Friday, February 5, 2016
A Solution to Postmodern History
Postmodernism seems to destroy the whole concept of history. It does this through one crucial tenet: it is impossible to know if any story is true. The example of this that we have been focusing on is that it is neither possible to prove or disprove the events of Ragtime, as ridiculous as that first sounds. I mean JP Morgan probably didn’t start a secret cult with Ford, but how would we know, it’s a secret cult.
To solve this, I would like to propose for a system that allows for the analysis and study of human history, even if not possible to prove any story. It relies on two key principles the first is that there exists a set of facts in the world that can just be accepted as true e.g. JFK was shot. The next is that people are allowed to create analysis’s based on facts e.g. Oswald was the shooter because he was in the book repository. This is how history works now, what makes my system special is that every analysis has a score, which I will refer to as “K”. This score ranges from 0-1 and serves to assess the validity of the analysis. Therefore, the “K” score is a function of the number and quality of facts that the particular historical analysis contains. Take for example the JFK case and the debate of how many shooters there were. The Warren Commission concluded that there was one shooter and given their immense resources were able to obtain a large number of facts and as a result, their theory has a K > 0.9. On the other hand, take the conclusion of conspiracy theorist who says there were 17 shooters because he heard the friend of a friend of a friend claim that he overheard a rumour that there was a guy who saw that many, this would earn a K < 0.0001.
Now this is an extreme example. But it expresses the power of the K Score to make decisions about what historical theorems are accepted. It would then be possible for later historians to cite theorems of high K scores as almost facts while still leaving in the possibility for them to be wrong. This then leads to the question of what would Ragtime earn on this scale. I would probably give it a K of around 0.2-0.3. As while so many of the characters are deeply rooted in historical fact, Doctorow has managed to “find” stories that are completely uncited, which unfortunately drags down the K score, e.g. while Houdini does exist I’m not sure how Doctorow knows that he went through an existential crisis about mortality. Overall, this is just a quantitative solution to the very philosophical question about how to decide what is history and what is fiction.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
So you want to create flowcharts of alternate realities assessing every possible effect and outcome of any situation. The specifics of how can be debated upon later, but your system seems to make sense. Overall, you would create documents that show that yes, JFK was assassinated, but by whom or how many or who organized it is all up in the air. Creating something with every possibility and the probability of each would mean that the truth is somewhere in there, which is a good step in the right direction.
ReplyDeleteWhile your system does remove narrativity from the picture, I wonder if its a particularly engaging way to view history. We've been talking about how to present history without using a narrative, but I'm beginning to wonder, even if we could create history without narrative, would we as humans be able (or willing) to process it that way? Either way this method of fact checking is interesting
ReplyDeleteProblem is everything is totally subjective. That is kinda how we view history now, but I think the reason that we don't just go ahead and add the number in is because it would be very difficult to create a specific function for how certainly true something is, especially when you have different people with different perspectives and different agendas.
ReplyDeleteWe'll get into this when we read DeLillo, but one big problem with the JFK thing is that often the various narratives depend on the same body of facts--they interpret the facts as having a different significance, or see them as part of different story lines. The maddening thing for the casual student, trying to get some sense of what actually happened in Dallas in November 1963, is that all (or at least many) of these stories sound equally plausible and equally factual.
ReplyDelete