Much more eloquently stated than my own humble effort, Ben, but I'm
wondering if you could be so kind as to provide some bibliography.
I'm familiar with Gadamer, but is there any particular bibliography
you'd care to cite? I'm unfamiliar with Dilthey.
>On Tue, 14 Mar 2000, Bob wrote:
>
> > I'm sorry, but I must disagree. Certainly there are historical
> > "facts" which generally are pretty much accepted as "true." An
> > example of such a fact might be the date of the signing & names of
> > the signers of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. After the
> > "facts," everything is pretty much interpretation/rhetoric.
>
><snip>
>
> > If, indeed, historians invent the past, then how do you reconcile
> > this with your notion of "historical truth" above?
>
>This is rehashing an old dispute coming out of the German
>Methodenstreit ("Dispute over method") that extends to the
>question of truth in all of the Geisteswissenschaften ("Human
>Sciences," or "social sciences" as we have in English now),
>including History. I think Dilthey really gets this ball rolling,
...
>Historians, as Gadamer puts it, immerse themselves in the
>stream of history - history is like one extremely large text,
>and its events and epochs constitute chapters or books.
...
>Only in the model
>of the natural sciences does consistancy (between account
>and phenomena) make a claim to having discovered something
>independent of those offering the accounts.
And yet, that claim is not necessarily a "truth" claim, as one might
infer from Kuhn's _Structure of Scientific Revolutions_
>With historical
>events, you are never independent of the accounts made of
>them.
As with events in the natural sciences :)
wondering if you could be so kind as to provide some bibliography.
I'm familiar with Gadamer, but is there any particular bibliography
you'd care to cite? I'm unfamiliar with Dilthey.
>On Tue, 14 Mar 2000, Bob wrote:
>
> > I'm sorry, but I must disagree. Certainly there are historical
> > "facts" which generally are pretty much accepted as "true." An
> > example of such a fact might be the date of the signing & names of
> > the signers of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. After the
> > "facts," everything is pretty much interpretation/rhetoric.
>
><snip>
>
> > If, indeed, historians invent the past, then how do you reconcile
> > this with your notion of "historical truth" above?
>
>This is rehashing an old dispute coming out of the German
>Methodenstreit ("Dispute over method") that extends to the
>question of truth in all of the Geisteswissenschaften ("Human
>Sciences," or "social sciences" as we have in English now),
>including History. I think Dilthey really gets this ball rolling,
...
>Historians, as Gadamer puts it, immerse themselves in the
>stream of history - history is like one extremely large text,
>and its events and epochs constitute chapters or books.
...
>Only in the model
>of the natural sciences does consistancy (between account
>and phenomena) make a claim to having discovered something
>independent of those offering the accounts.
And yet, that claim is not necessarily a "truth" claim, as one might
infer from Kuhn's _Structure of Scientific Revolutions_
>With historical
>events, you are never independent of the accounts made of
>them.
As with events in the natural sciences :)