The silent grief of the Dutch

[ihno]

Gorgik was just being polite.

 

[bigsal]

On this I never had any doubts.

 

[dargelos]

So many ideas, so many facts, so many opinions, too much for one little brain. That's meant as praise gentlemen, I will never use the catchphrase "too much information".
To pick one point out; ihno dislikes the tossing around of death toll numbers as if they were football scores. Ihno is right, it's a bad habit I'll try to stop. Each death is a discrete tragedy, aggregating big numbers insulates us from what those numbers really represent.
If a charity advert says "this girl is starving, please send money" they get a good response.
If the charity advert says "100,000 children are starving, please send money" they raise less money than with the first advert.

 

[gorgik9]

@ ihno (and everybody else)
Thanks for yet another piece of good read, but I'll beg to differ on a couple of points.

1) The only real reason why I started to talk about objectivity in post #18 was what you yourself had written in the last line in post #17: "But distance is needed for an objective view." Different kinds of objectivity or...?

I really don't understand why you sound so perplexed and starts ranting about Plato: " "Objectivity"...What do you mean? Platon?" (written in post #19). I could retort - well, what do you mean yourself?

2) In post #19 you write: "But the way history works is not different from nature-science".
On some levels history and other scholarly disciplines functions precisely like the natural sciences - you publish your work in scentific/scholarly journals, you get peer reviews and other kinds of feedback from the academic community and so on. I fully agree on that.

But other levels there are essential differences between scholarship and natural science. Let's imagine a brain neurologist or geneticist, let's call him Simon LeVay, let him and his team make an experiment to show that the famous thing called The Gay Gene actually exists. The results will be cabled to all gay media, and the story will go: "The Gay Gene! It's scientifically proven!"

But the interesting thing is what happens the minutes after LeVay's results were published in "Nature" or some other august publication; other groups of scientists all over the globe will try to replicate the experiment exactly as described by LeVay. And no, it couldn't be replicated.

The replication of experiments. But how on earth do you replicate historical actions? Sure, you can give various kinds of descriptions of the actions and interpret those descriptions in various ways. But that is not the same as the replication of experiments in the natural sciences.

3) In my post #18 I talked about the difference between traits founded in human nature and traits specific for specific historical epochs and cultures.
Let's take a simple but very important example: The spoken word is founded in human nature. No human being, no group, no society has NOT known spoken language. You don't have to go to school to learn how to speak. You go to school to learn how to read and write.

So written language is fundamentally different from spoken language. Writing has a history in a way that the spoken word hasn't and can not have. Every different kind of written language needs some specific level of economy, specific technologies and so on.

Most languages that have existed and exists now have never been written.

But the very notion of "a language" (like german or swedish or arabic or chinese or...) depends on writing.

Now, what is really unfathomable to me is, that this difference should be deemed not very important. Well...I beg to differ.

 

[ihno]

@ ihno (and everybody else)
Thanks for yet another piece of good read, but I'll beg to differ on a couple of points.

1) The only real reason why I started to talk about objectivity in post #18 was what you yourself had written in the last line in post #17: "But distance is needed for an objective view." Different kinds of objectivity or...?

I really don't understand why you sound so perplexed and starts ranting about Plato: " "Objectivity"...What do you mean? Platon?" (written in post #19). I could retort - well, what do you mean yourself?

I’ve thought of Platon’s ideology, that nothing is perfect… Because “objectivity” like “truth” or “selflessness” etc. are things, that normally don’t come with 100%. Who can seriously say of himself that he’s really 100% objective?
The work of the historian is to evaluate the past fairly out of the cirstances (it loses in translation, lol). History has of course an ethical point of view. Most historians would interpret a mass-murder or an atrocity as not desirable, some even as “bad”. Of course if a small museum in a small town publishes about their home town it can get a little affirmative. But believe me, the community notices that. “Objective” means to use techniques openly, to use all available and necessary sources in the scientific process, to doent that, so others can reproduce your results.

2) In post #19 you write: "But the way history works is not different from nature-science".
(…)
But the interesting thing is what happens the minutes after LeVay's results were published in "Nature" or some other august publication; other groups of scientists all over the globe will try to replicate the experiment exactly as described by LeVay. And no, it couldn't be replicated.

Okay, what do you want to say? That this LeVay is a fraud? If others couldn’t do what he did I quess he is. But I’m generally talking, not about single cases or persons. There are also frauds in historical science too, like everywhere else.

The replication of experiments. But how on earth do you replicate historical actions? Sure, you can give various kinds of descriptions of the actions and interpret those descriptions in various ways. But that is not the same as the replication of experiments in the natural sciences.

You seem to have a peculiar view on history. Since when “reproduce” historians historical events? It is a science. You don’t reproduce the actual event, you analyze and interpret it. And therefore the scientific process is the thing you reproduce, not the event itself.

There are a variety of techniques available. For example we use empirical social research techniques. If you work on divorces in a small city in 1950 you take the files from the court and you analyze them. This analysis is something that everybody can reproduce. And your result is that 10% of the pairs with two children got divorced then everybody who doubts it, is free to take the files again and check it.

You always have to present proof, not unlike lawyers or persecutors f.e. Sometimes, if it is a special research topic you have to define the rules. In every case you have to give full information on your research method. And this is something, that be reproduced and / or critically reviewed.
Some agree, some don’t. You have different views and debates like you have them everywhere else in science, including the “objective” natural sciences.

3) In my post #18 I talked about the difference between traits founded in human nature and traits specific for specific historical epochs and cultures.
(…)
Now, what is really unfathomable to me is, that this difference should be deemed not very important. Well...I beg to differ.

It can matter to biologists, anthropologists or philosophers or whomever, who’s interested in the topic but not to historians.
Really. History is not a biological science. Asking about human traits is outside the historian’s field of expertise and also the field of interest. And explaining historical events with “biological patterns” or “traits” sounds a bit like biologism to me. Big no no. Also don’t ask psychologists for help in serious science although that’s very fancy in those popular TV shows.