After reading the comment below in response to my post on the Azeris in Iran I responded with some exasperation. Sometimes you have a "Eureka!" moment, and this is one of them. Even if I agree with John that a positivistic project is near impossible in history because of the nature of the topic, I do think that some of the distortions that I see individuals engaging in are egregious. Meta-facts, conclusions which are extracted from the broad trends of history, maybe disputable, but specific facts can be quite solid. I have a passion for various historical topics, most of them rather distant from the modern era. My passion is not utilitarian in that it is a means toward any end, it is the end. That being said, when it comes to the Azeri question I've done a fair amount of research on Central Asian history, and the Turks, and to a lesser extent Persia. As a lay person I know my shit. The commenter below has read my weblogs for years now (I've seen the referrals from his weblog), so I assume that I could attain some credibility, but obviously I haven't. People can say whatever the shit they want based on whatever data they have on hand, ideology and personal credulity is king over all. Newton might have been the last of the Sumerians, but the age of magical thinking continues....
Everywhere, everywhere, the is of thought overwhelms the is of nature, because ought is leading by the leash. In truth, is does not dictate ought, ought demands is.
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Thanks for the link, which I just noticed. I agree with this:
Meta-facts, conclusions which are extracted from the broad trends of history, maybe disputable, but specific facts can be quite solid. I have a passion for various historical topics, most of them rather distant from the modern era.
There are processes of elimination and bounding which definitively rule out certain hypotheses. Often they are empirical, factual, and without scientific interest, but just true. For example, during changes of regime, especially palace coups, it's usually possible to know the starting point and end point with absolute certainty without any real understanding of exactly how it happened -- everyone lies, everyone slanders, most witnesses are killed, most evidence is destroyed, and often you have coups within coups and double-crosses within double-crosses. Nonetheless, the outcome is known.
The fact-value distinction is a cliche, but I think one of the big errors of human history is the belief that we will sometime be able to know the answers to the big practical-normative questions with the same certainty that we know scientific or historical facts. The facts can't bear that weight; they define or limit what is possible, but don't decide it. And so much of philosophical, historical, and social-science writing tries to attain that kind of "moral of the story".
And at the same time, entirely bracketing out moral-practical thinking doesn't work either, and entirely ignoring the historical past (as voluntarists and visionaries do) can be a disastrous mistake.
It's the claim of certainty that is to be denied. I sound a bit like Popper there, but I think that Popper also overestimated the power of scientific method in dealing with moral-practical questions.