All analysis is an abridgement of narrative

By -
"It may, of course, be the case that all analysis is only an abridgment of narrative, so that inadequacies introduced at the narrative stage are magnified and caricatured by the process of abridgment. If abridgment is a regrettable necessity, only the utmost rigour in its narrative premises can guard against the wildest results: anachronism and teleology can best disguised in the form of a table of statistics, valuable though quantifying techniques potentially are." --J.C.D. Clark, Revolution and Rebellion: State and society in England in the 17th and 18th centuries, p. 19

UPDATE: The funny thing here is I finished the book I am reviewing earlier today, and went looking for some light reading tonight. (In this context, "light reading" means "reading that is not directly work-related.") When I picked up this book off of a shelf I had no clue that the first few pages would provide several quotes supporting my recent contentions about the relationship between history and the other social sciences. But there they were.)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more