It comes across as though you worded this with the intent to evoke negative emotions as a psychological tactic to deter engagement, relying on sarcasm to evoke a sense of superior status without doing so explicitly. And I imagine you did so not out of some unknown personal grudge, but because my words were in some way offensive and upsetting to you.
I’m sorry. I meant no offense, and if there’s something in particular about the way I wrote which was hurtful, please, let me know, and I will apologize more specifically and endeavor to correct my error. Further, if I misread your tone here, and you actually meant to convey sincerity and welcomeness, I apologize for the misinterpretation.
Now, in this thread you say:
I cite several authoritative historians on how historians do history, including some of the most influential authors on historical methodology and epistemology in English, i.e. Carr and Elton. And I think what I’ve said on this topic fairly represents the mainstream view of historical methods and epistemology after Ranke.
Here’s the section of your blog post where the terms “Carr” and “Elton” appear:
Richard J. Evans (1997: 75) cites Sir Geoffrey Elton’s definition:
A historical fact was something that happened in the past, which had left traces in documents which could be used by historians to reconstruct it in the present.
Evans (1997: 76) notes that this view was expressed in direct contrast to E. H. Carr’s view that “a past event did not become a historical fact until it was accepted as such by historians.” Carr’s view turns out to be untenable since he confuses “fact” with “evidence”.
You don’t seem to actually use Carr to support your argument at all - you just call his position “untenable” and accuse him of confusing terms.
Your Elton line, on the other hand, does support your thesis partially - he does insist on documentation. It’s more narrow than your earlier Vincent quote:
“Historical study requires verbal evidence, with marginal exceptions. And this verbal evidence, with all respect to the fascination of oral history, is nearly all written evidence.”
But still not as narrow as your assertion (from the blog) that:
To be a historical fact about a particular time requires that the document be authored by someone who lived at that time.
Elton leaves room for “traces” and (in the material you provided) makes no such assertion about the requirement of contemporaneousness. Maybe he makes such an assertion elsewhere, but again, you don’t actually use Elton to support your stance.
Regardless, I’ll accept your definitions. Now, using your terminology that:
a fact is something that happened, and evidence is an attempt to use that fact to argue for a particular view of history.
I’d encourage you to consider this paper, which is full of the sort of discussion I referenced, but in particular this section should serve as an example:
From Diogenes we learn that Epimenides visited and purified Athens in Ol. 46 = 596-2 (cf. T 38); Eusebios refers this visit to Ol. 46. 2 = 595/4 (cf T 108), while Plutarch recounts it just before the archonship of Solon.
Diogenes wrote in ~ 3rd Century CE. You might say the only fact is that “In the 3rd century CE, a man named Diogenes believed that an event took place in the 590s BCE”. But that fact he left us is used as evidence to help date an event from, we estimate, ~590s BC.
Now, the disagreement between these sources is an example of how sources from centuries after events took place (all are from the CE) carry uncertainty.
In the blog post, you further say:
The Buddha lived in a pre-literate society and thus in a prehistoric society. A history of a pre-literate society or person is a contradiction in terms.
Similar to the forum post I quoted initially:
History is the story of literate people in literate cultures.
Both times unsupported by a citation, and contradicted by, for example, the History of the Goths covering the pre-literate goths. What’s true is that of course pre-literate societies leave no contemporary documentary evidence of their own, restricting historians to documentary evidence from other times and peoples, which is a limitation on the power of that evidence to establish hypotheses about historical events with clarity or confidence.
I can’t seem to copy & paste text from that book, but as one example on page 44 there’s a discussion using foreign sources followed by the historian making a statement of the form, “it appears.” Absent a document establishing “We the goths enter into a foedus with the Romans” a historian is able to form a hypothesis and advance it in a limited way with appropriate disclaimers.
To use a source which I can copy & paste, consider this PhD Dissertation in History on the Lucani, a people who were non-literate at least in the sense of not passing down documents to us. He says,
In evaluating the literary evidence for the Lucani, a select few authors comprise
the majority of our evidence, about whom it is expedient to say a few words here.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus’s (c. 60-7 BC) Roman Antiquities…
And so on for many other authors of around the same time. Yet the author engages with hypotheses going back as far as the 8th century BCE, and makes important claims about the 5th century BCE. All of this is appropriately disclaimed by statements such as, “The origins of the Lucani seem impossible to reconstruct with confidence.”
Depending on where you are in Europe, these limitations extend more recently. For example in Poland, “Unfortunately, the available historical information is sadly limited to the story recorded in the early 12th century by Gallus Anonymus.” Going back two centuries, to the time of Mieszko I, it’s possible to use other (primary) sources to corroborate some details, which gives credibility for this 12th century source’s account of 10th century events. Beyond that, historians take this low-quality source, together with foreign sources and non-documentary evidence, to make claims like, “research findings corroborate the idea, prevalent in scholarship, of the essential (though not exclusive) role of the Piast dynasty in the Polish state formation, as notably reflected in the dynastic legend recorded by Gallus Anonymous in his Kronika polska (Gesta Principum Polonorum. The Deeds of the Princes of the Poles, I.1-3).” But note that, of course, since this source is of low quality, it does not lend great certainty to the hypotheses of historians who use it. The two linked articles have contradictory hypotheses about events prior to the time of Mieszko I. Historians who only have documentary evidence which is foreign or late will use that foreign or late evidence, but they are neither able to be highly confident in their own hypotheses or establish agreement across the field.
Tangent about personages
There’s even an old debate about the historicity of specific figures from the Kronika polska which could be considered a parallel of the debate over the history of the Buddha, but all the sources seem to be older than the articles you cite, so I leave this not as part of my argument, but just as something for curious people to consider.
Another example comes from the Norse Sagas, an entire genre which is only written down centuries after the events they describe. And yet, from the fact that someone in the 13th-14th centuries wrote down what they thought happened in earlier times, scholars are able to develop new theses about those earlier times.
I could continue this laddering approach, showing cases where historians use sources from centuries later to form hypotheses about the 13th-14th centuries, on and on to groups which were not writing documents in the 1800s, moving further away geographically from the core regions where writing (as we understand it*) was first developed.
*
*One interesting wrinkle in the Americas at least is record-keeping systems which aren’t quite writing, like Incan Khipu, Wampum Belts, and Ojibwe Petroglyphs / Birch Bark Scrolls. AFAIK there’s nothing like this blurring the line of writing in India, but I think it’s really cool so again leave this note for the curious.
Now, in your forum post addressed to me you say:
It is certainly confirmed across numerous authoritative sources that I have consulted and I have yet to see any significant disagreement on, for example, the definition of a primary source (which you seem to want to dispute).
I don’t actually have any particular interest in disputing the definition of that term*. I just dispute your claim (from the forum post) that:
*
*there is some potential ambiguity I just want to point out and cede to whatever definition you prefer for the sake of discussion:
First, there’s the question of higher-quality primary sources surviving embedded in surviving secondary sources. It appears to me you’re on the side of not attempting to reconstruct embedded primary sources, and just treating surviving secondary sources as secondary. That’s fine by me. But if that’s not your stance, that’s also fine by me.
Second, there’s the issue of things like the Odyssey, which itself is frequently a textbook example of a primary source, but obviously only with regard to its own content (c.f. most of the Greek epics, about which we only have secondary sources). It seems to me you’re calling source documents which discuss the past, relative to the composer, as secondary sources with regards to that further past, which again is fine.
The PhD thesis on the Lucani I linked to early includes works like Dionysius of Halicarnassus’s (c. 60-7 BC) Roman Antiquities under the heading “primary sources” for his work on much earlier times. I take it you wouldn’t. That’s fine by me. Talking to you I’m calling those “secondary sources.”
Only amateurs and journalists write history based on secondary sources.
Historians use secondary sources. Even ones from centuries later.
I think it’s great to point out that we do not have contemporary eyewitness documentation supporting any aspect of the buddha’s life. The evidence for his existence should be properly classified. It is late, often distant, somewhat foreign, usually hagiographical or at least likely not independent of hagiographical traditions, etc.
An argument for a hypothesis like the assertion, “A mendicant born of the Shakya clan was the founder of the school known today as Buddhism,” will (barring some amazing discovery), be based on evidence with all of those caveats.
When you say:
For the history of the Heart Sutra, we have such primary sources as an inscription dated to 13 March 661 CE (the oldest dated document associated with the Heart Sutra ). We also have commentaries from the late 7th-early 8th centuries. And we have library catalogues from before, during, and after this period, which don’t mention the Heart Sutra before 664 CE. And so on. It is from these documents that I have constructed a revised history of the Heart Sutra
You’re bringing forth sources which provide much stronger evidence for your hypothesis. I think you’d be very justified in disputing anyone who claims an argument for the hypothesis I stated earlier is equally well supported.
But claiming secondary (or otherwise flawed) sources can’t be used to support historical hypotheses, except by “amateurs” is swinging the pendulum too far, from a false equivalence (primary = secondary) to a false nonequivalence (secondary != usable, except by “amateurs”).
History is not sharply divided into areas of perfect illumination and perfect darkness. Rather, there is a large periphery about which we cannot make highly confident direct assertions (like, say, who was president of the United States in 1801), but also we don’t have nothing to say (like, say, who was Chościsko’s father, in relation to the Piast dynasty). About those peripheral spaces, professional Historians do use sources written centuries later to cautiously advance hypotheses about pre-literate* people in pre-literate cultures.
pre-literate*
Literate again meaning “wrote down documents about themselves.” When it comes to “people” which I take to mean “persons” (since it’s contrasted to “cultures”), it’s obviously a more complicated question if so-and-so could read or write.
I don’t have much to say about your assertions regarding the nature of our sources on “The time of the Buddha”. But when you make these categorical statements about what historians do, a single example to the contrary disproves your claim.
Making hypotheses about the history of the Buddha should apply the same standards as are used when making hypotheses about other figures & places which do not have contemporary documentation. But that standard is not “stop talking”.