Romans and Barbarians

The tomb of Theodoric, King of the Ostrogoths in Italy (died 526 CE). That roof is a single piece of stone, and he seems to have been buried in a porphyry bathtub. I once visited Ravenna for a few hours. Source: Wikimedia Commons

If you can bear not just Romans but Christian Romans, late antiquity is a fascinating time. The period from when the Roman empire fell into civil wars in the third century CE, and the remainder of the empire drew inwards under pressure from Arabs and Slavs and angry theologians was a time of rapid changes that we know just enough about to argue about. Some of the biggest questions are about how to think about interactions between Romans and barbarians. This has been discussed so intensively by very clever people with very similar backgrounds that debates sometimes get dogmatic and people have a hard time listening to new perspectives.

In his brief period of experimenting on posting on other people’s sites, Canadian historian and essayist Phil Paine had a discussion with medievalist Jonathan Jarett. For my post in October I would like to share his words, and the comparative evidence that he uses.

North America has many well-documented cases of tribal migrations within historic times, in which family groups of hundreds, and sometimes thousands, moved considerable distances with the specific intention of setting themselves up in a new locale. Sometimes this involved making war against existing occupants of a place. Sometimes they were compelled to do so by defeat at the hands of another tribe. At other times it involved deal-making or confederation. It is not known what prompted the entire Mandan Nation, for instance, to migrate a thousand miles from the Midwest to the Upper Missouri country, but they were joined there by the Hidatsa, who were migrating from the equally distant Gulf coast, and they established themselves as allied farmer-traders in a region that had known no agriculture. Some of the locals joined them, some among them split off to become plains warriors. Western Canada witnessed many large scale migrations of people that are traceable over a period of three centuries.

We cannot assume automatically that things worked the same way in the Europe of late antiquity, but drawing analogies from native North America seems to me a valid way of discussing what is likely, unlikely, possible, or impossible.

Many countries in Latin America, equipped with modern armies and technology, are unable to prevent tribal peoples from migrating to the edges of their cities and setting themselves up in favelas or bidonvilles, retaining their own languages and customs without much difficulty. Often this takes the form of “chain migration”, where small groups make a foothold, and then whole villages follow them. The national authorities often send in police, or even the army, to stop such incursions, only to find themselves faced with well-organized and effective opposition.

Despite the Roman Empire’s urbanization and fairly impressive technology, the various tribal peoples on the periphery of the empire could often put together fighting forces that had a good chance of defeating a legion. The difference in military technology was not great — it was money and large-scale co-ordination that kept them out. If that co-ordination and financing was absent, then what was to stop any enterprising, and reasonably aggressive group from simply walking in and carving out a little space for themselves? Especially if they found depopulated areas, or plantations farmed by slaves or aged coloni, or areas in which the local elite saw no percentage in defending the Empire? The fact that the Romans had aqueducts and hypocausts, and the invaders did not, doesn’t seem to weigh much in the equation. Nor does any greater degree of “social complexity” the Empire may have had. The invaders didn’t have to be complex, they just had to fight well. In such a situation, the invading “horde” need not be especially large to put it’s stamp on a region. A well-organized empire could rush disciplined troops to stop isolated incursions — but what about when there were twenty incursions occurring simultaneously, in different locations? The logistic problems pile up quickly. Whatever differences in social complexity existed might work as much in the barbarians favour as against it, just as the crude tribal organization of Afghanistan’s Pathans has proven to be militarily effective against British, Soviet, and American global empires.

The Rajputs of India were little more than a small military caste with an associated ethnic group, from the marginal lands of the Thar desert. Their associated peasantry migrated with them in some conquests, but not all. The states they attacked far surpassed them in organization, wealth, and technology. Yet Rajputs ruled more than four hundred of the estimated six hundred princely states at the time of India’s independence.

Phil Paine, comment to https://tenthmedieval.wordpress.com/2009/02/23/two-seminars-two-cities-part-1-seminary-xl-with-peter-heather/

Roman historians developed a long theoretical and philological argument against barbarian migrations. They used a few historical models of the sort cited by Eric Hobsbawm to argue that what the Romans call “the Ostrogoths” was probably a multiethnic army that picked up soldiers, medics, and camp followers wherever it went, and was united at least as much by their shared hardships as shared language, customs, or ancestry. This works well in some places, in other places the new research on archaeogenetics has challenged some things. But I have never seen any of these historians cite parallels from Turtle Island north of Mexico. It seems generally agreed that the Mexica migrated to their current homeland from far in the north, because that was their tradition and their language is related to languages spoken far to the north but not languages near Mexico City.

Historians have trouble with comparative evidence because our methods require studying the unique evidence from a specific place and time, and there is just so much history. The case that comes to my mind is probably not one that you know. The structure of our departments also discourages breadth: you keep a job at a research university by publishing many things on a narrow specialty. Historians tend to be lone wolves who resist being told what or how to write, but if 100 historians write case studies of 100 societies, those studies are much more useful if they follow the same format. Informal chats about comparative evidence often break down because not everyone in the discussion is a trained scholar who knows every case well. Keepers of bookandswordblog lore will remember my chat with S.M. Stirling where I made some mistakes because I was going outside my specialty and working quickly without time to fact-check.

I admire projects like the World History Association where Roman historian Morgan Lemmer-Webber works, or the database of Religious History at UBC, or Robert Rollinger’s project on empires in world history. Broad comparative studies are hard to do well, and neither universities not the market reward them, but without them people can believe that something is a law when its just true some of the time, or believe that something about their favorite society is special when its actually typical.

Further Reading

Pereltsavig and Lewis’ book on the Indo-European controversy covers some similar issues

The rich world that produced the open web is dying, and a new poorer world is struggling to be born. I would like to keep blogging monthly as the lamps go out one by one. If you can, please support this site by sharing pages, donating, or talking about what you read at your next coffee with friends.

PS. I like Guy Halsall’s idea that the most organized Anglo-Saxons in Britain may have been soldiers from the hill zone that runs north-east to south-west through England who decided that if nobody was paying them any more, maybe they were not Romans either (Caesar’s soldiers had loved playing barbarian for centuries, and by the third century, some European barbarians had reorganized their egalitarian societies so they could support men a lot like Roman soldiers, both in the sense that they had steel swords and silver-plated helmets, and that they bossed around their neighbours and beat or stomped on anyone who was not humble enough).

(written summer to October 2025, scheduled 10 October 2025)

#ancient #comparativeEvidence #LateAntique #PhilPaine #worldHistory

Knowing Things is Hard

Knowing things is hard, even about the past. Over the years I have compiled pithy names for some of the reasons why this is. This week I decided to share them in the style of Andrew Gelman’s Handy Statistical Lexicon or Samuel Johnson’s dictionary. Right now many entries are blank or just link to other people’s websites and articles. If I ever turn these into a book, I will expand them. Until then I can add entries one at a time as they become necessary.

A

Abstraction: Wikipedia’s explanation needs work.

Computer scientists use abstraction to make models that can be used and re-used without having to re-write all the program code for each new application on every different type of computer. They communicate their solutions with the computer by writing source code in some particular computer language which can be translated into machine code for different types of computers to execute. Abstraction allows program designers to separate a framework (categorical concepts related to computing problems) from specific instances which implement details. This means that the program code can be written so that code does not have to depend on the specific details of supporting applications, operating system software, or hardware, but on a categorical concept of the solution.

Ad fontes: you will always learn things by checking the original sources for a claim, even if they have been examined a thousand times by people smarter than you.

if I could insist on one skill that I have been trained, and practiced, to have, the skill that I think historians really specialize in, as a core requirement of humanities education today, it would be this; Ad Fontes, back (again) to the sources.

David Hitchcock, May 2025

All Publicity is Good Publicity: see Truth Sandwich ↩

Analogy …

Anecdote: its wise not to trust them unless you have checked an original source. All too often the story that you use to represent a situation in miniature was made up by a journalist in 1928 or an opera writer in 1782. See Friedman’s Law of Anecdotes for more details. ↩

Anchoring Effect (skepdic): once you have a number for something, you tend to feel that other numbers for it should be similar, even if the first number was pulled out of a hat. This is one reason why Decorative Statistics (q.v.) are not harmless, and why Anecdotes (q.v.) should not be trusted. ↩

Appeal to Authority: in science, we have no good or bad authorities. There is simply evidence and claims which fit it well or poorly and make interesting or trivial predictions. Cp. Verified Trust and Regula Magistri. ↩

Apples and Oranges: eg. comparing the maximum range of a bow with the effective range of a musket against a single soldier. Nobody expects to hit a human with a bow at 240 yards, and not just because that human has 3 to 6 seconds to spot the arrow and get out of the way! And a musketball can easily carry a thousand yards.

Archaeological Visibility: ceramics and lithics survive much better than skin, wood, or textiles, but most things in the ancient world were made of those materials which rarely survive. So we know the most about objects of the less common materials. ↩

Argumentum ad baculum: sometimes you can just shut down a research program by burning down the research institute and locking up the researchers. I talked about this in Violence Makes Permanent. Compare History is Written by Losers. ↩

Argumentative Theory of Reason (Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber): You cannot reason someone out of a position which they did not reason themselves in to, yet hearing other views helps you develop your own. If we were always as cautious and unsure as the evidence warrants, little ancient history would be written! ↩

Art Historian’s Dilemma: iconography such as paintings and sculptures is governed by all kinds of things other than fidelity to the seen world. Taking it literally is dangerous, but so is rejecting everything unfamiliar or uncomfortable (because people are subject to confirmation bias). In practice you can study conventions (Pharaoh is always the tallest), and you can see if things are physically possible (no there are not societies where the aristocracy are a whole head higher than everyone else, and mummies of pharaohs are ordinary sized anyways), but in the end you have to use judgement about what reality the art reflects. ↩

Authoritarian Teleology (Iza Ding, 2023):

Broadly speaking, it’s a style of thinking that interprets whatever an authoritarian govt does as a ‘strategy’ to ‘stay/remain/survive in power.’ … We also see a functionalism that explains everything by staying in power. Repress? To stay in power. Ease repression? To stay in power. … This might not be wrong, but it is unfalsifiable. … Another big problem is that ‘between action and consequence lies a chasm that no one can bridge, let alone control.’ … Other factors like emotions, pettiness, petulance, values, commitments, laziness, narcissism, and mere stupidity get set aside or coopted

Iza Ding, Associate Professor of Political Science, Northwestern University (Illinois), @[email protected], 18 November 2023 http://archive.today/oagGs

She has now used this term in at least one lecture. See also Illusion of Control. ↩

Autobiographical Heuristic: Assuming that elements in a work of literature reflect the writer’s life and experience, rather than earlier texts, things they had been told, or pure imagination.

ancient biographers of famous poets … had access to extremely little genuine information about famous poets’ lives, but they desperately wanted more information, so they tried to interpret those poets’ works biographically, assuming that their characters’ personalities reflect aspects of the poets’ own personalities and that events the poets portray as happening to their characters reflect actual events that happened to the poets themselves in real life. The problem is that, in the absence of reliable biographical information about the author of a given work, it is impossible to reliably distinguish which aspects of the work are inspired by the author’s real life and which aspects are purely fictional with no basis in reality. Moreover, even when events in a play do probably draw inspiration from real-life events, they also draw from the literary tradition. For instance, although Sophokles’s depiction of the plague in the Oidipous Tyrannos does probably owe some inspiration to the real-life Plague of Athens, it almost certainly also draws inspiration from the Iliad, which similarly begins with a plague sent by Apollon devastating the Achaian troops.

Spencer McDaniel https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2024/04/30/what-do-the-newly-read-herculaneum-papyri-actually-tell-us-about-plato/

See also Persona. ↩

Auxiliary Sciences of History (Wikipedia) … ↩

Availability Bias: The first number people hear, or story they are told, has much more influence than the next number or story. I talked about this in my first book. ↩

B

Base rates …

Big, modern, educated brains: don’t use them to imagine how you would solve a problem when you can ask skilled but less educated people from another culture how they did it! Your solution might not be worse than a historical solution, but it will almost certainly be different. ↩

Big Data Can be Bad Data (Michael E. Smith): Putting math in it does not make it science if the numbers were made up. See also Decorative Statistics and Garbage In, Garbage Out and Numbers from Nowhere. ↩

Binary Thinking / False Dichotomy …

Books Feed Books: often this how-to book retells that how-to book even if no skilled worker actually does it that way. If there are 10 books on a topic, someone will probably write the eleventh because there is clearly an interest and they have models to follow. ↩

Boy who cried wolf: if you often make false predictions, people may stop listening to you even when you say something true (although if this always happened, most pundits would need to get a real job). Gillian Russell points out that just because most nutrition science or sports science is false or useless does not mean that you should ignore everything that comes out of those disciplines. An ideal epistemic agent would consider every claim on its merits. But because of Brandolini’s Law (qv.) its often wise to ignore sources which tend to be unreliable and not give them an open-minded listening. Its also wise not to say things which your audience can easily learn are wrong. One reason that verified trust (qv.) is so important is that it lets you check the things you are in a position to check while neither believing anything that seems plausible or rejecting everything you have not tried for yourself. ↩

Brandolini’s Law, the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle (2013): “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.” https://www.theifod.com/brandolinis-law-the-bullshit-asymmetry-principle/ ↩

Burden of Proof: its the obligation of the person making a claim to support it, not of the audience to refute it. See Brandolini’s Law and Research Incumbency Rule. ↩

C

Caesar’s Wife Must Be Above Suspicion: its hard to establish all the details of even one scandal even in your own culture today. Deciding what to make of the stories that Aspasia advised Pericles or Artaxerxes’ son killed him can be even more difficult. Because trusting someone untrustworthy hurts more than distrusting someone trustworthy, it can be a useful practical heuristic to be very suspicious of anyone about whom there is a credible scandal (cp. Gell-Mann Amnesia), but that is not so useful for finding the truth, especially when our sources have been selected to tell only one side of the story. This is also called falsus in uno falsus in omnibus. ↩

Category Error (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) ↩

Cherrypicking: choose the data or the interpretation which supports your preferred interpretation ↩

Chronology: If you don’t know what happened before what, you can’t establish cause and effect (“wet streets cause rain”). But establishing that in the ancient world can be surprisingly difficult! See One of Our Years is Missing and The End of Lydia- 547? (livius.org) ↩

Citing Nonexistent Sources: ChatGPT output is not the only text that does this! ↩

Clash of Civilizations: very rarely a real thing but makes good stories. See Internal vs. External Conflict.

Classical Style of Argument (2016) ↩

Confabulation (Skeptic’s Dictionary): see also Power of Fiction. NB. “children and many adults confabulate when encouraged to talk about things of which they have no knowledge.” (think about what this implies about LLMs and spicy autocomplete) ↩

Confidence: most people are convinced by someone they like speaking confidently in the style of someone who knows what they are talking about. Aristotle among others talks about these issues and it was probably known since the sophistic in the fifth century BCE (see also sophistry). A lot of quantitative economic history relies on trusting the paper which makes everything sound so certain and the disagreements so technical and not looking at the details of where that estimate for industrial investment in nineteenth-century Germany or the population of Pompeii comes from.

one of the important steps in a young fan’s journey to maturity is realizing that Heinlein’s ability to sound as if he knew what he was talking about was much greater than his ability to actually know what he was talking about.

In particular, re-reading Expanded Universe, and the line about how “[t]he most expensive thing in the world is a second-best military establishment”, at a point in my life where I knew a little something about game theory, that made me re-evaluate my trust in the man.

‘Avram’, comment on the Making Light blog, 23 January 2011 (archive.ph)

Confirmation Bias: Most people are much better at making up arguments for something they want to believe or against something they don’t want to believe than at finding the truth. This is one reason why academia is based around debates. One possible reason for this is the Argumentative Theory of Reason (q.v.). See nullius in verbis. ↩

Constitutive Other: many neurotypicals define themselves against one, even if that other is mostly made up. The Wikipedia page on Other (Philosophy) points to 20th century philosophers, but the specific phrase Constitutive Other is hard to find in Google Books before 1991. I would like to explore the history of this concept further! ↩

Context: humanities epistemology depends on knowing where things come from. Archaeological context determines what a find means, and the difference between an innocent act and fraud is the situation. Much bad thinking comes from the desire to have a magic wand that lets you separate truth from falsehood without thinking. ↩

Cool URIs don’t change. Changing them breaks the link from citation to source. Knowing where something actually comes from is key to historical scholarship, because if the original argument was bad, often nobody since has made a better argument. ↩

Counterfactuals (Meyer v. Weber): you can’t discuss cause and effect without making claims about what would have happened without this, but predicting what would have happened in that case is very very hard. Predictions, like advice, often tell you more about the person giving them than about the world. Statisticians talk about the link between counterfactuals and cause and effect as causal inference. ↩

D

Deconstruction …

Decorative Statistics (Ray Fisman, Andrew Gelman, and Matthew C. Stephenson, “The Statistics That Come Out of Nowhere,” The Atlantic, March 2023)

These numbers are what we might call “decorative statistics.” Their purpose is not to convey an actual amount of money but to sound big and impressive. That doesn’t keep them from being added, subtracted, divided, or multiplied to yield other decorative statistics.

Decadence and Decay: its a Trope (qv.) in lands once ruled by Rome that everything, and especially morals and military preparedness, is in decline. If you read in the preamble of a Tudor law that the people were no longer practicing archery like their fathers, it can sound like an observation until you read the same complaint in a Moroccan Arab archery manual or a Christian Roman military manual. Before you trust a work of literature telling you that everything is falling apart, its important to look for evidence of such a change outside polished literary writing.

Defensiveness: its embarrassing to be wrong in public, so once you have publicly committed to a position its hard to change your mind. See also Confirmation Bias and Identity Protection and Partisanship.

Déformation professionnelle: see mentalités, modelling minds

Disciplines: ever since academia was divided into them in the middle ages, information has travelled better within a discipline than between disciplines. Alex Usher once said that academics in Canada have an unspoken agreement not to have opinions on the validity of research on other disciplines, although I’m not sure that matches my experience. See also Books Feed Books.

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E

Easiest Person to Fool: its yourself! (Richard Feynman, “Cargo-Cult Science,” 1974) ↩

Ecological fallacy: the average person in the past saw about two children reach adulthood, but many had none and many had five. Peasant societies are diverse and dynamic when you look closely, they only seem static and unchanging when you zoom out and look for overall trends. One family often rose and fell in income, one village specialized in millstones or weaving cloaks, its only when we look at an economy as a whole that we see average income staying about the same and millstones and cloaks being made. ↩

Empty Citations (Anne-Will Harzing)

Empty references are references that do not contain any original evidence for the phenomenon under investigation, but strictly refer to other studies to substantiate their claim. Other authors subsequently use these empty references to substantiate their claims rather than going back to cite the original source. Empty references can go through several iterations with each subsequent author citing empty references that in turn cite other empty references.

Anne-Will Harzing, “Are Our Referencing Errors Undermining Our Scholarship and Credibility?” p. 130

Ethnographic analogy … Cp. McLean’s Heuristic of Recreation and Big, Modern, Educated Brains.

Equifinality

Archaeologists worry about equifinality, for example, a principle according to which many different past processes can result in the same or similar outcomes in the present. Is that “stone tool” the result of human planning and action, or is it the result of a mudflow? How do we tell the difference?

Andre Costopoulos https://archeothoughts.wordpress.com/2024/04/18/flint-dibble-and-graham-hancock-on-joe-rogan-key-takeaways/

Essentialism (Plato): I mostly cover this under The Map is Not the Territory. Note how people can see words like “hoplites” as a Platonic type, and have trouble accepting that a hoplite in 650 BCE can be a man with a shield 120 cm wide, two spears, gleaming bronze armour, and a sword a Viking would be satisfied with who might use it for a little light feuding, while a hoplite in 350 BCE can be a man with a shield 80 cm wide, one spear, a bronze skullcap, and a dagger who only ever expects to use those arms on behalf of his polis. The words are the same but most important aspects of the soldier are different.

Everest Fallacy (Keith Hopkins) ↩

Evidence is weighed not counted: this legal maxim is humanists’ equivalent of Garbage In, Garbage out.

Experts’ Disease: its easy to forget how little most people know or think about your area of expertise (XKCD 2501). An example of modelling minds is hard (q.v.) ↩

Euhemerism: a species of rationalization (q.v.) where you postulate that a myth is a distorted version of a true story and ignore that people in the distant past had imaginations (q.v.) ↩

F

Faute de mieux: if you give a number for something, no matter how transparently untrustworthy, someone else will use it for lack of anything better. ↩

Folk Models, Folk Psychology, etc. (see also The Map is Not the Territory and Abstraction) ↩

Forgery: since antiquity people have made up ‘ancient’ texts and art which show what they want to show and say what they want to say. see eg. Oscar White Muscarella, ed., The Lie Became Great: The Forgery of Ancient Near Eastern Cultures (Brill, 2002) or Ariel Sabar, Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife (2020). See Invented Sources. ↩

Fractal Wrongness (Keunwoo Lee, 2001)

The state of being wrong at every conceivable scale of resolution. That is, from a distance, a fractally wrong person’s worldview is incorrect; and furthermore, if you zoom in on any small part of that person’s worldview, that part is just as wrong as the whole worldview.

Friedman’s Law of Anecdotes (2010) “Distrust any historical anecdote good enough to have survived on its literary merit” http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/ (2010) via https://willscommonplacebook.blogspot.com/ (2010) and https://willscommonplacebook.blogspot.com/ (2013) (backed up at https://archive.is/REti1) ↩

Founder Effects (Wikipedia): these affect research traditions too!

G

Garbage In, Garbage Out: many of us are still as confused as Mr. Babbage’s interlocutor. The problem is the same whether you process the data with a machine or with your wetware.

On two occasions I have been asked, “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” … I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_in,_garbage_out

Gee-whiz: what reporters want from scientists. So reporters tend to look for big claims and be very credulous, and scientists who don’t play along don’t get an audience. “When academic researchers get media attention for their work, it’s typically universally positive. So it’s natural for them to keep the positivity vibe going and not be a party pooper.” (Andrew Gelman)

Generalization: when you have enough agreement between enough evidence to generalize is a hard problem. Yes, all models are wrong but some are useful, but nobody wants a hasty generalization from a sample of 1. ↩

Gish Gallop: a technique where dishonest debaters throw out a lot of nonsense very quickly hoping that the other side will try to respond point by point and run out of time leaving the impression that they could only answer part of it. Brandolini’s Law explains how this works. Named after American creationist Duane Gish (d. 2013) ↩

God of the Gaps

Goldacre’s Rule of Internet Journalism (2012): “if you don’t link to primary sources, I just don’t trust you.” https://www.badscience.net/2011/03/why-dont-journalists-link-to-primary-sources/ ↩

Goropizing (livius.org)

Gresham’s Law of Information (2006?): on the Internet, clickable information drives out good https://www.livius.org/articles/theory/bad-information-drives-out-good/ David Henige has a different version:

Bad idea, like bad money, never completely leave the marketplace: the High Counters’ numbers- and worse, the notions underpinning them- are here to stay, not only beacuse they fir so well into the High Counters’ preferred surroundings but also because these numbers, like any numbers, fill so well an epistemological vacuum.

David Henige, Numbers from Nowhere: The American Indian Contact Population Debate (University of Oklahoma Press: Norman, OK, 1998), p. 315

H

Halo Effect (Skepdic): if someone sounds wise, we tend to assume he or she is honest and good-looking. If someone is a criminal, we tend to expect that they cheat at senet and wear rumpled black.

Harmonization of Sources: erasing the parts of sources which disagree with each other, such as building a Christmas narrative out of bits of Matthew and Luke and later tradition. There was an ancient proposal to write a new gospel from the canonical four to avoid all the troubling questions about the similarities and differences.

So, who are we going to believe? Livy’s 1000 iugera of public land, Plutarch’s 500 iugera of land (unspecified), or Appian’s 500 iugera of public land plus 250 for every son? Many historians harmonize these bits of information, saying that the land bill allowed a man to own 500 iugera of public land, plus 250 for his two first sons. This may well be true, but it is also contradicted by all sources.

Jona Lendering https://www.livius.org/articles/theory/testis-unus-testis-nullus/

Hermeneutic Cycle (livius.org s.v. explanation)

Higher Naiveté (Donald Kagan attributes to “a former colleague of mine”)

My principle is this. I believe anything written in ancient Latin or Greek unless I can’t. Now, things that prevent me from believing what I read are that they are internally contradictory, or what they say is impossible, or different ones contradict each other and they can’t both be right. So, in those cases I abandon the ancient evidence. Otherwise, you’ve got to convince me that they’re not true.

Donald Kagan as quoted at https://www.sociology.education/p/how-skeptical-is-too-skeptical-the

History is Written by Losers (2013): winners are busy swimming in vaults full of gold, having a nice dinner and drinks, and going to bed with bevies of cute people, losers have time and grudges and writing is cheap. Thucydides, Polybius, Sallust, and Sima Qian were not winners. ↩

History from Square Brackets

As every working historian knows, there is a peculiar brand of historical fiction created by those (most often primarily historians, not epigraphists) who build far-ranging historical theories on words or phrases which their epigraphist predecessors have inserted- meaning no harm, and often exempli gratia– between square brackets in a fragmentary text. The epigraphic facts will be admitted, sometimes even discussed, with the conclusion that the supplement is ‘necessary’ or ‘inevitable.’ As every epigraphist knows, and some historians as well, such a statement, especially in non-stoichedon texts and non-formulaic phrases, is often a warning that the wish has been father to the thought, and that scrutiny is needed.

Ernst Badian, “History from ‘Square Brackets’,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik Bd. 79 (1989), pp. 59-70 https://www.jstor.org/stable/20187151 Stoichedon is what computer typographers call monospaced, a script where every character occupies the same width

Historical intervention (B. Devereaux after?) …

Hollywood: the Power of Fiction is great (q.v.) The power of films and TV is great too. Who outside South Africa would remember the Anglo-Zulu War without Zulu (1964) and Zulu Dawn (1979)? As Matthew Amt (qv.) says, just assume everything you see on TV or in theatre is wrong!

Hyperbole: People often exaggerate to get attention (but other people use restrained understatement). ↩

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I, J

Identities: we can’t access other people’s internal mental states at all. We can sometimes know what identities people asserted or performed, but if they needed to assert them then that identity may have been disputed. As Jacques Lacan supposedly put it, “If a man who thinks he is a king is mad, a king who thinks he is a king is no less so.”

Ideal types: a species of reification (qv.) and No True Scotsman fallacy where you reduce a diverse population to an ideal vision then act as if they are all like that and the diversity does not exist. For example, someone might say that Japanese swords are short because katanas for streetwear in the Edo period and army use in the 1930s and 1940s have blades roughly 28″ / 70 cm long, and not see that any large collection has Japanese swords from the Edo Period and earlier with 32″ (80 cm) and longer blades (eg. Morihiro Ogawa, ed., Art of the Samurai: Japanese Arms and Armor, 1156–1868 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art: New York, 2009)). Katanas tend to be relatively short, like Viking Age swords or Katzbalgers or hangers, but there were long ones which were brought out when appropriate. ↩

Identity Protection: most neurotypicals identify strongly with groups which they imagine themselves to be members of, and defend those groups against criticism. Those groups make up all kinds of stories about their origins and past actions and teach them as true. History is the science of discovering truth about the past, so it always conflicts with these stories and threatens identity groups. Therefore, powerful and unscrupulous people will always be hostile to the practice and teaching of history. See also Deconstruction, Invented Tradition. ↩

Illusion of Control: states are not governed by philosopher-kings. Grand Admiral Thrawn, Xanatos, and Professor Moriarty are not real. Post hoc ergo propter hoc is a fallacy. The tide will not stop for King Canute. Parliament can’t solve every problem by passing legislation. Its all to easy to assume that kings and councils in the past had master plans based on careful thought and were not bumbling their way through things or acting on impulse like the people in the news or at our hobby club today. ↩

Imagination: never assume that people in the past could not just make stuff up! See also Power of Fiction. ↩

Incorrect Premises: many people’s beliefs about the past are rooted in false assumptions, such as assuming that riding a horse was as convenient as driving a car or of course there were nonpartisan, impersonal courts following formal procedures with jurisdiction over everyone or obviously everyone was either superstitious and ignorant or a liberal humanist. People have trouble expressing these assumptions (see also Tacit Knowledge). Identifying and addressing these is the hardest part of teaching history (see also Modelling Minds). Bret Devereaux has a series on ancient polytheism, what Christians and post-Christians tend to misunderstand about it, and how its a good rule of thumb that people in other societies took their religious as seriously as Americans take political theories or some Europeans take World Cup soccer.

Internal vs. External Conflict, Narcissism of Small Differences (Sigmund Freud: Wikipedia s.v. Narcissism of Small Differences): the most vicious fights are often between people who are very similar, such as fascist dictators and communist dictators, different wings of the same political movement in the same country, or neighbouring communities. Fights that line up along cultural or civilisational differences are rare.

Intertexuality: when you have three sources, sometimes Ctesias is playing with a story in Herodotus and Herodotus is adapting a story in Aeschylus rather than engage with the world outside of texts. When a description of cavalry combat in Arrian’s history of Alexander is especially vivid, that is because he cribbed it from Xenophon to make a point that Alexander was even mightier than Cyrus the Younger. See also Small World, Big Drama and Tacit Knowledge.

Vi Hart’s Internet Votes (written 2015, published 2017):

On the internet, content rises to the top if it wins the popular vote. But unlike modern implementations of democracy, you get as many votes as you have time to give, all day every day, and most of those votes are taken by web companies without asking. And unlike the popular vote in democracy, internet popularity votes do not imply endorsement. Votes that come from gut reactions take less time than anything involving actual thought. … In theory when you want to work but feel uninspired, browsing the web should lead you to a great many wonderful things that really make you want to create something. But if you are browsing in a part of the web that promotes things using internet votes, you are all but guaranteed to only find things that elicit a quick easy user action and then leave the user unsatisfied and looking for more. In practice, inspiring and satisfying pieces of content are dead ends for user actions. Thoughtful pieces of content that take twenty minutes to read get one vote in the time it takes for pretty pictures and amusing memes to get dozens.

Invented Sources: according to a UN report, 97% of statistics are just made up. If you just make up a source it will say whatever you want it to say and nobody can find it and show that something in it contradicts you. See Historia Augusta (livius.org), Geoffrey of Monmouth, Protocols of the Elders of Zion. See also Forgery.

Invented statistics: see Invented Sources and Decorative Statistics

Invention of Tradition (Eric Hobsbawm): Many things which people tell you are ancient were invented last Tuesday. Pericles’ funeral speech for the war dead may have been a tradition just a few decades old but Thucydides still calls it an ancestral custom. Clan tartans were invented when Victoria was queen of England. Wikipedia on Invented Tradition. See also Identity Protection.

Is-ought problem (David Hume): The original eighteenth-century prose lays it out with merciless politeness.

In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, it’s necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. But as authors do not commonly use this precaution, I shall presume to recommend it to the readers; and am persuaded, that this small attention would subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceived by reason.

David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739) book 3

Irresponsible Passive

As an instructor concerned with the writing of history I have often inveighed against historians who use the ‘irresponsible passive.’ For example, in the sentence ‘Black slaves were bought from blacks in Africa,’ the identity of the responsible party vanishes into the abyss of the passive. Compare ‘White slave traders bought black slaves from other blacks in Africa.’ That way we know who did it.

J.H. Hexter, On Historians, London 1979, p. 2 n. 2) as quoted in David Whitehead, Aineas the Tactician, How to Survive Under Siege: A Historical Commentary, second edition (Bristol Classical Press: London, 2003) p. 3

Another term for this is avoidance of agency. That has the advantage that these grammatical structures do not always use the passive voice, and the passive voice can include agency (‘Black slaves were bought by Europeans and Arabs and carried overseas’).

K

Kaiser Josef Wrote Don Giovanni Syndrome (Phil Paine): we often give rulers credit for things that just happened when they were alive. If you asked the oligarchs of any declining place, they will tell you that they and their ancestors were the source of all wealth and creativity, when in fact the elites took over as the growth and newness were faltering or reversing. See also Misattributed Quotations which also tend to be assigned to the most famous person who might possibly have said them.

Kernel of truth: one thing which people who practice Euhemerism (q.v.) say they are looking for.

L

Legibility (James C. Scott)

Lendering’s Law of Misconceptions (2009): “Of the fifty mistakes I have discussed in my little book on common errors (about the ancient world), thirty-seven were made by people with a Ph.D. speaking on subjects outside their field of competence.”

Looking for Heroes: because binary thinking (qv.) is natural, its tempting to assume that if someone you don’t like criticized someone, that someone must be good. Many people suspicious of the US government admired Hugo Chávez and as long as they never visited Venezuela or talked to ordinary Venezuelans that was easy to do. If you hate Spartan serfdom, its tempting to admire Epaminondas of Thebes. Often both sides in a conflict are terrible stupid greedy people.

Lumpers versus Splitters: … See also Periodization, Reality is Continuous.

M

Maps: In societies which did not leave them, linking places to names is hard.

Map is not the Territory (Alfred Korzybski) …

Matthew Amt’s Law

as far as history goes, the rule of thumb is to assume that everything you see in a movie is WRONG, and go from there. Movies are for fun, but go elsewhere for knowledge, eh? Thanks!

Matthew Amt’s Greek Hoplite Page https://www.larp.com/hoplite/

Maximalism and Minimalism https://www.livius.org/articles/theory/maximalists-and-minimalists/

McLean’s Heuristic of Recreation

In trying to recreate (the ancient or medieval world), (slightly later cultures in the same area) are useful places to look for hints if you can’t find the information in a source (from your culture). It’s not perfect, but a lot better than using your enormous 21st c. brain to attempt to deduce things you don’t know from first principles. Diderot’s Encyclopedie (from the 18th century) was a great help to me in trying to recreate medieval scabbards, for example.

https://willscommonplacebook.blogspot.com/2008/04/how-on-earth-do-you-find-these-things.html

The dark side of this is using Viking Age technology to imagine Achaemenid technology, only to discover that the Viking age was later and they had invented some new things like firesteels. See also Big, Modern, Educated Brains.

McLean’s Heuristic of Anecdotes: distrust any anecdote memorable enough to circulate on its own. See Friedman’s Law of Anecdotes.

Memory: the everyday individual kind is fallible, as described in books like Elizabeth Loftus’ Eyewitness Testimony. The social collective kind like the stories we tell about unions or confederation is even more maleable.

Mentalités: people at other places and times don’t think the same way you do.

Misrepresenting Cited Sources (Anne-Will Harzing). This is often a sign that the author was playing a game of telephone (q.v.) and either never read the source or just briefly skimmed it. “The History of the Idea of Glued Linen Armour” shows one way this can happen.

Misattributed Quotations: another name for these is apocrypha

Modeling Minds: its hard!

Monocausal Explanations (Heinlein’s leftist friends already warned him against these in 1941!)

Motivated Reasoning: man is the rationalizing animal (Robert A. Heinlein, “Gulf,” with apologies to Aristotle, later cribbed (?) by L. Sprague de Camp and Elliot Aronson, “The rationalizing animal,” Psychology Today, May 1973, pp 38-44) See Argumentative Theory of Reason.

Gell-Mann Amnesia: if someone is wrong about things we know a lot about, we rarely assume that their views on topics we don’t know about are just as wrong.

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward — reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

Michael Crichton, “Why Speculate?” 2002 http://geer.tinho.net/crichton.why.speculate.txt

The people most skeptical of Herodotus are often specialists in Egypt who have gone through the details of his stories about that country. Another point in that essay is that its easier to speculate about the future or produce untestable theories than to establish what happened yesterday. Compare Caesar’s Wife Must be Above Suspicion which is an argument for not giving someone who has lied to you the benefit of the doubt.

I don’t have independent wealth or a salaried job that funds my writing, and I’m not big on social media, so supporting this site is appreciated.

N

Nature abhors a vacuum: this applies to epistemic vacuums too!

Naturalism (Wikipedia) Not to confuse with naturism, although people do like to accuse other people’s epistemology of running around starkers!

Nirvana Fallacy: just because something has a flaw does not mean that its useless. See Map is Not the Territory, Deconstruction.

No Smoke Without Fire: often invoked as a reason to practice Euhemerism (q.v.) or believe unworthy sources

Nugget of information: another thing which people who practice Euhemerism (q.v.) or Rationalization (q.v.) say they are looking for.

Numbers as references to other numbers versus numbers as measurements: Some Terrifying Numbers (2020). See also Decorative Statistics.

Nullius in verbis, “take nobody’s word for it”: not just for Horace and the Royal Society! Because of confirmation bias (q.v.), science cannot have authorities or sacred texts which must not be questioned. Memory (q.v.) is fallible.

Numbers from Nowhere (David Henige, 1998): see Decorative Statistics

O

Olden times: folk history often divides the past into dynamic and diverse living memory and an amorphous olden times like Dianna Wynn Jones’ Fantasyland. Those olden times actually changed a lot. This is a species of Generalization (q.v). The heavy bow hypothesis is an example of this kind of thinking among sophisticated people.

Omnium gatherum: dog latin for when you just grab anything that claims to answer a question without considering its quality. But evidence is weighed not counted (q.v.)

One-true-wayism: There is never just one way to do things, and rarely one best way outside a specific context. That does not stop people from insisting that the way they learned to do something is the one true way!

Overcorrection: when people manage to overcome Confirmation Bias (qv.), they often err in the other direction by adopting a version of the new idea which is too strong or too general. Almost all learning involves one of these two errors, all we can do is work to minimize them.

P

Panglossianism: we do not live in the best of all possible worlds.

Partisanship: many people much of the time are more interested in supporting their faction than finding the truth. Many of the customs of science were created to keep debates from becoming dominated by parties outside of science, but parties within science can emerge (eg. debates about the Anglo-Saxon migration into Britain). See also Identity Protection.

Periodization: its arbitrary, and it tends to shape our thinking even after we ‘know’ that periods are arbitrary and the best known system of periods is not necessarily the best. Archaeologists and historians each have their own takes on this but I don’t know of one book or article to recommend!

Persona: writers and poets often speak in voices which are not their own voice. Its dangerous to assume that a love song is about a love affair that the author really had, or that the politics of a chronicle are the politics which the author would express over a jug of beer.

Positivism (livius.org on positivism) (N.B. this term has several different meanings in philosophy)

Pots and People …

Postmodernism …

Power of Fiction: many people’s understanding of the world they live in owes a lot to fiction. Even if you know how something worked in a past society, someone in the past may have had different ideas if they had little or no direct experience. And many people still get their ideas about the past from Asterix comics or Shakespeare plays or computer games which never claim to be history. See also Mentalités and Books of the Brave by Irving A. Leonard http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft1f59n78v/.

What after all do most people know about history, people – a growing majority – who have not studied history and who are not concerned with historical accuracy? Some years ago, the French historian Marc Ferro observed that the idea that most of these people have of history is derived from two major sources: from the moldering relics of their primary school instruction in the subject, and from the cinema. These are the two major sources, I will not say of historical information, but of historical perceptions and attitudes.

Bernard Lewis, “In Defense of History,” p. 583 citing Marc Ferro, Comment on raconte l’Histoire aux enfants a travers le monde entier (Paris: Payot, 1981)

Presentism …

Progress: one of the most powerful myths to come out of 18th century Britain, spread under the Victorians, and fester in postwar California is the myth of progress. But most actual change is driven by fashion and changes in what people want to do. What is optimal for one narrow goal is rarely optimal for anything else.

the development of archery equipment may not be a process involving progressive improvements in performance. Rather, each design type represents one solution to the problem of creating a mobile weapon system capable of hurling lightweight projectiles. While a composite bow displays considerable design and technological innovations when compared to a self bow, it will not necessarily shoot an arrow farther or faster.

B.W. Kooi and C.A. Bergman, “An Approach to the Study of Ancient Archery using Mathematical Modelling” (1997)

Proving the Negative: it can’t be done but that does not stop people from asking for it! See also Burden of Proof.

Q

Quellenkritik “source criticism” …

I’m not sponsored by the King of Egypt, a rubber-chicken circuit, or a cotton-mill executive but help through Patreon is appreciated!

R

Rationalization (2017): taking an ancient story, explaining away the miracles, and tweaking the details until the psychology feels believable is one approach to writing history. But people in the past could lie and they had imaginations (q.v.) so this approach does not necessarily bring you closer to what really happened. The opposite of deconstruction (q.v.) where you assume that the story just tells you about the person or people telling it.

Research Incumbency Rule:

Once an article is published in some approved venue, it is taken as truth. Criticisms which would absolutely derail a submission in pre-publication review can be brushed aside if they are presented after publication. This is what you call ‘the burden of proof on critics.’

A. Gelman

cp. Egyptologists on Flinders Petrie’s chronology of Bronze Age Egypt based on Manetho‘s list of kings, which was established long before there was any form of absolute dating and tended to be used to interpret or correct absolute dates as they appeared, such as using the Petrie dates of dynasties to calibrate C-14 dates of wood from those dynasties. ↩

Reality is Continuous: but we divide it up more or less arbitrarily to simplify it. Archaeologists divide objects into typologies, but the next object they find is often in between two types. Historians create periods but nobody wakes up and says “by Jove, according to the calendar its not the Mannerist period but Baroque today, fetch painters and have them redecorate my dining room.” An exception is when a new political regime imposes an official style, as when a new dynasty took over in ancient Egypt and the big man in every village started to put up the same style of stele.

Rectification of Names (Confucius): calling things by the correct names is important and powerful! But people with the most common type of mind seem determined to call themselves false things: democratic socialist republics were neither, today’s conservatives are revolutionaries, realists have an unrealistic view of how people or states behave, and don’t get me started on the movement that calls itself rationality.

Reification (Wikipedia): some beginners often assign things to categories, then assume that everything in that category has the same properties. Other beginners speak of The Market, or The Romans as doing things. See also Map is Not the Territory and Reality is Continuous.

Regula Magistri (Jonathan Jarett via Steve Muhlberger): another name for Appeal to Authority (qv.)

One of the things I find oddest, and least enjoyable, about working on Spain is the peculiar persistence in parts of its historiography of regula magistri argumentation. Do you know what I mean by that? It’s proceeding with your argument, not from the sources, but by amassing a list of reputable authors who have also held the view you wish to put forward. As a result it’s kind of the flip side of the ad hominem argument, in which rather than impugning the character of your opponent and thereby his trustworthiness on matters of fact and/or opinion, you inflate the reputation of your supporters to show that you are rightly-guided.

https://tenthmedieval.wordpress.com/2009/08/16/regula-magistri-et-tu-brute-scientific-method-iii/

↩

Rules determine results: if I write the terms of a debate, I can almost determine that my side will win. If you are an Effective Altruist, you can be open to any intervention which has results which can be calculated probabilisticaly and directly compared to other interventions, while being very confident that interventions you approve of will look like what you already do. If two athletes agree to race 800 meters, I will bet on the track and field star over the weightlifter. This is one reason that its hard for people to agree across serious intellectual divides, because by the time two people agree on what would make them have to agree, they are both pretty sure what the answer will be. Its also a danger when optimizing, because what is optimal under one set of rules is rarely optimal in slightly different circumstances. This is very visible in machine earning but almost as visible in sports. ↩

S

Selective Preservation: ancient manuscripts survive because they were chosen to be copied and recopied under different political regimes, not because they would be the most useful for researchers today

Selective Publication: if I publish the part of the evidence that speaks to my questions, that may not be what speaks to your questions https://brentnongbri.com/2018/05/27/the-oxyrhynchus-papyri-of-dubious-provenance-and-editorial-choice/ Not to confuse with publication bias in the statistical sciences, where its easier to publish a claim X than a failure to confirm X (the Research Incumbency Rule).

Sherlock Holmes Method (N. Whatley)

The Fourth Aid is what I think I may call the Sherlock Holmes method. This again is used inevitably by all historians, especially in this age of Quellenkritik, but its own particular master is Munro. Reading his article on Marathon leaves me with just the same feeling as reading Conan Doyle. It is so attractive and such an artistic whole that it seems almost a crime to take it prosaically to pieces and inquire whether the steps in the first argument do follow one another so irresistibly as at first appears. … It seems so clear that the Sherlock Holmes method began to be employed in a mild way very early in Greek historiography and the chances that the earliest account of a Greek war that we possess is the best seem to me very great indeed.

N. Whatley, “On the Possibility of Reconstructing Marathon and Other Ancient Battles,” The Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. 84 (1964), pp. 119-139

Small World Big Drama: a surprising amount of low-tech writing comes out of face-to-face relationships and rivalries between people, most of which is not explained in surviving texts (see also Intertextuality and Tacit Knowledge). Look up the drama around Aristotle and his friends and students some time!

Social Proof: most people, most of the time, get their opinions by seeing what people around them think. Even if they are independent-minded any one person’s experience and education and ability to be objective are limited. But often the people around you don’t have any way to form a sound opinion. Or a social media site or manipulator has arranged for you to only meet people with a certain point of view. Most people are also influenced by things like confidence which are negatively correlated with the ability to form sound opinions. So epistemologically speaking, social proof is rubbish. Compare Verified Trust.

Special Pleading: “Special pleading is a form of inconsistency in which the reasoner doesn’t apply his or her principles consistently. It is the fallacy of applying a general principle to various situations but not applying it to a special situation that interests the arguer even though the general principle properly applies to that special situation, too.” – Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy s.v. Fallacy

Statistics: they don’t exist in ancient literature, just in ancient archaeology (see also What you see is not all there was, Archaeological Visibility)

Streisand Effect (Wikipedia): see All Publicity is Good Publicity

Suppressio Veri Suggestio Falsi (2016): preventing people from knowing something true can be more effective than telling them something false

T

Tacit Knowledge …

Telephone, Game of: as stories are retold or texts are copied they change.

Teleology: history is one damn thing after another not a being with purpose. From Greek τέλος “end, result.”

Telescoping the Past: people naturally blend all times before the memories of the oldest person they listen to as ‘old times.’ As I write this WW II is passing from history into old times; about fifteen years ago fantasyland was acquiring material culture from the Old West such as guns, livery stables, and beds with steel springs.

Testis Unius, Testis Nullius “one source is no source” (livius.org has a good article)

Thought-Terminating Cliché (Robert Jay Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalitarianism, 1961) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A9 People often say that “it is what is is” in less naive language so the simple version lets you see the pattern. Thanks Alan Jacobs.

Three-Source Method: because evidence from the ancient world is scarce and unrepresentative, strong claims are backed by texts, art, and archaeology. Arguments based on just one or two of these may miss important perspectives. I took this for granted because of the structure of Greek and Roman Studies at the University of Victoria, but there must be further writing on this! See also Auxiliary Sciences of History.

Tooth-Fairy Science (Skepdic): before you try to study something, make sure it actually exists. See Decorative Statistics (numbers which someone just made up) and Euhemerism (the hope that a story was not just made up but records historical truth).

Traduttore Traditore: a translator is a traitor.

Translation Shopping: a species of Cherrypicking (q.v.) where you pick the translation which says what you want it to say. This is common in passionate amateur research on topics such as theology, King Arthur, and historical fencing. See also Confirmation Bias.

Tropes: a lot of pre-20th-century literature says things because they were what was expected to be said in that context, such as a Christian writer humbly encouraging readers to correct his flawed and sinful teachings, or a Roman describing barbarians the way other writers described barbarians even if this particular nation did not meet expectations. We associate this with light fiction but Old Media journalism and business writing are still topical. See Books Feed Books and Small World, Big Drama.

Truth Sandwich (George Lakeoff, 2018?): trying to refute an idea can spread it, because your audience is probably not the audience that was first exposed. Another name is prebunking (but committing publicly to a position on something has dangers: if you turn out to be wrong, it will be harder to admit that – see Defensiveness).

I don’t have independent wealth or a salaried job that funds my writing, and I’m not keen on social media, so supporting this site is appreciated.

U, V

Uniformitarianism (James Hutton and Charles Lyell the geographers): the assumption that events distant in space or time were governed by the same physical laws and biological limits as events close in space and time. Armies which left no records were probably not much bigger than armies which left records; most claims about miracles or divine messages are unverifiable, so science can’t assume that your favorite one is true (see also Special Pleading and Naturalism) ↩

Universal Message of Science Fiction (Larry Niven): There exist minds that think as well as you do, but differently. Because of ethnocentrism etc. this is hard to accept (these days the American cult of optimization is very effective at crippling people’s ability to understand what someone else is doing and what its advantages are). See also Mentalités.

Verified Trust (2022): what science is

W

Western Civilization: this term is bafflegab not a tool for serious discussions. Fortunately, as historians in Canada we gave up the idea sometime in the last century. I don’t know whether Gandhi really said it would be a good idea but he should have.

What you see is not what there was: Because of Archaeological Visibility, Selective Preservation, Selective Publication, etc. the traces of the past are nothing like a random sample of the past. See also Positivism.

Whig Theory of History: the purpose of history is certainly not to produce Our Glorious Selves. See Teleology.

Comments

I might rearrange some of these. For example, it might be worth to split barriers to finding the truth for yourself from problems communicating the truth or leading people to the truth such as “You cannot reason someone out of a position which they did not reason themselves in to.” (Jonathan Swift) When I was editing this I deleted an entry or two which did not belong such as Dead Air (the principle that in broadcast media, saying nothing is very expensive, so people find something to fill the gap).

My book with Franz Steiner Verlag has an index entry for some of these.

I wish it were easier in WordPress to have links within the page so that one entry could link to another. These are called internal links, anchor tags, or page jumps. A help page is https://wordpress.org/documentation/article/page-jumps/ Please let me know if you find any broken links on this page!

Further Reading

Thomas Andrews and Flannery Burke, What Does It Mean to Think Historically? American Historical Association, 1 January 2007 https://www.historians.org/perspectives-article/what-does-it-mean-to-think-historically-january-2007/

E.H. Carr, What is History? (1961, second edition 1986) May be the source of the illogical dogma that counterfactuals are bad history, as if you could speak about cause and effect without asking “if you removed this what would have changed?”

Richard John Evans, “David Irving, Hitler and Holocaust Denial” (1999) https://www.hdot.org/evans/ especially §1.5 and §1.6

David Hackett Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (1970) (non vidi)

Anne-Wil Harzing, “Are Our Referencing Errors Undermining Our Scholarship and Credibility? The Case of Expatriate Failure Rates.” Journal of Organizational Behavior, Vol. 23, No. 1 (February 2002), pp. 127-148 [available from author’s website]

David Henige, Historical Evidence and Argument (2005) (non vidi)

David Hitchcock, “British History, Historical Bullshit, and the Crisis of ‘Information Hygiene’,” talk at Queen Mary University, April/May 2025

I think history is the professional craft of producing a multivalent, collective, and interpretive truth about the past. It’s multivalent because rarely is there a singular answer, it’s collective because our individual labours, whether agreeably or not, productively add up to a larger whole, and it’s interpretative in all the ways we’re familiar with here, while, I hope, retaining fidelity to our source materials and honesty with our readers. I think we historians do this using a remarkably stable, and robust, set of methods, core questions (think the 5Cs), scholarly priorities, and obligations to our source materials.

John D. Hosler, ed., Seven Myths of Military History (Hackett, 2022)

Charlie Huenemann, Knowledge For Humans (Utah State University, 2022) https://uen.pressbooks.pub/knowledgeforhumans/

Jona Lendering, “Theory,” livius.org https://www.livius.org/subdisciplines/theory/

Andrus Pork, “History, Lying, and Moral Responsibility,” History and Theory, vol. 29 no. 3 (October 1990) pp. 321-330 https://doi.org/10.2307/2505054 thanks Daniel Little https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/

Neville Morley, Writing Ancient History (Cornell University Press, 1999)

Luke Pitcher, Writing Ancient History (I.B. Tauris, London, 2009)

Barbara Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England, 1550-1720 (Cornell University Press, 2000)

Jeffrey Newman has a Zotero library at https://www.zotero.org/groups/5798726/historical_methods_and_methodology_for_undergraduates

Not touching the Bayesians of the Internet with a sixteen-cubit sarrisa!

Edit 2025-01-11: many small tweaks, broken links fixed, etc.

Edit 2025-01-13: deleted duplicate Losers Write the History Books. Added citation to Harzing. Added Teleology, Whig Theory of History, Ecological Fallacy, Confirmation Bias, Western Civilization.

Edit 2025-01-14: added Memory, expanded Anecdote, Anchoring Effect, Counterfactuals. Trackback from Caroline Crampton and Robert Cottrell’s The Browser newsletter https://thebrowser.com/

Edit 2025-01-15: added Defensiveness and Partisanship and Persona, fixed some typos

Edit 2025-01-16: trackback from The Morning News (est. 1999) https://themorningnews.org/p/wednesday-headlines-fahrenheit-20004

Edit 2024-01-17: trackback from “Heap of Links” (Obstacle Course of Knowledge), The Daily Nous https://dailynous.com/

Edit 2025-01-18: added Big Data can be Bad Data, Books Feed Books, Garbage in Garbage Out. Trackback from https://www.arcadiespada.es/2025/01/18/3-lo-que-hay-que-leer-9/ and https://sideswipedthesequel.substack.com/p/sideswiped-the-a-z-of-2025

Edit 2025-01-20: added Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect

Edit 2025-01-21: added Disciplines, Easiest Person to Fool, Halo Effect, Kernel, No Smoke Without Fire, Nugget, Tooth-Fairy Science

Edit 2025-01-24: added argumentum ad baculum, Identities, Kaiser Josef Wrote Don Giovanni Syndrome.

Edit 2025-01-28: added gee-whiz, Fisher, burden of proof

Edit 2025-02-01: added Binary Thinking / False Dichotomy, expanded Rationalization

Edit 2025-02-03: added Hosler ed.

Edit 2025-02-10: added some internal links

Edit 2025-02-11: minor stylistic edits, added example to Power of Fiction

Edit 20025-03-03: minor edits especially Misrepresenting Cited Sources and Motivated Reasoning. Added Streisand Effect.

Edit 2025-03-09: added a quote for Empty Citations. Trackback from https://weeklyfilet.com/2025/01/17/knowing-things-is-hard/

Edit 2025-03-14: added Caesar’s Wife

Edit 2025-03-20: added Chronology

Edit 2025-03-27: added Reification

Edit 2025-04-10: linked Violence Makes Permanent

Edit 2025-05-04: added Generalization, Hollywood, Olden Times

Edit 2024-05-11: added looking for Heroes (may give this a different name)

Edit 2025-05-16: added Fractal Wrongness

Edit 2025-05-17: added Universal Message of Science Fiction

Edit 2025-05-29: added Art Historian’s Dilemma

Edit 2025-06-06: added Progress

Edit 2025-06-08: added Apples and Oranges

Edit 2025-06-12: expanded Ethnographic Analogy

Edit 2025-06-13: added Overcorrection

Edit 2025-06-23: added Category Error, Goldacre’s Rule

Edit 2025-06-25: added Decadence and Decay, Trope

Edit 2025-06-29: added Matthew Amt’s Law

Edit 2025-07-02: added Social Proof, Hyperbole

Edit 2025-07-03: added Regula Magistri

Edit 2025-07-05: added Presentism

Edit 2025-07-09: added ad Fontes, Hitchcock, and Andrewes and Burke

Edit 2025-07-22: added Evidence is weighed not counted, Faute de mieux, Nature abhors a vacuum, omnium gatherum, Henige quote under Gresham’s Law

Edit 2025-07-25: added Confidence with Avram’s Law

Edit 2025-08-19: added Rectification of Names

Edit 2025-08-31: added report on David Irving

Edit 2025-10-04: added Context

Edit 2025-10-20: added Essentialism

Edit 2025-11-15: added Experts’ Disease from post on Orlat Battle Plaque

Edit 2025-12-20: added example to Essentialism

Edit 2026-01-28: add internal links, Base Rates

Edit 2026-02-01: add Ideal types

Edit 2026-02-21: added Rules determine results (needs a better name)

Edit 2026-02-22: added Boy who cried wolf

(drafted 30 August 2023, scheduled 14 December 2024)

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