VERY interesting. Godfrey, surely known to some of my readers as the proprietor at Vridar, says that using Bayesian probability is a sort of violation of Ockham's Razor: It's simply an unnecessary add-on in dealing with the historical Jesus.
Here's his nutgraf, or the main sentence within:
One can validly use Bayes to judge between competing hypotheses that seek to explain President Kennedy’s assassination, but one does not need Bayes to determine if there was a historical President Kennedy in the first place. There are much simpler ways to check that datum
Well put, especially as someone here, me, who rejects JFK assassination conspiracy theories.
But, he doesn't stop there. This:
Carrier approaches history the way positivists used to do in the olden days, approaching it like an empirical science that differs only from other sciences insofar as it has comparatively less data to work with.
Is at least halfway spot on, the positivism angle.
Then?
Followed by a cite from this Aviezar Tucker critique of Carrier:
Historical sciences use evidence to support hypotheses about historical events such as the Big Bang, the origins of the solar system, asteroids hitting the earth, the evolution and disappearance of species, and who committed a crime. Historical sciences rely more on observations than on experiments and infer particularities more than generalities. In Carrier’s view, science and the historical sciences are not identical but are continuous and mutually dependent with a quantitative difference: in his opinion, historiography has less data and so is less reliable.
Is where the rubber really hits the road.
No comments:
Post a Comment