Internet Perfidity (Fiction and history in M&D)

[andrew at cee.hw.ac.uk]

Peter Giordano writes:
> 2) It occurs to me that I'm not sure what "reinventing history" means -
> Perhaps we mean "to refocus" - For example, the lovely poem JULY 4, 1864 by
> Richard Wilbur tells two stories at once: the trip of Reverend Charles
> Dodgeson (sp) and Alice Liddle down a lazy river in England (the Genesis of
> ALICE IN WONDERLAND a forerunner of Pynchon's work) and the Battle of
> Gettysburg, thus we think about both facts in a completely different way
> I would hate for "reinvent" to mean "Make up"

Well, take what was once `fact' but no longer is fact e.g. that the
King of England has a divine right to rule England. Or how about the
`fact' that phlogisten was present in various compounds and enabled
them to burn. Meanwhile. we now have facts about human rights and
protons, electrons, neutrons et al. Didn't have them 300 years ago,
did we?  Sounds to me like we reinvented the facts somewhere in there.
And yes, reinventing facts involves `making up', at least as much as
inventing the facts in the first place. Invention, not because we are
talking about bringing something - the fact, the objects, properties,
relations et al it references, whatever - into existence, but because
we have to invent a framework of explanation, interpretation,
understanding and action within which the fact operates/is employed as
a fact. The issue is not one of ontology but epistemology and praxis.

> 3) Andrew suggests that the text 2 + 2 = 4 is subjective - Yes, the text is
> subjective but are the facts behind the text subjective?   Aren't the facts
> just the facts but isn't our effort to explain those facts or our need to
> store those facts via words or picutures or evidence subjective?

What are these `facts behind the text'? It is erroneous to regard the
text and the fact as equivalent, but that does not mean we have to
have some other `thing' which is the fact. If I were to say `That's a
fact' and you ask me `What's a fact?', I would present you with the
relevant statement i.e. the text (I might, instead, show you what I
mean but let's assume I use words). I wouldn't say it's the thing
referred to by this text. How would you know what it refers to?
(n.b. for any LudWit fans out there Peter is in the company of Frege
and the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus in following this line of
questioning - answering it led to most of the changes Wittgenstein
instituted in his later work).

Here's an analogy of Wittgenstein's which is apropos. If we were
playing chess and you asked me what a knight was and I pointed to the
piece would you then say that that was only a representation of the
knight. Clearly, any old piece of wood would do as well as a knight,
could be a knight, but what would make it a knight rather than (as
well as) a piece of wood is *that it was used as a knight in a game of
chess*. Ditto what makes it a fact that Columbus discovered America is
how we use statements like "Columbus discovered America". Not the
mechanics of utterance or anything like that but the way we accept,
reject or discursively draw out judgements and actions from occurences
of such statements in written or spoken speech.

> 4) Who discovered America?  Assuming the above means who was the first
> person from Europe to set foot on American soil (the generally accepted
> interpretation of the above) I'm sure nobody knows but that doesn't mean
> that there wasn't a first European to do so

It's a trick question. America wasn't discovered, it was invented.


Andrew Dinn
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How do you know but ev'ry bird that cuts the airy way
Is an immense world of pleasure clos'd by your senses five