2nd February 2012, 10:35 AM
(This post was last modified: 2nd February 2012, 10:40 AM by tom wilson.)
Kev, we do extend a degree of tolerance, as you put it, towards pseudo-archaeologists (and most people I know do the same with creationists). By that, I mean that they are welcome to believe whatever they like. That tolerance stops though when it impinges on other people's liberties, and sometimes before that. Presumably, the site report for that excavation didn't have to include a section reinterpreting the results in the light of the biblical evidence. Even if it did, that clearly wouldn't have been enough for your visitor, who sounds like the last person to be embracing the kind of multivocality Haltdorf and others support. That visitor would want you to remove all trace of interpretations that don't fit with the Bible.
The comparison with creationism is an good one as it also exemplifies the limits of our tolerance. We, as a society, are happy for people to believe the world is 6000 years old and evolution doesn't exist, but we won't have it taught alongside science in our schools. Significantly, this applies to private schools as well as publicly funded ones; the government is telling people when they can say certain things to their children. That sounds pretty 'intolerant' to me, but then the government also forces people to say a lot of other things to their children (e.g. reading, writing and arithmatic) and that is pretty uncontroversial policy.
Incidentally, even Haltdorf doesn't think (or didn't) that we should accept all interpretations of the past. He thinks we should just discount interpretations that are disagreeable to us, for example facist interpretations (see: http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/adsdata/...ltorf.html ).* Notably though, he also says, "there is certainly no need for emancipation of our interpretations from the data".
About the time when the above paper was produced, a similar debate was taking place in ecology, as it was becomming increasingly clear that climate change was a very scary and real issue but the scientists involved were having trouble winning what could charitably be called a multi-vocal debate (i.e. against petrochemical naysayers). The ecologists actually had to become *less* 'scientific' in their interpretation, get over the fact that they didn't really 'know' what was happening and stop apologising for their methodologies in order to convince the world at large.
...at this point, I was going to quote "Ecology and the End of Postmodernity" by George Myerson, and go on to say why I think post-modernism was all played out by 1980, but I've run out of time...
*eta: to me that seems very Pollitically Constructive, which I am generally in favour of, but I don't see it as being mutually exclusive with 'scientific methodology', and don't see why we can't do both. Hell, I don't see why interpretations can't be scientific *and* femeinist *and* critical *and* neo-Marxist *and* ecological *and* *and* *and* all together and without any of the dynamic tension/oppositions expicit in post-modernism...but that's another post entirely.
The comparison with creationism is an good one as it also exemplifies the limits of our tolerance. We, as a society, are happy for people to believe the world is 6000 years old and evolution doesn't exist, but we won't have it taught alongside science in our schools. Significantly, this applies to private schools as well as publicly funded ones; the government is telling people when they can say certain things to their children. That sounds pretty 'intolerant' to me, but then the government also forces people to say a lot of other things to their children (e.g. reading, writing and arithmatic) and that is pretty uncontroversial policy.
Incidentally, even Haltdorf doesn't think (or didn't) that we should accept all interpretations of the past. He thinks we should just discount interpretations that are disagreeable to us, for example facist interpretations (see: http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/adsdata/...ltorf.html ).* Notably though, he also says, "there is certainly no need for emancipation of our interpretations from the data".
About the time when the above paper was produced, a similar debate was taking place in ecology, as it was becomming increasingly clear that climate change was a very scary and real issue but the scientists involved were having trouble winning what could charitably be called a multi-vocal debate (i.e. against petrochemical naysayers). The ecologists actually had to become *less* 'scientific' in their interpretation, get over the fact that they didn't really 'know' what was happening and stop apologising for their methodologies in order to convince the world at large.
...at this point, I was going to quote "Ecology and the End of Postmodernity" by George Myerson, and go on to say why I think post-modernism was all played out by 1980, but I've run out of time...
*eta: to me that seems very Pollitically Constructive, which I am generally in favour of, but I don't see it as being mutually exclusive with 'scientific methodology', and don't see why we can't do both. Hell, I don't see why interpretations can't be scientific *and* femeinist *and* critical *and* neo-Marxist *and* ecological *and* *and* *and* all together and without any of the dynamic tension/oppositions expicit in post-modernism...but that's another post entirely.