{"id":2650,"date":"2018-07-03T08:56:13","date_gmt":"2018-07-03T08:56:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/?p=2650"},"modified":"2018-07-03T08:56:13","modified_gmt":"2018-07-03T08:56:13","slug":"historical-facts-dont-exist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/?p=2650","title":{"rendered":"Historical Facts Don&#8217;t Exist"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>To historians, &#8220;history&#8221; basically means the (complex, disputed) knowledge that contemporary people have about what happened in the past. To the general public, &#8220;history&#8221; is the stuff that happened&#8212;about which contemporary people might have limited evidence, disputes of interpretation, etc. This can lead to confusion in communicating ideas about the methodology and ontology of history. For example, when I first came across people saying things along the lines of &#8220;historical facts change over time&#8221;, I thought that they were embracing a much more radical vision of history than they were. They were making the (important) point that what we call &#8220;facts&#8221; are based on incomplete evidence and biased by political\/social\/religious views and our biases coming from the contemporary world. I thought that they were making the much more radical claim that the subjective experience of people in the past changed due to our contemporary interpretations&#8212;a kind of reverse causality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>To historians, &#8220;history&#8221; basically means the (complex, disputed) knowledge that contemporary people have about what happened in the past. To the general public, &#8220;history&#8221; is the stuff that happened&#8212;about which contemporary people might have limited evidence, disputes of interpretation, etc. This can lead to confusion in communicating ideas about the methodology and ontology of history. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[14,42],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2650"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2650"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2650\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2651,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2650\/revisions\/2651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}