Fiction vs History?

[jbor]

>> The existence of a world external to ourselves has never been in
>> question --
>> it's the conceptualisation, or interpretation, of it, which is being
>> addressed. Historians and writers of fiction are both in the business of
>> representing an interpretation, or interpretations, of "the world".

on 28/10/04 1:54 PM, Keith McMullen wrote:

> So are we all. 

Yep. Mostly we're not in it as a business, but the same deal applies for
every individual.

> A careful examination of the imagined relationship
> between the human bodymind mechanism and an external world is just a
> more extreme version of the issue of the relationship between history
> and fiction, between reader and text, author and text, etc etc. The
> conceptualization of a world external to ourselves is a dualistic
> conceptualization popular in the West and leads to views of history
> and/or fiction in accord with it. Nondualistic conceptualizations, more
> popular in the East, open other doors for talking about and questioning
> the nature of reality, as well as for discussing history, fiction,
> hermeneutics, etc etc.

Sure. Many indigenous cultures also don't impose that strict separation
between "self" and "world". Works for them: works just fine. It's as valid a
way of conceptualising "the world" / "the cosmos"/ "reality"/ "existence" /
whatever you want to call it, as any other is. But whether we interpret
"self" and "world" as continuous or as separate, I don't think that anyone
has been arguing that the material world doesn't exist, which was the main
thrust of the counter-argument.

On a related point in this thread, a good balance of qualitative and
quantitative data -- or a process of quantification of an extensive sample
of qualitative data -- is the preferred research methodology of most people
working in the human sciences, and it has been for quite a while. The days
of measuring craniums in order to determine how much "knowledge" is inside
are long past.

best