When you read a work of history, always listen out for the buzzing. If you can detect none, either you are tone deaf or your historian is a dull dog. The facts are really not at all like fish on the fishmonger’s slab. They are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend, partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use—these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch. – Carr
Transclude of dialectic#^152e36
Circular transclusion detected: dialectic
Link to originalThis reminds me of a clever bit of psychology (and clear thinking) employed by John Maddox, the former editor of Nature. Maddox had little sympathy for authors who wanted to title their paper “Evidence for…,” and always insisted that a paper’s title should describe the facts that the work really established, rather than what those facts might possibly be taken to imply. If authors objected, as they often did, Maddox offered to leave “Evidence for” in the title, so long as it was, for clarity, modified to “Inconclusive Evidence for.” I don’t believe there were any takers.