Yes. Or, more exactly, statements that we take as true that aren't. We can avoid the "false positive" by avoiding statements in the sources that aren't true... it isn't a false positive just because someone says it in a source somewhere; it is only thinking it true when doing history today that makes it so.Roger Pearse wrote:A query: by the "false positive", I understood you to mean statements in the data which are not actually true? (I will continue on the basis that this is what you had in mind, but of course I may misunderstand here).
I suggest that there is no reasonable alternative unless we are unconcerned about whether we are writing about something true.Roger Pearse wrote:But I suggest that it is a great mistake for us to start by choosing which bits of data we will listen to, on the basis that some of them may be lying to us.
The only difference between you and me here is that you imply that there is no basis (only bias) for us to "start by choosing which bits of data we will listen to." On the contrary, I believe the aim of historiography and any historically-oriented epistemology or methodology project is precisely that. There is no consensus about how exactly we do this in all its gory details, but the alternative is to take the entire story of Odysseus, Heracles, Aeneas, King Arthur, Moses, and Gilgamesh (where there is no contradiction) as literal truth.
Best regards,
Peter Kirby
PS - You do something sneaky when you replace the word "sources" with that other word "data," in order to imply that doubting a source's statement is to ignore some of the data. Statements in sources are in fact always data for something, even if they are only data for a lie, rumor, or fiction.