Why Fallacies are False -- 15 the two-fer

This time I’m talking about two fallacies that you have probably seen, but either it wasn’t important or you didn’t know the difference between them. They are very similar but it’s not hard to explain them.

Historian Fallacy and Presentism Fallacy both involve the present and the past. The first assumes that people, at a selected point in the past, knew things that weren’t discovered until decades or centuries later. The second projects present ideas or attitudes into the past.

If you read historical novels you have likely seen examples of Historian Fallacy, like packing a womb with moldy bread to prevent infection, but it didn’t matter because that’s fiction. It matters when somebody is trying to write historical fact. My favorite example is pretending that, in the Bible, tahor/tameh mean hygienic and non-hygienic, respectively. I have blog posts about that.

Gibbon commits Historian’s Fallacy constantly. I have a thread showing why you shouldn’t read Gibbon, or why you should not sit still for it if a teacher presents Gibbon as fact in a history class.

Gibbon pretends that the Roman Republic was run by free and fair elections, and that Augustus and the emperors up to the Antonines deprived the Romans of “liberty”. Then he turns around and commits the Presentism Fallacy by pretending that liberty, as understood by the British constitution in the 1700s CE, had a role in the Roman Republic nearly 2000 years earlier.

And then a website touting its postings as documents of liberty, confuses what Gibbon was talking about, with liberty as understood in the US in the 21^st century. That’s another example of the Presentism fallacy.

DH got its start due to Presentism Fallacy. It got its start among people who pieced together information they collected from discrete documents invented in writing by individuals, creating pastiches of information that supported a given conclusion. It assumed that what it perceived in its translations of the Jewish Bible, resulted from Jews between 600 and 400 BCE also creating a pastiche from existing documents. To support this concept, DH had to propose one or more editors, some of them creating expanded editions as somebody authored new material.

The idea of editors creating ever larger pastiches implies, and the description of the DH dataset stated, that each of the documents has a different historical context. That’s all over. The Dean of Yale Divinity School has declared that DH has nothing to do with historicity; it is strictly literary. If he has published the new dataset description that eliminates historicity, I haven’t found it online. If you know what it is, you would help out fans of DH by publishing it.

Since we know on other grounds that DH has no possibility of being true, I for one don’t care about it. But you may care, because if historicity is now irrelevant, it doesn’t matter if archaeologists ever turn up the hard evidence of DH. DH will ignore it. Or at least the Dean will.

Look, historical novels are one thing, nobody is saying you should study them for fallacies. People who want their writing about history to be taken seriously, have to watch out for fallacies in their work. My experience is that they don’t do it.