I like to play with ideas about how we might explain the vagaries of “historical truth” to amateur genealogists. That’s not to say I think it’s possible; more that I wish it were.
The further back you go, the spongier truth becomes. This is not an intuitive idea. People don’t understand it unless they’ve been trained to it.
The battles rage around this problem on every forum where there are amateur researchers who take old stories and legends at face value, as gospel truth. Someone said it a very long time ago so it must be true. It’s then a short step to drunken mobs armed with pitchforks.
Occam’s Razor
Amateurs who get entangled in an academic-style debate tend to grab for Occam’s Razor. This is the theory that the simplest solution that will fit the facts is probably the best.
In genealogy, this argument tends to take a predictable path. The argument is that we should accept old stories and legends as true because that’s simpler and easier than analyzing them. This is a misuse of the tool, but that’s a topic for another day.
Logical Positivism
A curator colleague over on Geni.com once suggested formulating a standard based in Logical Positivism and Karl Popper’s idea of falsifiability. Leaving out a lot of the academic drama, falsifiability is the idea that a theory is worth consideration only if it is testable or verifiable.
But falsifiability doesn’t work for evidence. Popper wasn’t using falsifiability to evaluate historical facticity. He was using it to criticize and dismiss theories about the direction of history.
For example, Marxism. How can Marx know that history will end with the overthrow of capitalism when it is not formulated in a way that it could be proven false? If nothing can prove him wrong, then Marx’s theory is a belief system, not science. That’s falsifiability.
My colleague had it confused with verifiability. It is verifiability that we use for evidence. Falsifiability is just one way of doing verification.
American Pragmatism
This train of thought today was set off by an old video about Pragmatism by The Cynical Historian on YouTube (Pragmatism – a Truly American philosophy). Pragmatism says there are limits to what we know. Truth is the best we can agree on with the evidence we have now. It’s provisional.
The granddaddy of all these philosophies is the Rationalism of the 18th century Enlightenment. All of them have some element of gatekeeping. We don’t take every statement as factual. There is going to be some system for choosing which statements of fact are acceptable.
Hayden White
I was content to point out to my colleague that when I was in college in the 1970s and 1980s the academic world was already turning toward the ideas of Hayden White. In fact, it might have been White’s death in 2018 that prompted this particular round of discussion.
Back when I was in school, I encountered White before I encountered Popper. I can laugh about it now. I had Sterling McMurrin for Historiography 540 (or whatever it was). I don’t know what Prof. McMurrin thought about White, but he introduced me and gave me a gentle nudge in that direction. And let’s be honest–I was never going to flourish in McMurrin’s rarefied world of Mormon dissent. He must have decided to show me something where I might succeed and hope for the best.
White stood historiography on its head. His idea is that history is narrative. There are facts, and maybe those facts can be verified, but the way we connect the facts is interpretation, not science. This goes right to the heart of how we know what we claim to know. I fell in love, and I’m still in love.
The way I think of it, Logical Positivism is Pragmatism gone astray.
Conclusion
This, in short, is the crucial difference between the humanities and the sciences. The humanities by their nature cannot be science.
HIstorians of the past reaslly wanted to be scientists. There are scientific tools that can provide historical isngights, but that doesn’t make it science.
I often say, as a shorthand, that you can’t really string together hundreds of different sources across the centuries to show your line of descent from a 10th great grandfather, and expect anyone to read that as anything other than a creative product.
Yes, you might in fact be descended biologically from that person in exactly that way, but it’s impossible to know that. It’s naive to think you’ve proven it, and even more naive to think your compiled evidence represents an absolute proof that must be accepted by every other researcher.
Nor does it particularly matter one way or another. apart from the evidence you’ve It’s not “real” history the way people might mean that word. It’s a story. And that’s okay; it could never be anything more than that.
So, if it’s “just” a story and not an objective truth, why do we do genealogy? Following Hayden White and others, my answer is that we do it to create meaning for ourselves.