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Re: Evidence versus Authorities



My spouse is a historian of the philosophy of science. She starts her
history courses with a short film called something line Whose History is
This...it raises questions like, if peasants didn't do much on the grand
scale, why should we study their history, or whose history do we know,
the winners or the losers.
This even appears in the history of science, read for example Mara
Bellars books called Quantum Dialogue about how it happened that the
Copenhagen interpretation of QM became the dogma.

cheers,

joe

On Sat, 24 Aug 2002, Hugh
Haskell wrote:

At 11:19 -0400 8/24/02, Michael Edmiston wrote:

Carried to the extreme, "scholarly work" becomes learning what others=
have written and collecting a "better set" of references on the side=
you prefer than you collect for the side you don't prefer. A former=
dean, who aspired to be a lawyer, was proud of his ability to win de=
bates even when he was on the "wrong side." He repeatedly boasted th=
at it never matters what is right or wrong, the only thing that matte=
rs is who wins the debate. Therefore, don't waste time searching for=
truth; rather, spend time developing your debating technique and lin=
ing up your authorities.

That seems to be the lawyer mentality. The object is to win the
debate, not out the truth. So you assemble the evidence that supports
your side of the case, and ignore that which does not. Both sides to
this. I have a lawyer friend who has told me that on several
occasions he has defended clients who he knew were guilty, and gotten
them off, and he sees nothing wrong with this. Apparently prosecutors
are also more interested in getting a conviction than getting the
guilty party, and engage in suppression of exculpatory evidence
rather than admitting the defendant is innocent when such evidence
comes up. Not all of them, of course, but it happens often enough to
be a serious problem.

I read a review of a history book not too long ago in which the
reviewer took the author to task for writing a "lawyer's brief," in
which he assembled the evidence for his interpretation of the events
and ignored the contrary evidence. The reviewer thought that such
action was not good scholarship. I don't think it's good lawyering,
either. But what do I know. I've never been to law school.

On a related topic, I recently had a student come to me for some
information about a topic she wanted to write a term paper on, for
her History class. The teacher had instructed the students that there
was to be no opinions expressed in this paper. Only facts. Everything
she said had to have a reference, and she could not express her own
opinion. I thought this was a little weird, but perhaps it was part
of a bigger picture in historiography that I wasn't aware of, but I
still wonder how one writes anything about a historical topic,
especially one about which there may be no agreed upon consensus (she
wanted to write about the end of WW II and whether it had been
necessary to drop the bomb in order to end it). We got around the
requirement by her writing about other people's opinions and citing
them, but it was odd, nonetheless.

I hope that this is not what term papers have become all about. What
ever happened to the buzz-word of the nineties--critical thinking?

Hugh
--

Hugh Haskell
<mailto:haskell@ncssm.edu>
<mailto:hhaskell@mindspring.com>

(919) 467-7610

Let's face it. People use a Mac because they want to, Windows because they
have to..
******************************************************


Joseph J. Bellina, Jr. 574-284-4662
Associate Professor of Physics
Saint Mary's College
Notre Dame, IN 46556