Some Birthday Stories

Consider this story template to generate yes/no questions:

On May 12, [2020//1930/1890], [Emma/Charles] celebrated their [10th/20th/40th/80th] birthday in London. When their sibling [Charles/Emma] ate the [cake/pony/Faberge egg/iPhone], the birthday child cried. Does that surprise you?

Stories are surprising when the mix of ingredients does not go together. Some of these incongruencies would be temporal: An iPhone in 1930 (or a dodo bird at any of the offered points in time, having become extinct in the 16th century already). 

Some of these incongruencies would be structural: eating a pony or a Faberge egg is hard work and could not be accomplished quickly. 

Some of these would be social conventions surrounding emotions: a 40-year old man in 1890 London, that is Victorian society, would be expected not to cry over the loss of a birthday present, but a 40-year old woman may well be expected to. 

Some of these might be unusual but acceptable: though a Faberge egg cannot be eaten (despite what it name seems to imply to a noun tagger), it is also an odd present for a 10-year old (possibly excepting upper aristocracy). Eventually, as the age of the celebrated person increases, the presence of a sibling itself becomes unlikely without additional information.

on Silence and Simplification

In Andrew Freyn's contribution to The Silent Morning, entitled `What a victory it might have been`: C. E. Montague and the First World War, pp.131-148, Freyn works with the pastiche method of approaches of analysis that makes historians so careless about contradictory positions.

He cites five different opinions, ranging from historians to composers like John Cage of 4'33" fame, to negate the position that silence is an absence of sound. However, he grapples nowhere with the assurance that these positions are not self-contradictory and in the end undercuts his own analysis by pointing out that Cage is trying to get the audience to listen to the ambient sound of itself, which shows conclusively that the "silence" that Cage is after is just another form of sound (albeit not the one that the patrons paid for, and not a "natural" sound, but one that Western music performers like Beethoven cultivated in their listeners, who had happily chatted through Haydn [see Greenberg's lectures on Beethoven, by the Teaching Company] or 19th century French music performances [see Bernier's Pleasure & Privilege, esp commentary on attending the opera).

Freyn is more successful in integrating the use of silence as a commemorative device into the concomitant silencing of other forms of celebration as well as other stories. He cites two observers for the second aspect who deserve to be quoted in full.

Jay WInter comments that 'every decision to commemorate is a decision to simplify and clarify a message by leaving out substantial parts of the story surrounding it' [citing Fn 11]; .... similarly, James V. Wertsch comments that commemorative performances have a 'tendency to eschew ambiguity and to present the past from a single committed perspective' [citing Fn12] (p.133)

[[RCK: The references are to Winter's paper Thinking about Silence in Ben-Ze'ev et al, A Social History of Silence in the 20th Century, Cambridge University Press 2010, p.20 and to Wertsch's monograph, Voices of Collective Remembering, Cambridge University Press 2002,  p;42.]]

 And Freyn himself so aptly notes:

The officially sanctioned solemnity of Armistice commemorations [in Great Britain, RC] meant that alternative vibrant and boisterous celebrations were restricted, seen as unofficial and dissenting -- even if many of those who wanted to remember the war as a victory were those tho had worked hard to win it. (p.133)

Bibliography: Trudi TATE, Kate KENNEDY (eds), The Silent Morning: Culture and Memory after the Armistice, in series: Cultural History of Modern War,  Manchester (Manchester University Press) 2013.

What about all these Stories? Rereading Schank

In the aftermath of the civil disturbances of Charlottesville, Michael Eric Dyson wrote in the August 12th, 2017 edition of the New York Times:

Such an ungainly assembly of white supremacists rides herd on political memory. Their resentment of the removal of public symbols of the Confederate past — the genesis of this weekend’s rally — is fueled by revisionist history. They fancy themselves the victims of the so-called politically correct assault on American democracy, a false narrative that helped propel Mr. Trump to victory. Each feeds on the same demented lies about race and justice that corrupt true democracy and erode real liberty.

Dyson then distinguishes between political memories, between revisionist history and other history (proper? academic? he has no name for it, but cites Du Bois), between true and false narratives.

Tools of Story Telling

It is in this context relevant to look at the infrastructure that Roger Schank has identified for story telling (bracketing Schank's occupation with intelligence, however). Because of his particular slant to story analysis, Schank provides a repertoire of narratological tools and distinctions that differ from those in the literary toolkit. (This cuts both ways, Morson argues in the Foreword, missing for example the notion of Genre in Schank's musings, p.xxff.)

Stories are received and generated structures that people label in an attempt to index them, so that they can retrieve them and match them for comparison purposes. People are assisted in story manipulation by story skeletons, which give a basic direction to a narrative, and by the hierarchy of scripts, plans, goals and themes that Schank had identified in his classical work with Robert Abelson (1977). Because stories can be retold in a variety of ways and for various purposes, Schank posits that they are remembered in a different format, the gist, of which the individual retelling is a production. Stories vary by culture and subculture---Schank specifically discusses the French restaurant on the one hand and the teenager Rock fan on the other.

In much of the exposition of the book, and especially in the discussion of the story production and generation, Schank brackets the question of truth. Schank writes as if the intentionality of the stories would make the question of whether the stories are true or not irrelevant or even impossible to answer.

Diplomatic Incidents

Schank uses a diplomatic conflict, the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by a US Navy warship, the Vincennes, on July 3, 1988, to illustrate the way that the same event is used to make hay for the divergent political positions.

If we construct our own version of truth by reliance upon skeleton stories, two people can know exactly the same facts but construct a story that relays those facts in very different ways. (p.152)

Or even more patronizingly:

The real problem in using skeletons whis way is that the storytellers usually believe what they themselves are saying. Authors construct their own reality by finding the events that fit the skeleton convenient for them to believe. They enter a storytelling situation wanting to tell a certain kind of story and only then worrying about whether || the facts fit onto the bones of the skeleton that they have previously chosen. (p.154f)

Schank then goes on to label the skeletal stories that backed the reactions of the various government as the US using the understandable tragedy (p.152f), Great Britain the justifiability of self-defense (p.153),  Libya insolence and state terrorism (p.154),  and Bahrain justifiable bad effects of war on the aggressor and moral courage (p.155).

So, we can summarize as a first impression that, while Schank will admit that some facts do not fit onto the bones of a skeleton, he is willing to talk about people's own realities and how the skeleton stories are what make up people's notions of truth.

... no matter what happens next, all the viewers of the play [that plays out in the international diplomatic incident, RCK] will retell the story according to the skeletons they have already selected; i.e. they will probably not be moved to reinterpret any new event in terms of some skeleton that they do not already have in mind. (p.158)

So even though the stories dominate to the point of where they shape the memory of the events and the way that future facts will attach to past narrations, there is still something that Schank can call coherence.

One of the oddities of story-based understanding is that people have difficulty making decisions if they know they will have trouble constructing a coherent story to explain their decision. (p.159)

So justificatory stories do have coherence requirements, otherwise they will not properly support the decisions through explanations. Schank goes on to demonstrate this with divorce stories (pp.160ff), which however need not concern us here.

Stories that were Challenged

While there is much plausibility to the fact that political agents have apriori decided how participants will respond to events in the arena that is international diplomacy---theorizing, as Sherlock Holmes would warn us, in advance of the facts (p.159), matters become more complicated when Schank looks at stories that were strongly challenged by agents able to do something about disagreement.

Schank discusses this problem in two examples, in the claimed rape of Tawana Brawley by white supremacists (pp.208ff) and the disqualification of Canadian runner Ben Johnson (pp.210ff) for allegations of doping. However, the larger context is the problem of the cultural and subcultural specificity of stories, and how to acquire that skill (pp.189-218). As a result, the analysis of these stories that were challenged (and ultimately rejected) by authoritative agents come across as situations of choosing bad raw materials for story telling on part of Brawley and Johnson.

Tawana Brawley

... Tawana Brawley ran away for four days, and she needed to tell a story. For her own reasons, she decided not to tell the true story of where she had been, but to invent one instead. (p.209)

It is easy to agree with Schank here, though one has to emphasize that he distinguishes between "true story" and "invend(ed) one" explicitly.

Schank then continues:

When we invent a story in order to mislead people, we try to figure out the story that they want to hear, and we tell it. Children frequently tell a he made me do it story or an it wasn't me that did it story when they are caught having done something wrong. And this kind of story is what Tawana Brawley told too. (p.209)

Again, we are on the same page as Shank here. But then Schank takes a departure that is interesting for the problem of reliability.

Her [Tawana Brawley's, RCK] problem was selecting a believable story. She failed to assess how many listeners would hear her story and failed to understand that what each of them wanted to hear was quite different. (p.209)

Even with the discussion of enculturation into story cultures and subcultures and the difficulties for teenagers to acquire these skills going before (p.208), the turn here is unexpected. The problem according to Schank at this point is not that too many listeners would eventually exhaust Tawana's range of fictional supports, but that they story expectations would eventually exceed her capabilities in some other way.

Schank argues that Brawley picked two basic skeletons, both shockingly realistic in 1980s America ( and as Dyson might remind us, even in 2017), namely young girl is kidnapped and raped as well as young black is victim of racial attack (p.209). Crucially for Schank's argument, the first one comes from the general American culture, and the second one from Brawley's subculture (p.209).

While either of these standard stories is bad enough, the combination of them produced something we can only assume Tawana had not counted on---the match of two types of stories || sought by the news media and black activists. (pp.209f)

Schank then discusses these two groups in turn:

The media looks for horrifying stories involving assaults on especially innocent people. Consequently, Tawana's story matched a skeleton story that news people are always looking to report. (p.210)

Her [i.e. Tawana Brawley's, RCK] story also matched a skeleton story that black activists are always on the lookout for: innocent blacks as easy victims of white officials. She had added that her rapists were state police officers and other officials of her area. The factor, of course, had it been true, should well have caused alarm on the part of the activists. (p.210)

Schank is entirely plausible in identifying the activation patterns for various groups' involvement, and the in arguing that Brawley did not understand how her chosen skeletons meshed with these activation skeletons. But even here, Schank is willing to admit that there are true stories of innocent blacks as victims---"had it been true" (p.210)---that activists should be alarmed by.

Tawana's mistake, apart from fabricating events in the first place, was to invent stories without understanding the standard nature of the stories that others look for. (p.210)

There are a polite and a critical reading to this sentence. The admission, and as an aside only, that "fabricating events in the first place" was a mistake either is Schank's backdoor to admit that the events matter (this is the polite reading) or an indication of his lack of appreciation for how much events matter (the critical reading), i.e. that Brawley's failure to grasp "the standard nature of stories" (p.210) pale to the point of irrelevance in comparison with the need to fabricate facts that could hold up to the scrutiny of multiple organizations.

It is thus with much less agreement than previously, or with a feeling of the emphasis lying on the wrong part, that we head into the description of the role of the standard nature of stories.

Thus, when doctors are handed a rape case or a case of unconsciousness from beating and deprivation, they have certain tests they perform to aid the victim. They also use skeleton stories to understand such cases, and they seek to fit the details of any new story into the familiar story. (p.210)

This  is just an adapted restating of Schank's general epistemology that understanding in humans is story-based.

Similarly, the police know a story about rape, and in the case of Tawana Brawley, they tried to fit the details of her story into theirs. (p.210)

As a result of casting the problem in this way, Schank posits that the police became suspicious because of the mismatch between Tawana's story and their expected story.

For both the doctors and the police, Tawan's story did not agree with the standard stories about rape, and this disparity caused them to question the truth of Tawana's claims. (p.210)

Notice that the whole problem of truth---now however applied to claims, not to facts or events or stories---is admitted and raised by Schank. Yet his conclusion is cast in terms of story skeletons and of subcultures:

Not surprisingly, since she is young and rather unsophisticated, Tawana Brawley failed to understand how to make up a story that matched the ones that the people who were listening to her expected to hear. She did not know the stories of the other subcultures. (p.210)

And almost wistfully, Schank concludes:

Traveling across cultures, it seems, requires the help of a translator. (p.210)

Perhaps a stronger stance that Schank could have taken was to recur on his prior notion of scripts. Tawana failed, because she did not really understand the rape script and the deprivation script, and was therefore unable to tell stories that matched well enough with the script that the doctors and the police officers had for these incidents.

Furthermore, as the New York Times article that Schank quotes (pp.208f) suggests, while the doctors and the police officers took their departure from their questioning the validity of the story, they did not condemn her on that account but used it to find actual evidence that contradicted Tawana's narrative. Notice the use of the word "evidence" in the cited article:

The conclusion that Miss Brawley fabricated her story is supported by ... evidence that she ran away and spent much of the next four days at her former apartment, evidence that she concocted the condition in which she was found, and evidence that she tried to mislead the police, doctors and others about what had happened to her.  --New York Times, September 27, 1988, cited in: Schank 1990, (p.209)

In fact, the article, a two-page spread as Schank admits (p.208), was called "Evidence points to Deceit by Brawley".

Even granted all the usual caveats of the mutual interaction between evidence and narrative, it seems hard to support the stance that for Miss Brawley, the story skeletons did her in. At best they tipped the police off to problems. And the failure in the collection of confirming evidence, which would have been required equally for a court of law, would have done her in just as much as the success in finding fabricated evidence.

Canadian Runner Ben Johnson

Schank of course believes that he has proven that Brawley became entrapped by being unfamiliar with the story expectations. Thus he can use the case of Ben Johnson, a Canadian runner disqualified from the Olympics for doping, as "another case of story misunderstanding" (p.210). 

The story is interesting in this context because the press assumed that everyone who used steroids also knows how to avoid getting caught. (p.211)

Schank's quotes from the NY Times actually do not bear this statement out. It is Dr Voy, the chief medical officer of the US Olympic Committee is the one that is quoted as commenting on the masking know-how in the athletes community.

Schank then goes on to enumerate the stories that Dr Voy, the physician and official, has---to wit: the miscalculate the dose, the screwy system, and the reckless gamble story, the panic to insure victory story and the masking the drug story (p.211)---as well as the stories that Johnson was familiar with---to wit: spiked my drink with drugs and bad lab test (p.211).

The first thing to notice is that Voy's and Johnson's narrative intentions are at odds. None of Dr Voy's stories would have gotten Johnson a pass for testing positive. Indeed, the article gives no examples of stories that Dr Voy would have considered legitimate for a positive testing candidate to continue on as a medal bearer. So Johnson could not have used any of these stories. In fact, all we learn is that the stories Johnson alleged were not part of Dr Voy's repertoire of acceptable excuses; that set may have been empty. If there was no story for Johnson to choose, then Schank's comment, that "in essence, the only thinking we have here is the selection of stories" (p.211), is puzzling in the extreme.

Summary

Though Schank at times sounds as if he is flirting with both sides of the relativism divide, this effect is produced partially by sloppy wording and partially by not distinguishing the following points correctly:

1. Even if skeletal stories are hard to disprove because of their intentionality, which functions as a political stance does, their are notions of quality of match that can lead to not selecting them.
2. Stories include factual information and can be challenged much more readily along that dimension. Admittedly, facts may themselves be the outcome of stories (a topic that Schank unfortunately bypasses), and facts have some of the same subcultural aspects that Schank identified for the stories (e.g. water-logged dinosaurs supporting a Biblical flood narrative) as to acceptability and validity.
3. Though it may not be possible to show that some stories are true, it is sufficient to be able to show that some stories are false for historiography to have the ability to stem the flood of politically-charged revisionist history. Tawana Brawley's story for sure and possibly Ben Johnson's story as well (Schank's source material is too terse) are stories that are false, due to the evidence found, not the skeletons chosen.

It is possible that Schank's side-stepping of the question of truth is due to his general goal of moving AI work from theorem proving and expert systems (p.xlii) toward story generation / understanding / summarization and explanation.

If we take a step back and look at the larger sources of information available for the examples that Schank uses, such as the Admiral Fogarty report from August 1988 or the investigative research journalism by the New York Times reporters Robert McFadden et al, Outrage: The Story Behind the Tawana Brawley Hoax, from August 1990,  we get the suspicion that Schank is used in the small forms, such as the newspaper article, not the hundred-plus pages slugfest of details that Fogarty or McFadden and their collaborators provided with.

Postscriptum

In an amusing twist, the McFadden's book Outrage, published contemporaneously with Schank's book in 1990, possibly even contradicts the sequence of events claimed by Schank. 

Later, Dr [Alice, RCK] Pena [the emergency room physician, cf. p20, RCK] had her put her feet into stirrups for an examination of the vaginal, rectal and pelvic areas. The examination revealed no cuts, dried blood, bruises, swelling, deep redness, or other indications of injury. There were no signs of trauma to the mouth …. Indeed, the girl’s [Tawana Brawley’s, RCK] teeth were surprisingly clean and her mouth did not even have a bad odor. Dr Pena decided to forego the use of a rape-detection kit, at least for a while. There weren’t enough signs to warrant it …. (p.21)

At this point, with Tawana still giving signs of semi-consciousness (p.17), and had hardly launched into a story of the type that Schank is looking for. Already the initial interaction with the paramedics and the emergency room physician was gathering evidence against the narrative that Tawana was planning or had been told to use.

Bibliographic Record

Roger C. Schank, Tell Me A Story: Narrative and Intelligence,  Evanston, IL (Northwestern University Press), 1995 (= reprint of the 1990 edition published in New York (Scribner), 1990; with a foreword of Gary Saul Morson, from 1995). [Google Book Selections]

James Fenimore Cooper on Steamboats colliding with Folklore

This would have made a nice footnote in the book, though of course it is a narrative one and not a historical source in the strict sense of the word.

Hugh C. MacDougall, who edited the Gutenberg copy of The Lake Gun,  the short story where the following paragraph appears in, dates the story to 1850, gives it a decidedly political context, and points to a visit of Cooper in Geneva College (now Hobart College) on Lake Seneca sometime between 1840-1844, when Cooper's son Paul was studying there, as the origin of the "local knowledge" such as it is.

"I haven't seen that ere crittur now"—Peter always spoke of the tree as if it had animal life—"these three years. We think he doesn't like the steamboats. The very last time I seed the old chap he was a-goin' up afore a smart norwester, and we was a-comin' down with the wind in our teeth, when I made out the 'Jew,' about a mile, or, at most, a mile and a half ahead of us, and right in our track. I remember that I said to myself, says I, 'Old fellow, we'll get a sight of your countenance this time.' I suppose you know, sir, that the 'Jew' has a face just like a human?"

"I did not know that; but what became of the tree?"

"Tree," answered Peter, shaking his head, "why, can't we cut a tree down in the woods, saw it and carve it as we will, and make it last a hundred years? What become of the tree, sir;—why, as soon as the 'Jew' saw we was a-comin' so straight upon him, what does the old chap do but shift his helm, and make for the west shore. You never seed a steamer leave sich a wake, or make sich time. If he went half a knot, he went twenty!"

Two ideas that I find curious here are that the novelty of the steamboats, which rubs oddly with this American form of the legend of the "Wandering Jew", is expressed narratively as a form of resistance to be encountered. Nevertheless, when encountered, the supernatural remains superior, going faster than the engine-powered boat.

Cusack on LDS Archeology

Carole M. Cusack (University of Sydney) points out that there are odd dynamics at play within the archeological community.

It is also important to note two further complicating factors: first, new religions may embrace a postmodern openness to interpretation when archaeological confirmation of their position fails to emerge, effectively mirroring the “multivocal” position of Post-Processualist archaeology; and second, scientific archaeology decries alternative archaeology with comparable ferocity to that observed in the repudiation of new religions by established religious traditions, thus creating a “feedback loop” in the interactions between archaeology and new religions.

Cusack reminds us of the early relationship between archeology and religious studies as something to give historical understanding of the many religions discovered.

As the comparative study of religion developed, archaeology became important due to its role in verifying the pasts of many religions: Alexander Cunningham published the facsimile Inscriptions of Asoka (1879) which confirmed the Indian origins of Buddhism; Leopoldo Batres excavated Teotihuacan in 1905, enhancing knowledge of pre-Columbian religion; and in 1921-2 Sir John Marshall excavated Harappa in the Indus Valley, a city that might be evidence of the “forts” destroyed by Indra, the god of the invading Aryans, referred to in the Rig Veda (Breton 1908, pp.34-37; Insoll 2004, passim).

During the twentieth century, there was both a de-coupling of archeology from the religions as well as a flourishing of religious formations and traditions. As a result, religious studies had to abandon its old approach of focusing on the few influential faiths and attend to the vast plurality of religious movements.

Further, the“world religions” approach has been exposed as an Enlightenment construct, implying a false comparativism (Jackson 1995, 276-278).

This is the situation in which present-day archeology finds itself.

Before considering specific case studies, it is necessary to investigate scientific archaeology’s relationship with “pseudoarchaeology” or “cult archaeology”(Fagan 2006; Stiebing 1995). 

Though the delineation is not trivial, there are themes that separate academic archeology from its pseudo or cult forms.

Schadla-Hall argues that, although there is no hard line that can be drawn between “mainstream” and “alternative” archaeology, the core themes of the latter area focus on origins, hyper-diffusionism, ancient knowledge and power, astro-archaeology, and the truth of religion and mythology (Schadla-Hall 2004, pp. 257-258)  

Further, the claims regarding each of these themes are always dramatic and propose revolutionary new understandings, rather than the gradual accretion of information that slowly advances knowledge.

Cusack sees this taking place in the general context of the "buffet of identities" offered by modernity.

[I]n the contemporary West personal identity has undergone significant modification, with the consumption of products and the “trying-on” of roles displacing religion, family and community as the prime factors in how people determine who they are. This plastic sense of self is flexible and experimental, and identity is “amenable to infinite reshaping according to mood, whim, desire and imagination” (Lyon 2002, p. 92). 

This has two effects with regard to the status of information; the individual can choose the explanation that suits him or herself, without concern for whether it is “objectively true,” and is free to discard it when it no longer satisfies. When this realisation is combined with the dense and non-user friendly nature of scientific publications and the degree of specialisation required to understand them, Pascale Boyer’s argument that humans have an evolutionary biological tendency to accept and trust narratives that operate through inference and attribute personal agency as the cause of events ... rather than explanations that posit impersonal forces or complex interrelated factors, receives additional support (Boyer 2001, passim).

Thus, the conventions of science are often perceived by non-scientists to be arcane and restrictive, and the attitudes of its practitioners are experienced as patronising and elitist. Other explanations of scientific phenomena are readily available and the modern individual is empowered to choose them. 

Cusack then gives a reasonable summary of early Mormonism and shows how it was a contribution to Indian origin discussions. [[RCK: She does not emphasis the antiquarian aspects of early Mormonism enough, for my taste.]]

Joseph Smith actively promoted the Book of Mormon as the missing link in the history of America, and revelations and diary entries from Smith’s followers indicate that by the 1830s he was claiming North America as the territory of the Lamanites and identifying archaeological finds at specific sites (Givens 2002, pp. 94-95). 

Citing (Givens 2002, p.112), Cusack points out that 1928 Elder Levi Edgar Young hoped that the successful validation of the Biblical texts in Palestine through archeology might be replicated in the Americas for the Book of Mormon.

During the 1950s, Wells Jakeman interpreted Izapa Stele 5 as a representation of the Tree of Life from the vision in 1 Nephi 8. In the 1960s, a latex cast was taken to BYU and became the origin of a little following of replicas. The interest in archeology waned in the 1970s as the first translations of the Egyptian papyri showed that these were fragments of the Book of the Dead, not a new Book of Abraham. Thereafter, as Armand Mauss had observed (Mauss 1994), the LDS church withdrew "from an increasingly liberal mainstream American society" which reduced interest in science.

At the same time, under Gordon B. Hinckley, the disdain for historical "shrines" turned into an appreciation for historic sites as "sacred ground" (Masden 2006, 58, 62),

This has implications for identity formation among Mormons: authentic experience of their faith may be attained by visiting historic sites, in a form of religious tourism which combines consumerism and the past being manifested through a specific place (Holtorf 2005b, p. 127).

This has clear consequences within the framework of modernity, as the validation function has turned ego-centric.

That the Nauvoo Temple was destroyed in 1850 is unimportant; Gordon B. Hinckley’s $30 million reconstruction is experienced as “genuine”. This parallels a broader social shift, affecting all Western manifestations of religion, where the experience of the self has greater authority and reality than institutional pronouncements, and where affective rather than intellectual proofs are persuasive (Lyon 2002). 

[[RCK: Cusack does not realize how modern Joseph Smith Jr was in the regard to emotive validation.]]

For Mormons, there is no conflict between true religion and true science, and “when it comes to learning gospel truths, Mormons think with their hearts. The scripture conveys the idea that the final word on truth comes via feelings. This is now a fundamental tenet of Mormonism” (Southerton 2004, p. 44). 

Bibliographic Records

Cusack, Carole. 2011. “New Religions and the Science of Archaeology: Mormons, the Goddess, and Atlantis.” In James R. Lewis and Olav Hammer (eds.), Religion and the Authority of Science, Leiden: Brill, 765-796 (Academia.edu pre-print; eBrill link).

• Boyer, Pascale. Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. New York: Basic Books, 2001.
• Holtorf, Cornelius. Archaeology is a Brand! The Meaning of Archaeology in Contemporary Popular Culture. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press Inc, 2007.
• Levitt, Norman. “The colonization of the past and the pedagogy of the future.” pp.259-284 in: Archaeological Fantasies: How pseudoarchaeology misrepresents the past and misleads the public, edited by G. G. Fagan. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.
• Lyon, David. Jesus in Disneyland: Religion in Postmodern Times. Oxford: Polity, 2002.
• Mauss, Armand. The Angel and the Beehive: The Mormon Struggle with Assimilation.Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994.
• Nuckolls, Charles W. 2008. “Archaeology, Mormonism, and the Claims of History.” Marburg Journal of Religion 13,1.
• Southerton, Simon G. Losing a Lost Tribe: Native American DNA and the Mormon Church. Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2004.

Depicting German Peasants in Poetry

I came to this topic by considering the fact that the son of Meier Helmbrecht, also called Helmbrecht, convinces his sister Gotelint, to marry his best friend among the robbers, Lämmerslint. And this struck me akin to the Muslim girls who would go off, sixteen years old, from London and Vienna, to Syria to marry ISIS warriors.

So I decided to re-acquaint myself with Meier Helmbrecht, leading to this English translation of both Helmbrecht and Hartmann von Aue's Poor Heinrich by Clair Hayden Bell, of the University of California, in 1931.

In the introduction, Bell furthermore discussed the works of the Austrian ministerials Seifried Helbing, who left us some fifteen poems (e.g. Kleiner Lucidarius, described here) and Reinmar von Zweter's poems. The Austrian ministerials benefitted from the relative peace and the excellent soil along the Danube river.

These two belong together so tightly that Reinmars and Seifried are at times neighbors in a manuscript.

Another fellow who belongs into this group is Ottackar von Steiermark, in the mind of Theodor Ritter von Karajan.

Bell also mentions Hugo von Trimberg, who wrote the famous didactic Medieval poem Der Renner, "welches die größte didaktische Dichtung des deutschen Mittelalters darstellt", which he wrote while in charge of the School of the priory St Gangolf. That text is available via Medaevium.de for the 14th century,  Von Trimberg is interesting as he received no university training and was a married man with a large family.

Current state of Pentateuch research

John Van Seters socio-historical study of the Pentateuch will be re-issued in October of this year.

The basic scheme is as follows:
= Dtrn (7th century)
= Josh to 2nd Kings (= DtrH the deuteronomistic historian) (early exilic period)
= Gen/Ex/Lev/Num (formerly J) (late exilic period)
= Pentateuch redaction under P in post-exilic times

The biggest worry I have with this is that it puts the Davidic/Salomonic United Kingdom too late. Under this view, it is not a theological retroprojection of the Josianic Reform movement that is to be restored, but entirely without historical context. That's a bit too radical even for my tastes.

(see the 2004 edition http://books.google.at/books… for details)

Treating Beggers around Dijon over two centuries

When introducing the term "horizontal mobility", Braudel defers to a book on the environs of 17th century Dijon.

In the sixteenth century, a beggar would be fed and cared for before he was expelled [from the town]. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, he would have his head shaven. Later he was more likely to be whipped and by the end of the century the full weight of a repressive society set him to forced labour. -- Gaston Roupnel, La ville de la campagne au XVIIeme siecle. Etudes sur les populations du pays dijonnais, 2nd ed, 1955.

Quoted in: Braudel, The Mediterranean,  Book 2, p.704.

Salvation History through Blood and Family Ties

It was with quite some shock that I realized that Joseph Smith Jr believed that he was a biological descendant of the Patriarchs through Ephraim. The stance of the LDS Church on this issue is expounded in a complicated article in the Ensign from 1991, written by Daniel H. Ludlow, editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Mormonism. Ludlow does a good job writing up the issue; the complexity hails from the fact that lots and lots of words have to be reworked to mean new things they never meant before, in order to make the theory come out. Of course, it is a modern day interpretation of what Joseph Smith Jr may or may not have meant, so we will have to recontextualize it afterwards.

Ludlow's Argument

Ludlow first tries to sort out the general terminology.

... for the literal seed of Abraham are the natural heirs to the remarkable promises given anciently to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. 

Terms like literal descendants of Abraham by birth, tribe of Israel, house of Israel, lineage, and Gentiles are sometimes confused, and some terms have a range of meanings, referring to different ideas in different contexts.

Ludow works with the equivalence of Abraham -- Hebrew; Isaac -- Israelite; Juda -- Jew. Ludow argues that via his other wives, Abraham had children other than Isaac: Ishmael, Zimran, Jokshan, Medan, Midian, Ishbak, and Shuah. Though the Midianites are thus literal seed of Abraham, they are not Israelites, much less Jews---though all Jews are Israelites and thus literal seed of Abraham.

In this context, Ludlow cites the Book of Abraham (3:14), a work whose translation from Egyptian papyri Joseph Smith Jr had begun in Kirtland in 1835 (the papyri have since been identified as funerary texts depicting Isis and Osiris). [On early criticism of the translation see Stenhouse's Rocky Mountain Saints, New York, 1873, who engaged an Egyptologist from the Louvre; and Franklin S. Spalding's Joseph Smith Jr as Translator,  New York, 1912, who received assistance from noted scholars like James H. Breasted or Flinders Petrie. See also Stephen E. Thompson on Egyptology and the Book of Mormon in Dialog 1995, pp.143ff.]

Ludlow emphasizes that lineages, esp. in patriarchical blessing, indicate blood lines, and are important for the privilege they convey, that is, "special promises and blessings attendant thereto". Thus it is important for patriarchical blessings that their lineage identifications "are not simply tribal identifications by assignment."

Ludlow then gives a long list of scriptural passages, OT and NT, which speak of the importance of lineage. Interestingly, of all of St Paul's letter to the Romans, the only passage cited is the one that insists on the preeminence of the Jews with respect to the Gentiles,  but not the elimination of that distinction in Christ.  This approach to inheritance goes counter to much of the arguments that St. Paul makes, whose insistence that neither Greek nor Jew, that is, neither Gentile nor Israelite matters for the story of salvation he is expounding. It is often claimed that Joseph Smith Jr is, like many Protestant reformators, inspired by Paul; but in this familial focus Smith Jr clearly is not. (I owe this point to Rahel Kahlert.)

Oddly, Ludlow lists Galatians (3:14), which clearly says that "That the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ", not through the descent of blood. The baptism into Christ makes one partake of Abraham's seed, says Paul (3:26-29): "For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. And if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise."

In the Book of Mormon, the following passages are considered relevant by Ludlow:

• 1 Nephi: 1 Ne. 22:1–28.
• 2 Nephi: 2 Ne. 6:5–18; 2 Ne. 9:1–3; 2 Ne. 30:1–8.
• Jacob: Jacob 5:1–77; Jacob 6:1–4.
• Helaman: Hel. 15:1–17.
• Mormon: Morm. 7:10.

A look at Doctrines and Covenants shows that the development of this interest belongs in the Kirtland period, as the topic begins with D&C 45.

• D&C 45:24–25
• D&C 58:45
• D&C 86:8–9*
• D&C 90:8–11*
• D&C 96:7;
• D&C 109:57–67 (D&C 109:57–58, 60, 67*)
• D&C 110:11–12
• D&C 113:7–8
• D&C 132:30

There is also a quote from the Mt-Retranslation that Joseph Smith Jr and Sidney Rigdon pursued in 1831 in Kirtland, Ohio.

• JS Mt Translation (JSTP Mt) of Mt 23:39-24

The problem remains that even passages like the Book of Abraham, 2:9-11, which hails from 1835, have a very non-blood interpretation. It is difficult to suss out the direction that a statement like

in thy seed after thee (that is to say, the literal seed, or the seed of the body) shall all the families of the earth be blessed, even with the blessings of the Gospel

is supposed to be read in. In a sense, it inverts St Paul in Galatians, where by the acceptance of the Gospel, and baptism into Christ, all are made to Abraham's seed. Clearly it is Abraham's literal seed that makes this possible. 

Ludlow then "interviews" Church presidents and authorities to give more understanding. 

Apparently, President Joseph Smith Fielding felt that those that had joined the Church in the present days had a mix of Gentile and Israelite blood in their lineage. In this way, the Church is gathering the House of Israel.

The great majority of those who become members of the Church are literal descendants of Abraham through Ephraim, son of Joseph. 

President Spencer W. Kimball wrote

The Lamanite is a chosen child of God, but he is not the only chosen one. There are many other good people including the Anglos, the French, the German, and the English, who are also of Ephraim and Manasseh. They, with the Lamanites, are also chosen people, and they are a remnant of Jacob. 

This all could be read in a spiritual vein as well, in the sense of Galatians 3, but Brigham Young's talk of veins makes that impossible.

Will we go to the Gentile nations to preach the Gospel? Yes, and gather out the Israelites, wherever they are mixed among the nations of the earth. … Ephraim has become mixed with all the nations of the earth, and it is Ephraim that is gathering together. …

If there are any of the other tribes of Israel mixed with the Gentiles we are also searching for them. … We want the blood of Jacob, and that of his father Isaac and Abraham, which runs in the veins of the people. …

Crucially, Brigham Young notes in the same discourse,

The Book of Mormon came to Ephraim, for Joseph Smith was a pure Ephraimite, and the Book of Mormon was revealed to him.

Since it is crystal clear that Joseph Smith was from New England stock hailing from Old England, this is a rather surprising statement, and Ludlow turns to this point next.
Again, President Joseph Smith Fielding explains

In this Dispensation of the Fulness of Times, the gospel came first to the Gentiles and then is to go to the Jews. However, the Gentiles who receive the gospel are, in the greater part, Gentiles who have the blood of Israel in their veins. There is a very significant statement in the words of Moroni as recorded on the title page of the Book of Mormon that it was ”[Sealed by the hand of Moroni, and his up unto the Lord, … ‘To come forth … [in due time] by way of the Gentile. …’

But in the title face of the Book of Mormon,  it says

Written to the Lamanites, who are a remnant of the house of Israel; and also to Jew and Gentile.

Thus, the issue of being of the house of Israel while being a Gentile is not really addressed here. This makes it doubtful that in April of 1829, Joseph Smith Jr had already decided that he was a descendant of Joseph.

The main argument for that is the 2 Neph 3, which says, as President Joseph Smith Fielding reminds the reader in the passage quoted by Ludlow, that

“How did the Book of Mormon come forth? By the hand of Joseph Smith. Yet we read in the Book of Mormon [see 2 Ne. 3:7–15; 2 Neph 2, p.67 in BoM 1830] that Joseph Smith is the descendant of Joseph who was sold into Egypt by his brethren, ....

What makes all of this so confusing is that the LDS leadership holds on to the Romans story of the Olive Tree (filtered through Jacob 5, which is expanded to fit in the fall of the Lamnites and the Nephites), and admits of the possibility of joining through faith. As Joseph Smith Fielding said:

Those who are not literal descendants of Abraham and Israel must become such, and when they are baptized and confirmed they are grafted into the tree and are entitled to all the rights and privileges as heirs.

But what then is the necessity of the mixed blood assumptions that are applied to the majority of the Saints?

The great majority of those who become members of the Church are literal descendants of Abraham through Ephraim, son of Joseph.

On top of that, they in some sense deny the "special" nature of the natural descendants, because it is the obedience to the commandments and the faithfulness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ that are decisive; whoever lapses here, cannot use their lineage to inherit (1 Neph 17:35; Rom 9:6). The big difference, according to Ludlow, is that Ephraim is responsible for performing the work of the Restoration and for directing it. Again, President Joseph Smith Fielding states

The members of the Church, most of us of the tribe of Ephraim, are of the remnant of Jacob. We know it to be the fact that the Lord called upon the descendants of Ephraim to commence his work in the earth in these last days. We know further that he has said that he set Ephraim, according to the promises of his birthright, at the head. Ephraim receives the ‘richer blessings,’ these blessings being those of presidency or direction. The keys are with Ephraim. It is Ephraim who is to be endowed with power to bless and give to the other tribes, including the Lamanites, their blessings.

(The allusion of the "richer blessing" here is to KJV Gen 48:19f.)

Discussion

Clearly there are all sorts of problems here. 

One issue that was already bothering the Jewish interpreters of the story of Joseph was the fact that Ephraim and Menasseh as sons of Asanet, an Egyptian girl whose father was the priest Potifera, could not have been Jewish. This has to do with the fact that the Jewish interpreters were projecting the laws of Ezra and Nehemia, that Jews have Jewish moms, back into Patriarchical times (cf. Karin Hügel, in her queer readings of Joseph, p.92, makes). Thus Joseph is made to marry an adopted niece of his to bring forth Ephraim and Menasseh.

Die Israelit_in Dina, eine Halbschwester Josefs, wäre die Tocher Jakobs und Leas, hätte also eine andere Mutter als Josef, und Sichem, der Sohn eines Hiwiters, käme aus einem kanaanäischen Stamm. Asenat wäre also Josefs Nichte gewesen.

[The Israelite Dina, a half-sister of Joseph, would be the Daughter of Jacob and Leah, thus had a different Mother than Joseph, and Sichen, the Son of a Hiwite, would come from a canaanite tribe. Asenat would have been Joseph's niece, then. translation RCK]

The biggest issue remains why it was not sufficient to be counted among the seed through the Gospel; perhaps it was not sufficient to be non-Israel in that sense?

 

When Campbell's Delusions were published

Oh my Goodness, I had no idea that Alexander Campbell published his Delusions an analysis of the Book of Mormon already on February 7th, 1831, two days before Joseph Smith Jr received the first part of his revelation on the Law of Consecration (D&C 42). And Rigdon only converted in November of 1830. That's a three month turn-around time!

One thing that this implies is that Campbell in the Delusions, when speaking of common stock [via the Munster incident, RCK] (p.6), cannot criticize the Smith version of the common stock system of D&C 42---similarly to how his father, in his exchange with Rigdon, cannot have (Hayden 1875, p.217) [= (Howe 1834, pp.116-123), since that dates from February 4th, 1831, cannot have meant the Smith version (Howe 1834, p.121)---but must be targeting the Rigdon version that Campbell had only heard about at the Austintown Mahoning Society Meeting that summer (Hayden 1875, p.299).

How Campbell's Mother in Law had a run-in with the Indians

Richardson (1868), p.358 cites the kidnapping in 1789 of Mrs Brown by Indians from Doddbridges' Notes on the Settlement and Indian Wars of the ... (pp.226ff) [in the 1912 edition]. Mrs Brown was the stepmother of Alexander Campbell's first wife, Margaret, whom Alexander first met in 1810. Thus, only some 20 years before Campbell lived in the Western part of Virginia, the place had still been wild frontier and a locale for bad interactions between the white newcomers and the indigenous population.

some French uses of the notion of an intellectual matrix

In its French form, la matrice intellectuelle, the concept is used to reconstruct the world stance of an intellectual movement. (Care has to be taken when reading these French texts, esp feminist authors, as matrice on its own also can mean the uterus. Cf. Emilie Malefant below, where about 70% of the references are anatomical.)

The French historian Yvan Lamond, in his essay L’émergence de l’intellectuel vue des Amériques, (pp.114f), in the reader of Michel Trebitsch, Marie-Christine Granjon (ed), Pour une histoire comparée des intellectuels: textes, 1998, Lamond speaks both of the cultural matrix and the intellectual matrix of the time of the Dreyfus Affaire, which that affair highlighted and revealed (p.114), to the point of bringing about the intellectual as a cultural force (p.115). Lamond provides no other clues about this construct.

The French historian Etienne Fouilloux, in his book Une Eglise en quête de liberté : La pensée catholique française entre modernisme et Vatican II (1914-1962) [i.e. A Church in Search of Liberty: French Catholic Thought during Modernism and the 2nd Vatican, 1914-1962], Paris (1998), p.10, can write:

The modernist crisis constitutes the intellectual matrix of contemporary Catholicism precisely insofar as it is defined as a re-reading of the founding message in light of the scientific forms of knowledge of the last century. (p.10)

In her master thesis from the University of Sherbrooke, Canada, Emilie Malenfant reconstructs the genealogy of the intellectual matrix of misogyny of the Third Reich, without ever defining what that might be or offering clues to the secondary literature. Malenfant wants to have an "ideological matrix" that is not restricted to the intellectual, but widened to encompass medicine, philosophy, sociology and politics (p.21). Clearly she assumes that the philosophical discourse contributes to the matrix construction (p.25), bringing also the cultural into the game when writing about the "intellectual and cultural matrix" (p.25), though without distinguishing it properly from either of the constituent matrices of the conjunction.

French Wikipedia does not define the term, but use it. For example, in its article on the French Militia, they write:

L'organisation est fondée sur 21 points qui donnent la matrice idéologique du mouvement : « contre le capitalisme international, pour le corporatisme français », « contre la condition prolétarienne, pour la justice sociale », « contre la lèpre juive, pour la pureté française », « contre la franc-maçonnerie païenne, pour la civilisation chrétienne ».

PS: The Argentinian Sephardic theologian Mario Javier Saban wrote a Spanish book that placed the matrix straight into the title: La Matriz Intelectual del Judaismo y La Genesis de Europa, 2005.

some English uses of the notion of an intellectual matrix

In his 1969 postscript to the Structure of Scientific Revolution, Thomas Kuhn introduced the term disciplinary matrix (Kuhn 1970:180) as the locus of the change during the paradigm shift, and defined it as

the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques and so on shared by the members of a given community (Kuhn 1970:175)

In their book 2012 Objectivity and Subjectivity in Social Research, the authors Gayle Letherby, John Scott and Malcolm Williams suggested to broaden disciplinary matrix to intellectual matrix, to shed the restriction to a specific discipline or specialization (p.24 Fn 4).

In a 2013 book entitled Biblical Narrative and Palestine's History, Thomas L. Thompson of the Copenhagen School of biblical criticism used the concept of "intellectual matrix" as the basis for Chapter 8, entitled The intellectual matrix of early biblical narrative: inclusive monotheism in Persian period Palestine (pp. 105-118). This chapter repeated an argument that Thompson had published in the essay collection The Triumph of Elohim: From Yahwisms to Judaisms edited by Diana Vikander Edelman from 1995. Here, Thompson uses the terms literary matrix and intellectual matrix (pp.112-113) interchangeably to denote the interpretation of the Exile as a mental event.

Concepts and literary works commonly thought to be exilic and post exilic have referents recognized as adhering to the defining ideology of Exile — whatever the exile’s actual historicity. In such literature, the exile is presented first of all as an event of the mind within the intellectual world of early Judaism and functions as a literary matrix for large portions of the Bible. This is true whatever events, if any, actually occurred that might be regarded as a “return”. What are commonly designated as exilic and post exilic texts, as well as some of the later compose collections of the Old Testament, whether the Septuagint || or the later Massoretic [sic!] collection called the Hebrew Bible, all flow from this intellectual matrix and must, therefore, be chronologically subsequent. (pp.112-113)

Perhaps more typical of the problem is the use that James F. Ward makes in his monograph Language, Form and Inquiry: Arthur F. Bentley's Philosophy of Social Science, 1984, where the 2nd chapter is entitled The Intellectual Matrix of Bentley's Social Science, without ever defining what might be meant with that. Ward writes that:

This chapter [i.e. the 2nd chapter, RCK] is concerned with the milieu in which Bentley’s early thinking was formed and the way in which he began his course of inquiry. The central question is how Bentley arrived at the problem that unifies his work: the search for the foundations of social science. The path to the philosophy of social science led Bentley through a series of intellectual encounters which expanded the horizons of his thinking and which reveal his growing intellectual independence. (p.15)

leaving it unclear whether the intellectual matrix is understood here as the residue of the Entwicklungsroman of Bentley' intellectual encounters, or the unifying problem of Bentley's research, or something else entirely.

We owe Ellen Meiksins Wood's Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought (2011) the reference to and explication of Quentin Skinner's 1978 book The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, which takes a hyper-contextualizing approach to political vocabulary.

His [i.e. Quentin Skinner, RCK] main strategy, here as elsewhere in his work, was to cast his net more widely than historians of political thought have customarily done, considering not just the leading theorists but, as he put it,  “the more general social and intellectual matrix out of which their works arose”. [= Skinner, ibid, p.x] (p.8)

In Skinner's use then, the social matrix and the intellectual matrix are almost akin to levels of discourse of different parts of society, rather than agglomerations of conceptual notions.  Meiksins Wood writes:

It turns out that the ‘social matrix’ has little to do with ‘society’, the economy, or even the polity. The social context is itself intellectual, or at least the ‘social’ is defined by, and only by, existing vocabularies. The ‘political life’ that sets the || agenda for theory is essentially a language game. In the end, to contextualize a text is to situate it among other texts, among a range of vocabularies, discourses and ideological paradigms at various levels of formality, from the classics of political thought down to ephemeral screeds or political speeches. (pp.8-9)

Rob Moore, in his book Basil Bernstein: The Thinker and the Field, 2013, uses "intellectual matrix" to mean a substratum of the disciplinary or social discourse of his time.

The exegesis of [Basil, RCK] Bernstein’s thinking must involve a consideration of when he thought what he did, both in terms of the intellectual matrix of the time, the nexus of personal relationships and broader social conditions and issues. It must be concerned with the time and the place of the ideas. (p.3)

Rob Moore then equates the term ‘meta-dialogue’, coined by Hasan (1999) [= Ruqaiya Hasan, Speaking with Reference to a Context,  In M. Ghadessy (Ed.), Text and Context in Functional Linguistics: Systemic Perspectives (pp. 219-328). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1999. RCK], as equivalent to “an intellectual matrix of ideas”, which is used to describe a 

... nexus of personal and institutional relationships — University College London (UCL), where Halliday and Douglas were based, is ‘around the corner’ from the University of London Institute of Education where Bernstein and Hasan worked. (p.15)

Jairo Moreno, in his discussion of the Argentinian Jazz musician Guillermo Klein, as part of his essay Past Identity: Guillermo Klein, Miguel Zenón, and the Future of Jazz, in: Pablo Vila (ed), Music and Youth Culture in Latin America, 2014, pp.81-105, contrasts the type of matrices which constrain Klein’s work with those that constrain, according to Lewis (2008) [= George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music, Chicago (University of Chicago Press), 2008. RCK], the work of African American musicians (p.88).

Moreno (p.88) quotes Lewis (2008:447) as saying that African American musicians are under an imperative to

situate their work in a complexly articulated African American intellectual, social, and sonic matrix” (Lewis 2008:447); cited (p.88)

In contrast, Moreno argues, Klein is under no such imperative; though his work is

articulated to a local-national social and intellectual matrix, and in turn to an international critical matrix that in a way preceded it and helped to shape it. What is more, these matrices rarely intersect. When they do, they disrupt as much as they enable one another. (p.88) 

Moreno interprets the notion of matrix as belonging to competing modernities.

… matrices operate independently from each other as embodiments of actually existing multiple modernities—modernities that are no longer local variants of a centrally dominant US or European modernity. (p.89) 

In 2014, S. Demazeux used the Kuhnian notion of the disciplinary matrix in an article in the International Journal of Epidemiology to analyze the consolidation of psychiatric epidemiology. Because Demazeux diagnosed a "weak coherence of its intellectual components" (Abstract), the almost-discipline is noted to have a "weak intellectual matrix" (ibid).

In his 2014 online faculty profile at Princeton, Thomas Conlan, Professor of East Asian Studies and History, uses the term the terms “social, political and intellectual matrix of fourteenth-century Japan” as the object of transformation targeted by the violence that he describes in his monograph State of War: The Violent Order of Fourteenth Century Japan (2003).

The online Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History in its article on Intellectual Life uses the matrix terminology at least twice. For the colonial period, it denotes the shape into which the oppression of slavery confined intellectual African thinking for the slaves brought to the colonies.

... an African-American tradition of sacred and secular folk thought in sermons, tales, aphorisms, proverbs, narrative poems, sacred and secular songs, verbal games, and other linguistic forms became the primary matrix for historicizing, interpreting, and speculating about the nature and meaning of society and the cosmos.

The alternative matrix of the Enlightenment was available to the African Americans through the free schools and societies, as the article eloquently notes.

But Free African societies and fraternal orders like the Prince Hall Masons also provided a counterconventional intellectual matrix—for mastering the secular and sacred freethought traditions of the Radical Enlightenment, in which the proselytizing mythographers of freemasonry and Renaissance hermeticism offered African-American free thinkers secret access to a "perennial philosophy" that hypothesized an unbroken continuity with, and a reverential attitude toward, the esoteric symbol systems and pagan wisdom literatures of ancient North Africa and the Orient.

Richard Rorty on the Historiography of Philosophy

In his essay on the historiography of philosophy, in which Rorty identifies four different genres of historical writing about philosophy, Rorty looks first at a binary choice that philosophers can make: whether to reconstruction the arguments of the past philosophers as contemporary conversations, what is termed rational reconstruction, or in the context of their past conversations, that is, historical reconstruction (p.49). Rorty considers this dilemma false, as he points out that both are necessary and that the history of science shows how this could be done. Rorty wonders why it is OK for the historian of science to note these unfortunate confusions.

We do not think its anachronistic to say that Aristotle had a false model of the heavens, or that Galen did not understand how the circulatory system worked. We take the pardonable ignorance of great dead scientists for granted. We should be equally willing to say that Aristotle was unfortunately ignorant that there are no such things as real essences, or Leibniz that God does not exist, or Descartes that the mind is just the central nervous system under an alternative description. (p.49)

Rorty has a discourse-level suggestions as why that hesitancy might exist.

We hesitate merely because we have colleagues who are themselves ignorant of such facts, and whom we courteously describe not as ‘ignorant’, but as || ‘holding different philosophical views’. Historians of science have no colleagues who believe in crystalline spheres, or who doubt Harvey’s account of circulation, and they are thus free from such constraints. (p.50)

There are purposes for which it is useful to know how people talked who did not know as much as we do — to know this in enough detail so that we can imagine ourselves talking the same outdated language. (p.50) 

There is knowledge — historical knowledge — to be gained which one can only get by bracketing one’s own better knowledge about, e.g., the movements of the heavens or the existence of God. (p.50) 

However, in order for this to be controlled, a heuristic has to be be developed, and Rorty makes use of the one proposed by Quentin Skinner, to wit:

No agent can eventually be said to have meant or done something which he could never be brought to accept as a correct description of what he had meant or done. (Skinner 1969:28) (p.50)

Rorty envisions such reconstructions as eliminating false perceptions of the past.

As Skinner (1969:52-3) rightly says, ‘the indispensable value of studying the history of ideas’ is to learn ‘the distinction between what is necessary and what is the product merely of our own contingent arrangements.’ (p.51) 

[E.g. animal magnetism in Hegel’s philosophy. RCK]

… we would like to be able to see the history of our race as a long conversational interchange. We want to be able to see it that way in order to assure ourselves that there has been rational progress in the course of recorded history — that we differ from our ancestors on grounds which our ancestors could be led to accept. (p.51)

This means that we are interested not only in what the Aristotle who walked the streets of Athens ‘could be brought to accept as a correct description of what he had meant or done’ but in what an ideally reasonable and educated Aristotle could be brought to accept as such a description. (p.51)

[RCK: Rorty is right in this, because the absence of this belief would undermine the possibility that people could be swayed by rational arguments at all, bringing the project of philosophical discourse to an end. A dead philosopher is an extreme example of someone who is both incredibly bright and coming from incredibly different presuppositions; a perfect person to convince to our own stance.]

Rorty uses Peter F. Strawson's The Bounds of Sense from 1966 on Immanuel Kant, to make Kant a “fellow-member of the same disciplinary matrix” (p.52), as Rorty had put it in an earlier paragraph.

Since Kant agreed with this line of thought [i.e. that Humean psychological atomism is deeply misguided and artificial, RCK], and such much of the ‘Transcendental Analytic’ is devoted to making similar points, it is natural for someone with Strawson’s concerns to want to show Kant how he can make those points without saying some other, less plausible, things which he said. (p.52)

In the long footnote 1 (pp.52-53), Rorty objects to Michael Ayers attempt to reconstruct the philosopher historically before reconstructing him rationally, because the understanding of what is being said is a pre-requisite to coming up with a good translation and not just the raw materials for such a translation. 

I think that Ayers overdoes the opposition between ‘our terms’ and ‘his terms’ when he suggests that one can do historical reconstruction first and leave rational reconstruction for later. The two genres can never be independent, because you will not know much about what the dead meant prior to figuring out how much truth they knew. These two topics should be seen as moments in a  continuing movement around the hermeneutic circle, a circle one has to have gone round a good many times before one can begin to do either sort of reconstruction. (p.53 Fn 1 cont). 

Such enterprises in commensuration are, of course, anachronistic. But if they are conducted in full knowledge of their anachronism, they are unobjectionable. (p.53)

It is natural to describe Columbus as discovering America rather than Cathay, and not knowing that he had done so. (p.53)

Historical reconstructions of what unre-educated dead thinkers would have said to their contemporaries — reconstructions which abide by Skinner’s maxim — are, ideally, reconstructions on which all historians can agree. If the question is what Locke would be likely to have said to a Hobbes who had lived … for a few more decades, there is no reason why historians should not arrive at a consensus, a consensus which might be confirmed by the discovery of a manuscript of Locke’s in which he imagines a conversation between himself and Hobbes. (p.53)

[RCK: This would of course never validate the correctness of the reconstruction of Hobbes, only the correction of the reconstruction of Locke.]

Rorty is interested in this convergence of the historical reconstruction because he denies the convergence for the rational reconstruction.

Rational reconstructions, on the other hand, are not likely to converge, and there is no reason why they should. … The Fregean, the Kripkean, the Popperian, the Whiteheadian, and the Heideggerian will each re-educate Plato in a different way before starting to argue with him. (p.54)

Thus, philosophers can alternate between the two modes of reconstruction, historical and rational, obeying and disobeying Skinner’s maxim.

When we respect Skinner’s maxim we shall give an account of the dead thinker ‘in his own terms’, ignoring the fact that we should think ill of anyone who still used those terms today. When we ignore Skinner’s maxim, we give an account ‘in our terms’, ignoring the fact that the dead thinker, in his linguistic habits as he lived, would have repudiated these terms as foreign to his interests and intentions. (p.54)

However, that difference of historical and rational cannot be mapped to the difference between meaning and truth.

The contrast between these two tasks, however, should not be phrased as that between finding out what the dead thinker meant and finding out whether what he said was true. (p.54)

This is partially due to the fact that meaning is not necessarily something that cannot develop even for the utter.

It is perfectly reasonable to describe Locke as finding out what he really meant, what he was really getting at in the Second Treatise, only after conversations in heaven with, successively, Jefferson, Marx, and Rawls. (p.54) 

… grasping the meaning of an assertion is a matter of placing that assertion in a context — not of digging a little nugget of sense out of the mind of the assertor. (p.55)

From this stance the search for truth falls out, because 

… determining truth is a matter of placing it [i.e. the assertion, RCK] in a context of assertions which we ourselves should be willing to make. (p.55)

Thus any separation of truth and meaning is suppressed. 

There will be as many ration reconstructions which purport to find significant truths, or pregnant and important falsehoods, in the work of a great dead philosopher, as there are importantly different contexts in which his work can be placed. (p.55)

Rorty now introduces the distinction of history of culture or thought versus history of philosophy, or the question of the canon, as to how to pick great philosophers. (p.56)

The problem arises only in a relatively trivial form for the history of chemistry, because nobody much cares whether we call Paracelsus a chemist, an alchemist, or both. (p.56) 

This is because we have, in these areas [such as chemistry, RCK] clear stories of progress to tell. It does not make much difference … at what point we see a ‘discipline’ emerging out of a chaos of speculation. (p.56)

For the big, geistesgeschichtlich[e] stories that Rorty finds paradigmatically in Hegel, but also in Heidegger, Reichenbach, Foucault, Blumenberg and McIntyre, Rorty returns to his previous assessment that their purpose is self-justificatory.  

When I say that these are works of self-justification, I of course do not mean that they justify the present state of things, but rather that they justify the author’s attitude towards the present state of things. Heidegger’s, Foucault’s, and MacIntyre’s downbeat stories condemn present practices but justify the adoption of their authors’ views towards those practices, thereby justifying their selection of what counts as a pressing philosophical issue — the same function as is performed by Hegel’s, Reichenbach’s, and Blumenberg’s upbeat stories. (p.57 Fn 4)

Instead of working on specific issues, 

… Geistesgeschichte works at the level of problematics rather than solutions to problems. (p.57)

As a result, the scope is much broader “(e.g. Kant as the author of all three Critiques) …” (p.57).

It [i.e. Geistesgeschichte, RCK] wants to give plausibility to a certain image of philosophy, rather than to give plausibility to a particular solution of a given philosophical problem by pointing out how a great dead philosopher anticipated, or interestingly failed to anticipate, this solution. (p.57)

This is another crucial difference vis-a-vis the history of science.

Historians of science feel no need to justify our physicists’ concern with elementary particles or our biologists’ with DNA. … philosophers do need to justify their concern …. (p.57) 

The question of which problems are ‘the problems of philosophy’, which questions are philosophical questions, are the questions to which geistesgeschichtlich[e] histories of philosophy are principally devoted. (p.58)

The academic discipline called ‘philosophy’ encompasses not only different answers to philosophical questions but total disagreement on what questions are philosophical. (p.58)

This means that the rational reconstruction is the little sister to the geistesgeschichtliche approach. 

If one disagrees with him [i.e. the great dead philosopher, RCK] mainly about solutions to problems, …, one will think of oneself as reconstructing him …. If one thinks of oneself as showing that one need not think about what he tried to think about (as in, e.g. Ayer’s dismissive interpretation of Heidegger, …) then one will think of oneself as explaining why he should not count as a fellow-philosopher. One will redefine ‘philosophy’ so as to read him out of the canon. (p.58)

Canon-formation is unimportant in the natural sciences, because the work stands on its own. It is only in philosophy, and only in its honorific use with moralistic intent (p.58), that the affiliation with a great dead philosopher is required (p.59). For mere rationalistic reconstruction, the relevance of the problem suffices; and for historical reconstruction, a contextualist historian need not concern themselves about the canon (p.59)

One might, in one’s philosophical capacity, share the Anglo-Saxon belief that no philosophical progress occurred between Kant and Frege and still, as an historian, delight in recapturing the concerns of Schiller and Schelling. (p.60)

In practice of course, everyone want to work on the relevant problems and analyze the relevant historians, so the Geisteshistoriker as the "sage" of the philosophers remains enormously influential; but the geistesgeschichtliche approach has lost a lot of its influence, given the meandering focus of effort over the centuries.

Nobody is quite sure whether the issues discussed by contemporary philosophy professors (of any school) are issues which are ‘necessary’ or merely part of our ‘contingent arrangements’. Furthermore, nobody is sure whether the issues discussed by all or most of the canon of great dead philosophers offered by books called The History of Western Philosophy — e.g. universals, mind and body, free will, appearance and reality, fact and value, etc. — are important issues. (p.60)

Thus, the Geisteshistoriker assembles

… a cast of historical characters, and a dramatic narrative, which shows how we have come to ask the questions we now think inescapable and profound. Where these characters left writings behind, those writings then form a canon, a reading-list which one must have gone through in order to justify being what one is [i.e. a philosopher, RCK]. (p.61) 

It is this form of history, though, that is parasitic on the rational and the historical reconstructions, synthesizing their insights, and in combining these two into the same process runs headlong into the problem of anachronism, because it has to simultaneously trace and evaluate, speak in their and in our terms.

It has to ‘place’ that vocabulary [of the great dead philosopher, RCK] in a series of vocabularies and estimate its importance by placing it in a narrative which traces changes in vocabulary. (p.61)

It is self-justificatory in the way that rational reconstruction is, but it is moved by the same hope for greater self-awareness which leads people to engage in historical reconstructions. (p.61) 

Rorty now turns to doxology, the most dubious of the historiographical genres, which is an enumeration of the individual philosophers that presents their writings with neither enough historical context, against historical reconstructions, nor with enough interaction with the best present day work, against rational reconstruction (p.62).

But because not all historical philosophers that are well known worked on the same issues, the underlying narrative must suffer from a lack of coherence.

… doxography is the attempt to impose a problematic on a canon drawn up without reference to that problematic, or, conversely, to impose a canon on a problematic constructed without reference to that canon. (p.62)

A more honest approach would either adjust the problematic or the canon to fit the task (p.63), and to admit that the "deep questions" are dependent on the time at hand. 

The main reason for this recurrent half-heartedness is the idea that ‘philosophy’ is the name of a natural kind — the name of a discipline which, in all ages and places, has managed to dig down to the same deep, fundamental, questions. So once somebody has somehow been identified as a ‘great philosopher’ (as opposed to a great poet, scientist, theologian, political theorist, or whatever), he has to be described as studying those questions. (p.63)

The solution to the problem of mistaking 'philosophy' for referring to a natural kind is both better contextualized historical reconstruction and "more self-confident" Geistesgeschichte:

We need to realize that the questions which the ‘contingent arrangements’ of the present time lead us to regard as the questions are questions which may be better than those which our ancestors asked, but need not be the same. They are not questions which any reflective human being must necessarily have encountered. (p.63) 

It is not the answers to the same questions that have improved, but also the questions themselves (p.63).

We can think of the fundamental questions of philosophy as the ones which everybody really ought to have asked, or as the ones which everybody would have asked if they could, but not as the ones which everybody did ask whether they knew it or not. (p.63)

We should just stop trying to write books called A History of Philosophy which begin with Thales and end with, say, Wittgenstein. (p.65)

For not all topics were prevalent in all centuries:

They [i.e. these books, RCK] have to worry, for example, about the absence or the skimpiness of chapters headed ‘Epistemology in the sixteenth century’ or ‘Moral philosophy in the twelfth century’ or ‘Logic in the eighteenth century’. (p.65) 

Against these difficulties of histories of philosophies, with its unwarranted distinctions of canon (p.66), Rorty proposes a scheme that is based on "a sociological view of the distinction between knowledge and opinion” (p.66). 

On this view, to say that something is a matter of opinion is just to say that deviance from the current consensus on that topic is compatible with membership in some relevant community. To say that it is knowledge is to say that deviance is incompatible [with membership in the relevant community, RCK]. (p.66)

Rorty illustrates this with the example of the “good Americans” who consider the party to vote for a matter of opinion, but know that the press should be free from government censorship; while “good Soviets” [this is a 1980s paper, after all, RCK] know that some censorship is necessary for newspapers, while the question of appropriate consequences—labor camp or asylum—is a matter of opinion (p.66). 

… to say that the existence of real essences, or of God, is a ‘matter of opinion’ within philosophy departments is to say that people who differ on this point can still get grants from, or be employed by, the same institutions, can award degrees on the same students, etc. By contrast, those who share Ptolemy’s opinions on the planets or William Jennings Bryan’s on the origin of species are excluded from respectable astronomy and biology || departments, for membership there requires that one know that these opinions are false. (pp.66-67)

Since these communities make their own rules about what counts as opinion and what counts as knowledge, they should be able to define their own canons and pick their own favorite great dead philosophers (or parts thereof) (p.67), without being submitted to such a canon by a History of Philosophy (p.67).

We should encourage people who are tempted to dismiss Aristotle as a biologist who got out of his depth, or Berkeley an as eccentric bishop, or Frege as an original logician with unjustified epistemological pretensions, or Moore as a charming amateur who never quite understood what the professionals were doing. (p.67)

Rorty views these as experiments that support Geistesgeschichte but suppress doxography (p.67). Having thus axed doxography as an unnecessary genre, Rorty now summarizes the three genres that are indispensable to philosophy and recalls their purpose (p.67):

Rational reconstructions are necessary to help || us present-day philosophers think through our problems. Historical reconstructions are needed to remind us that these problems are historical products, by demonstrating that they were invisible to our ancestors. Geistesgeschichte is needed to justify our belief that we are better off than those ancestors by virtue of having become aware of those problems. (pp.67-68)

These three genres thus form a nice example of the standard Hegelian dialectical triad. (p.68) 

Rorty now turns to the broader genre of intellectual history, which has more grounding in the sociological and political aspects of the time (p.68), and covers cases of figures that never make it into the canon but belong there for other reasons, "people like Erigena, Bruno, Ramus, Mersenne, Wolff, Diderot, Cousin, Schopenhauer, Hamilton, McCosh, Bergson and Austin" (p.69). Rorty also discusses the non-philosophers:

These are people who in fact did the job which philosophers are popularly supposed to do — impelling social reform, supplying new vocabularies for moral deliberations, deflecting the course of scientific and literary disciplines into new channels. They include, for example, Paracelsus, Montaigne, Grotius, Bayle, Lessing, Paine, Coleridge, Alexander von Humboldt, Emerson, T.H. Huxley, Mathew Arnold, Weber, Freud, Franz Boas, Walter Lippman, D.H. Lawrence and T.S. Kuhn — not to mention all those unfamiliar people … who turn up in the footnotes to Foucault’s books. (p.69)

This general intellectual history provides the grounding for the sketching out of the histories of philosophy; only the doxographies find themselves independent of these analyses.

Like the history of anything else, history of philosophy is written by the victors. Victors get to choose their ancestors, in the sense that they decide which among their all too various ancestors to mention, write biographies of, and commend to their descendants. (p.70) 

But it also broadens the contexts, flattening the mountain tops into the plains by exposing a more accurate assessment of the degree of influence of the famous figures (p.71).

… intellectual history works to keep Geistesgeschichte honest, just as historical reconstruction operates to keep rational reconstructions honest. (p.71)

It is only that skepticism, of asking how the famous philosopher X ever came to have that position, that allows philosophers to write radically new Geistesgeschichte, such as Foucault's The Order of Things (p.72).

I am all for getting rid of canons which have become merely quaint, but I do not think that we can get along without canons. This is because we cannot get along without heroes. … We need to tell ourselves detailed stories about the mighty dead in order to make our hopes of surpassing them concrete. (p.73)

The assumption that there are timeless questions, that all people everywhere should have sensibly thought about, is a necessary precondition for the community of philosophers that present day thinkers want to be members of (p.73).

On this assumption, what we need is to see the history of philosophy as the story of the people who made splendid but largely unsuccessful || attempts to ask the questions which we ought to be asking. (pp.73-74) 

The competition [between the canons, RCK] is not likely ever to be resolved, but as long as it continues we shall not lose that sense of community which only impassioned conversation makes possible. (p.74) 

Bibliographical Record

Richard Rorty, The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres, published in 1984 in Richard Rorty, Jerome B. Schneewind, Quentin Skinner (ed), Philosophy in History, Cambridge, as Chapter 3 (pp.49-76), now also accessible in: Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Cambridge 1998, pp. 247-273.