"Means to an end" generally assumes that the means is justified by the end goal, which isn't what I'm talking about. I'm saying that seeking truth is misguided, searching and defending any truth is always a falsehood, because there are only models of the world and their practical applications.
This applies to history as well, we have fragments of the past, we will never know the truth of what happened and why, you can insist that your assessment is the true one, but at the end of the day it doesn't matter. What matters is that your assessment is useful to you or to me right now, and that is the only thing we can successfully argue about, otherwise everything else is just our opinion of our own belief in the interpretation of the past.
Generally this is implicitly ackowledged in science, it rarely claims an absolute truth, simply a model that best fits all the data, and which affords us the best predictions and the best methods for accomplishing some desired outcome. The model that succeed the best at that will be the agreed on "truth" and how we go about understanding things until a better model shows up. In that sense, the scientific "truth" is a moving target by design, because the success criteria for truth is just: the current most practical understanding.
What that means for history is that yes, the science of history is very much grounded in this practical reality. You are successfully studying history if the lessons you take from the past allow you to predict the future or increase the likelihood of your desired outcome for some decision you need to make today.
Effectively I'm arguing against the narratives of truth that serves people's agendas, but I'm doing so by pointing out that my "haha" moment related to this was realizing that truth is irrelevant, believing in truth itself is a mistake. If you start to instead seek practical relevance and start to see all truth as "models of the world" and not the real truth, you'll now be able to actually judge truths for what they really are and that means how useful and helpful they are to you or me at predicting events or generating some desired outcome.
I still think my position is very different, and your position still sounds to me like it would ignore known facts if they don't fit a useful narrative.
Let's take some concrete examples. Say that a Volkswagen engineer came to a hypothetical ethical manager and said that they had discovered some of their cars' emissions were much higher in real life conditions than in the lab tests they reported. If the manager cared about the truth, they would investigate to find out how this came to be. If they cared about utility, they would hide this information, as it may cause Volkswagen to lose an edge.
Similarly for historical purposes - an ethical historian who is interested in helping the English public have a good image of itself would discard information about the horrors that the British Empire forced many people through, and only discuss the nice things they did. After all, truth doesn't exist, so why complicate the story?
Hum, okay it definitely seems I've not explained myself clearly, and I'm not too sure how to best communicate what I'm trying to share, so bare with me.
I can see that you're getting hooked on the utility side of things, when I say practical I do not imply benefitial to you in a selfish way. In fact, I'm making no moral implications, I'm not speaking to ethics or morals at all.
So it seems you're thinking I'm saying that you can simply make up falsehoods to your benefits, lie and deceive others is a great way to achieve a goal, so why not. Okay, that's not what I'm saying at all, I'm not arguing that the ends justify the means.
What I'm saying is that any argument to the truth is actually a way to deceive yourself and others. It's a dogma:
> Dogma - a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true
You'll tell me this is the truth and argument it to death until I concede defeat and agree to your truth, or we'll just agree to disagree.
Now what I am saying is that this truth of yours, it's simply a hypothetical model which fits the data you have, or at least best tries to fit and explain the data you have. That it is true or not is unknown. What we can know though, is how practical of a model it is.
So replace the word truth with model everywhere and hopefully you'll come to the same "haha" moment as me, when looking at people's truth as simply models they came up with that best explains their current data, everything becomes clearer and starts to make sense.
So in that way, I'm saying someone's truth (which in my head I think of as model of reality, or explanation and understanding of something), is only as "true" (which in my head I think as accuracy of the model to predict or create a desired effect), as it can be used practically to predict the outcome or allow us to design methods that generate some desired outcome.
That means that when a historian explains what happened in the British Empire, why they did what they did, what effects it had on people and our modern times, how it felt to live in that era, etc. I will assess how correct they are based purely on if any of that information can predict anything or allow for any applicable learnings that actually works. Otherwise I will simply conclude that that's just their opinion, and it's probably biased from their frame of reference and beliefs.
So your examples are a little beside my point. But for example, in the case of the ethical manager, let's assume since they are ethical, they don't want their cars to cause harm to the environment. If they followed what I'm saying, they would not look for some absolute truth about the cause of global warming, instead they would look for the current models of climate and emissions that have best predicted the changes in the climate or have shown the most promesse in changing the climates outcome, and use that to figure out what best to do about it. Not try to argue that the model is not the real absolute truth, because of bla bla I believe and I think and therefore, and so don't you get it...
Ok then, thanks for taking the time to re-word this, I think I get your point and I agree with it. Your use of 'practical/useful' was what was throwing me off - I'm used to seeing it in the way you meant it in physics,bbut when moving to history it took on other connotations for me.
The important thing is that we both agree that finding facts that your model can't account for means you have to replace/augment your model,nk matter how useful it's conclusions had seemed so far. This is the core of what I consider important for a theory of 'truth' to seem acceptable to me personally, and yours does pass this test.
> The important thing is that we both agree that finding facts that your model can't account for means you have to replace/augment your model,nk matter how useful it's conclusions had seemed so far
Ya I think we agree on this. Maybe I go one step further though, and I'm proposing that even if your model accounts for everything, it is still not the truth, just a good model, and that it works perfectly today does not guarantee it will work perfectly forever or that reality is exactly as your model explains it to be.
I can imagine both a reality which changes in time and space, thus a model could be perfect given some specific time and space, but no longer apply in another. And I can also imagine equal models that are both just as accurate, yet they differ in their explanation. So a model which would have perfect prediction still might not be the true reality, it could be an equal model with similar behavior, but how you've modeled things could still be very different from how reality works.
Which is where I'm kind of suggesting that the search for truth is irrelevant, and trying to argue for or against truth is futile. It be better to search for models with practical benefits instead, that the model is true to reality or not isn't something we should fight over, because it doesn't matter, and it's not objectively provable.
So when I say "search for truth", I don't mean the search for an understanding that enables better prediction or manipulation of outcomes. I take it to mean the search for what reality actually truly is like. And I'm saying the search for that, while it sounds noble, it really just ends up being dogma, and each of us can believe whatever we want. But the search for the former, the search for models of reality that have practical benefits is something we can all discuss and benefit from. And so I think our focus should move away from this "truth seeking" and towards this "practical model seeking".
Hope that made sense too. I guess in a way I'm saying that for example, if someone says that "this is what really happened in the past", and then they show you evidence as to why, there's this parchment, this old painting, this focile, well that's still just someone's belief of what happened, even if it constructs an explanation that fits the data. It might not be what actually happened at all, it's just a good model that fits the current data. So practically speaking, all you can do is nod and smile, or ask: ok what can I do with this? Can I use it to accurately predict what will happen in the future? Can I use it to make better decisions today so that the future ends up in that way instead of some other way? If no, well your explanation is crap, and all we can do with this explanation if you insist it is true is get mad at each other.
Oh, and the last thing is, with this frame of mind, it is perfectly acceptable for contradicting models to coexist. A model doesn't have to be "absolutely true to reality" to be practical. In fact, a not true to reality model could be more useful sometimes, an approximate model for example can sometimes be more easily computed, or put to use, it can make it that predicting things (while possibly less accurate), can be done more quickly or at higher scale, or with less data, etc. So again, I'm trying to show that if you discuss practical models, you kind of remove all sense of nobility and righteousness and pride and whatever that a belief in "truth" brings.
Edit: Oh and if anyone has read this far, to bring it back to Malcom Gladwell. What this means is that if you don't look at his revisionist history as a claim to the truth, but instead consider it a model of the past. The question isn't if he is right about the truth or not, but how practical is his framing of history for the reader. Can I leverage it to make better decisions today about political policies? About work policies? In my day to day life? Can I apply it to predict social trends? This is now what becomes important, how good a model is it, not how truthful is it.
I completely agree that a model that fits all data ever thrown at it is still not 'the truth', and that there is in fact no way to access ultimate truths about the world.
Unfortunately in the past I have seen people using this type of reasoning to then argue that, if truth is illusory, so is falsehood - that everything is a matter of opinion and utility (for example, Peter Jordan has argued this in the past). This does not at all follow from your my and your beliefs about ultimate truths, but it is tempting for some to extrapolate.
"Means to an end" generally assumes that the means is justified by the end goal, which isn't what I'm talking about. I'm saying that seeking truth is misguided, searching and defending any truth is always a falsehood, because there are only models of the world and their practical applications.
This applies to history as well, we have fragments of the past, we will never know the truth of what happened and why, you can insist that your assessment is the true one, but at the end of the day it doesn't matter. What matters is that your assessment is useful to you or to me right now, and that is the only thing we can successfully argue about, otherwise everything else is just our opinion of our own belief in the interpretation of the past.
Generally this is implicitly ackowledged in science, it rarely claims an absolute truth, simply a model that best fits all the data, and which affords us the best predictions and the best methods for accomplishing some desired outcome. The model that succeed the best at that will be the agreed on "truth" and how we go about understanding things until a better model shows up. In that sense, the scientific "truth" is a moving target by design, because the success criteria for truth is just: the current most practical understanding.
What that means for history is that yes, the science of history is very much grounded in this practical reality. You are successfully studying history if the lessons you take from the past allow you to predict the future or increase the likelihood of your desired outcome for some decision you need to make today.
Effectively I'm arguing against the narratives of truth that serves people's agendas, but I'm doing so by pointing out that my "haha" moment related to this was realizing that truth is irrelevant, believing in truth itself is a mistake. If you start to instead seek practical relevance and start to see all truth as "models of the world" and not the real truth, you'll now be able to actually judge truths for what they really are and that means how useful and helpful they are to you or me at predicting events or generating some desired outcome.