincoln said: “I think, therefore I am”
Ironically, I think OP looks to be as guilty of over-confidence as the people he’s criticizing. He’s so sure that no one is thinking critically about history, yet… how would he know that? How involved is he in modern historical Academia?
(Now, in my own humility, I admit that I don’t know, maybe he’s VERY involved in that field - maybe he produces textbooks or teaches at a university, I invite him to tell me now if he does, but if not…)
I think it’s far more likely that a significant chunk of people in that field ARE questioning things, trying to find more context, more information, coming up with alternative explanations. I know that’s true of people who study religious history and the history of the bible, because of my interest in the works of Bart Ehrman. Through him I know that at the very least that field is ripe with debate and disagreement and conjecture and research.
It’s my humble view that the most likely scenario is, OP read a history book as a child and remembers his history lessons from back then, and is talking about the whole field as if the way we teach children is the whole story, and that’s all there is to it.
In fact I would wager that a significant portion of people writing papers about historical events, whether they’re writing dissertations or just trying to get published in a journal, are doing the exact same kind of questioning OP laments doesn’t exist. I’m pretty sure that kind of questioning is the bread and butter of the academic history industry.
I don’t think we have to go that far. Academia is not having as much influence in most people’s everyday lives as one might think. I have an academic background, but I’m just sort of thinking, like, where did I come in contact with history? When I got curious, I myself might go diving into things that were a little alternative, or very alternative, or just try to see what people are thinking now. But actually, I don’t run across that. So the history that kind of appears to me out of the world is, fits, I think, the OP’s position. And it wasn’t just one history book, or it wasn’t just one history textbook anyway. It was textbooks in general. Except for that exception I mentioned. So I don’t remember what the OP said on academia or academic, the academic world or historians. That may also have been unfair. But what comes to most of us, unless we specifically go and look and have the skills to do that, I think is not very nuanced and is sort of propaganda-like. I mean, I think your point is well taken. I’m not taking away. I think, because it might seem like, you know, historians are all either stupid or in on some sort of con, or I suppose ideologically stuck in some way, and I don’t think that’s the case.
I would be interested in hearing from people who have been to public schools more recently than I have what they experienced. So, in the last 40 years, any takers?
It didn’t sound like op was just criticizing how we teach history to children though, but how we do history? Which is why my question is: how do you know that’s how they do history?
I hear you. I went right to schooling. I did have flash thought while reading that academia is more complicated than that, but because I think, unfortunately, this is less important that is should be - regarding what we hear, read in everyday life - I sort of glossed over that. (I suppose I was also tired of disagreeing with people or being disagreed with - just wanted a break). But yes, academic history has gone radically into these issues. Just mulling what the 60s, postmodernism, Foucault (a special case), Zizek (In Defense of Lost Causes is a good example), Howard Zinn, feminism, gay/queer focused studies and the huge rise in identity politics have done to history departments. Note: I am not approving or disapproving, but there has been a radical challenge to traditional modes of doing history, radical investigation of other perspectives, shifts towards the study of non-powerful people and more. One could certainly get locked into new but just as controlled narratives, but the opportunities to explore, reexamine, shift focus are all over the place now. I don’t know people teaching history, but my guess is there are a lot of histories now where there were many fewer before. And also what gets looked at to understand history is more varied. And it’s likely much easier (internet) to find out what related fields (archaology, culture studies, anthropology, etc. are doing).
How much of this reaches the public I don’t know. Probably not much. College students get a smattering then they go on to jobs and families and it slides into the unconscious mind.
Because it is a matter of missing context and lack of information, AND there is always the factor of personal interpretations of facts. Both of these are the case at the same time. I never meant to dismiss or relegate the aspect of personal interpretation, perspective, bias or subjectivity. These are inherent aspects of what it means to be the kind of being that we are, however there are ways around this in certain cases. For example it is possible to triangulate using multiple points of reference beyond oneself. Math provides a great analogy here using ratios:
If I say a distance is X km, that is an arbitrary or subjective measurement, “km” as humans have created what that means. Yet the distance itself exists in reality. The fact that we create a subjective made-up term and concept for it does not mean it also does not exist objectively in reality as that which it is beyond human definitions or perceptions. Now, extend this even further by comparing two distances, X km and Y km. Two “arbitrary subjective km measurements” yet if you put them into a ratio the “km” disappears: X km / Y km = Z. Not “Z km”, just Z. The unit terms cancel and vanish. We are left with an objectively existing quantity, a direct aspect of reality that can be immediately known outside of any human biases: “The distance X is Z times greater than the distance Y.” It doesn’t matter the unit terms we want to make up or even how large or small X or Y are. Once X and Y are selected and regardless of how we label them, Z becomes a derived piece of objective knowledge about reality from that.
In a similar way we use language, concepts, our perceptions, our understanding of meanings, all of this works together in a system we call or access as our mind, consciousness, and this is able to product knowledge that does not depend on human perceptions or preferences. The sun is a ball of hydrogen and other elements in the way it is, regardless of what we think or prefer about it. We KNOW the sun exists in such and such a way, regardless of our own views or needs or anything human. Therefore we adjust our human approach to this fact by placing the objective reality of the sun as the primary object and our own epistemic approaches to that object as secondary, as conditioned to the first in every way possible. For example we do not look at the sun and think “It would be cool if that ball of light in the sky really was some kind of god, I am going to say it is a god” because that would be imposing a human want or need upon it. We already know that this is a false epistemology (even if it did happen to be true).
So basically it nests in a way that Reality is the primary object, it is whatever it is, even if we don’t know it; then comes human subjectivity perspective and preferences, which is itself a small aspect of the larger Reality; from these two facts comes a third fact, which is the proper relationship between them (reality and humans) which involves acknowledging both the objectively existing Reality beyond human wants and needs and ideas, while also acknowledging what the human brings to the situation in BOTH our ability to know things that are real objective truths about existence as well as our propensity to filter everything through our own subjective perspective and a tendency toward bias in many cases.
Not sure if all that answered your question or not. But it has direct relevance to this topic because this topic is about learning to look at history and how we think about history in a way that makes space for what is missing, for the lacking pieces of information, facts, context, factors etc. all of which did occur in reality back when the historical event in question was the present moment. To the extent we lack these things our understanding is also lacking, although again each thing lacked may result in a different sort of skew to our understanding as not every little detail of context for example, even if relevant, is going to be incredibly significant. This is not about parsing the significance of missed items, it is more generally just about understanding that there always ARE missed items and we should not fictionalize and simplify our ideas of history (as I think is often the case and is how history is usually taught in school). Also the further point that this false approach to history affects our present thinking and philosophizing in negative ways, which is yet another reason why all this matters.
Since you did not intent to remove the human interpretation factor, we are in agreement. Missing information is also a factor. My opinion is that the human interpretation is more important. There are plenty of examples of people that refuse or disregard new information because they have already formed an opinion that do not want to alter.
With the risk to deviate again, I will continue to disagree. You gave a geometric example. Geometry as a branch of mathematics was developed rigorously in antiquity by Pythagoras and elaborated/summarized by Euclides in his geometry. It was developed as philosophy, using definitions, axioms, theorems etc. So, distance is human definition. Very convenient indeed, but still human concept. All the definitions and axioms can be changed if you want to.
The simplest example is that of parallel lines. If you want them to meet at infinity, this requires to abandon Euclidean geometry and develop a new one (which has been done).
Are you going to say that numbers are objective? Well, then we neglect how they were developed and their practical use. The number zero has not an objective aim, it was developed by Indians thousands of years after the other numbers, passed to Arabs and from there to Europeans. It was a nice new number, helpful to do fast computations.
Binary numbers are extremely useful for computers, but useless in our everyday math, because our brain does not function like a computer. “Smaller” or “bigger” are also human concepts. Dead people do not recognize bigger or smaller, only alive humans with functioning brain recognize them.
Things can be as “objective” as the human mind permits them. Sun, distance etc., we can call them objective if you like, but still they are related to human experience. If I shrink you to the size of an atom, you will never recognize the sun, because the only thing you can see are other atoms (and this is also debatable, given that the distance between the atoms is orders of magnitude larger than their own size). If you are going to say “then atoms exist”, I will tell you that these are also observed by humans, using human-made machines, designed to be understood by us. Everything we know passes through the human mind, there is no “human knowledge” without it. Our reality is as true as we can agree on it.
I am not suggesting to stop trusting your senses, or the science, or maths. The opposite, trust them, they are your best tool to function as human being. But remember that everything we know can be altered by changing the rules we, ourselves, impose. Great things happened in science, when scientists decided to “change the rules” of commonly accepted reality. For thousands of years earth was the center of the universe, it was “objective truth”, until it wasn’t. Time was “objectively” constant, until Einstein came up with his theory, suggesting that time is relative, a new concept that works pretty well in our examination of stars and planets.
Similarly, great things happened in philosophy when philosophers came and provided new concepts, unthinkable, or unimaginable, during their time.
You know what is the funny part? What convinces me the most for the subjective reality is the examination of history, the title of the topic. The more I study history, reading different accounts from historians of different background, the more I am convinced that we are creating our own reality.
That is my take on the matter. You can accept it or reject it, of course.
The thread title is click bait. Folks do realize most the time that their experience, like everyone else’s (including authors, editors, committees, publishers, educators), only tells a piece of the story, always subject to reframing in light of new evidence/frames, so forth.
That’s why “historical revisionism” (rewriting history) is a buzzword.
We can do the same thing with a narratival frame about a future some have deemed inevitable as if they are or were already there.
