On “the true tree of life” – is there a single true history or not?
Humans (ie, historians) have been battling over the truthfulness of different descriptions of history forever, but the fundamental question for such battles is whether there is a true description of history to be found or not.
The most obvious problem for such a description is subjective (ie, objectively relative) terms such as “terrorist”, “spy”, “traitor”, “undeveloped”, “misled” and ”barbarian”, but a more fundamental problem is whether objectivity itself (ie, classification) is consistent. Unfortunately, Bertrand Russell demonstrated about a century ago (1901) that classification is ultimately paradoxically contradictory, meaning that there isn’t a true description of history to be found, not because there isn’t a single true history, but because even if there is, we can’t describe it unambiguously.
This fact may be hard to digest for some historians, and difficult to understand for others. However, the problem is that we can’t catch reality with our words, but can only describe it, and a description of something can’t become that something (see Magritte’s painting “Ceci, c’est ne pas une pipe”). This problem means that we have to turn description of reality into a mathematical model of reality to be able to describe reality consistently, and thus that we have to accept that history is ambiguous (ie, subjective) per definition. This ambiguity is impossible to escape from, since there are not only objectively relative words, but classification itself also is fundamentally paradoxically contradictory. The fact may thus be hard to digest, but inevitable.
Another contribution to understanding of conceptualization http://menvall.wordpress.com/
2012-12-22 17:04:05
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