[quote=""DCHindley""]
ApostateAbe;7478308 wrote:You and Robert Price are postmodernists, and postmodernists tend to think all possibilities are of equal weight.
Abe, Please read at least one postmodern philosopher of history. They most certainly do NOT think all possibilities have equal weight. What they DO think is that present day reconstructions of the past are influenced by a phenomenon called the episteme, into which are poured all the experiences that the inhabitants of the world.
Trajan, in his letter to Pliny the Younger about the Christians, called it the "spirit of this age." So, all that has occurred since the historical event happened influences any modern reconstructions of a past historical event.
I see it as a matter of the fundamental difference between those who value [sure] knowledge of the truth and those who value something else.
I'd recommend Alun Maslow's,
Deconstructing History.
According to Munslow, pretty much all modern secular historians have given up the notion that we can reconstruct THE true history of an event, and acknowledge that the past is always interpreted through a lens in the present. Opinion varies as to how to deal with that realization.[/QUOTE]
Thanks, DCHindley. The philosophical differences are most relevant and they are worth a full discussion. I am of the modernist camp, deeply suspicious of the postmodernist attacks on the scholarly attempts to estimate the truth. I read the introduction to
Deconstructing History and it is as you said. The author believes that any historian's attempt to portray a narrative of the past, even so-called "facts," is riddled with the historian's own personality. My own stated opinion is about the de facto effect of this perspective--all possibilities are treated as equals. A postmodernist historian will not say this explicitly, but neither will she or he rate one possibility as more probable than another, as "reality" is merely subjective.
I may read the full book by Alun Maslow. I most certainly will if you agree to read
Tower of Babel: Evidence Against the New Creationism (or via: amazon.co.uk) by Robert T. Pennock. It is about how the Intelligent Design movement has employed postmodernist rhetoric in an attempt to cast another field of history into greater doubt.