am i totally naive or way too post-linguistic turn, history as representation and all that?

CPP: Perhaps as an intellectual exercise, but this is not a conversation that is relevant to science as an actual human enterprise.

I disagree but there may be a difference in how theorists, experimentalists, and so on think about the scientific endeavor. Science is littered with wrong conclusions built on perfectly valid principles and (apparently) correct conclusions built on the wrong principles. This is about “knowing” things.

I have to get back to my Richard Pipes. Or is it smoking my pipe… or is it Magritte???

“This is not Richard Pipes”

The better conversation is about what we mean when we say we understand something or know something.

Perhaps as an intellectual exercise, but this is not a conversation that is relevant to science as an actual human enterprise. For understanding how scientists construct knowledge, naive realism is sufficient.

This sustains our collective will as a Volk, keeps the hearth fires burning and sustains the morale of our valiant troops fighting back the bolshevik hordes on The Eastern Front.

Or at least thats what I learned in Seminar with Leopold von Ranke.

That’s fun. The first 6 or 7 times. But then it just gets tiresome.

Quixote and Feminist Avatar make some good points about the uses of history–a point Charlie made wayyyy upthread. I don’t disagree that mobilizing history is a prominent aspect of the rights movements of the past 60 years–in the U.S., Civil Rights, women’s rights, and gay rights, for example. (In fact, I’m lecturing tomrorow on the complicated relationship between queer history and the gay rights movement.) Disability rights & disability history have grown up together even more recently.

People who WANT to learn from history can learn some useful things. But collectively, most U.S. Americans don’t really want to learn. They want to be reassured of the old mythology about America, and they want to pursue short-term gains even when the longue duree suggests a wiser course. And so, it’s Tulip Mania and Asian Land Wars all over again. . . again and again. Other nations aren’t any smarter, either: I think the short-term gain is hard-wired into the human animal, but U.S. Americans have made an art of burning through an epic amount of land, human, and natural resources in order to sustain the fantasy of “American Exceptionalism.”

I know I bring him up all of the time, but how can we not honor Gore Vidal for his “United States of Amnesia” line?

Oh, wait a minute.

Never mind.