One thing that I think maybe historians don't communicate well enough, & which leads to miscommunication whenever there's an attempt at vulgarization, is the difference between historical theory and historical fact.
"There was a man called Napoleon Bonaparte who ruled France in the late 18th and early 19th century" can be treated as historical fact. His existence is well-attested via a variety of sources: we have his baptism, marriage & death certificates, we have his school & military records, we have a wide variety of testimonies from various people who knew him or met him, we have portraits & sculptures, he's discussed in contemporaneous newspapers all across the European continent & beyond, he's mentioned in private correspondence & diaries written by all kinds of people of all kinds of nationalities, he authored several books, & so on & so forth - the evidence that there was a real man called Napoleon Bonaparte & that he was First Consul & then emperor of France is overwhelmingly strong. It would be difficult to account for the existence of all those sources mentioning him in a plausible way, and difficult as well to account for the effect he’s had on the world: if there was no Bonaparte, then who fought at Waterloo, where archeologists have discovered what is clearly an early 19th-century battlefield, & more importantly, why did they fight? Who came up with the French Civil Code? Who ordered the creation of the Paris stock exchange? & so on & so forth!
You could argue that all of this is some kind of vast conspiracy, but extraordinary claims (”people got together to fake the existence of a French head of state for no obvious reason, going so far as to create thousands & thousands of disparate records across the world & to plant archeological evidence throughout Europe”) require extraordinary evidence: in the absence of such evidence, the only logical conclusion you can draw from this accumulation of material records of his life is that he existed, & that he did in fact rule France from 1799 to 1815. New findings might at some point bring this into question, but currently, the available evidence in favour of his existence & of his status as First Consul & then emperor is overwhelming - &, most importantly, it would be very difficult to give a cohesive interpretation of all that evidence from the opposite standpoint, ie, that he didn’t exist. The statement “A man called Napoleon Bonaparte ruled France between 1799 and 1815, first as First Consul & then as emperor” coheres with all available evidence. This is a fact.
“Napoleon Bonaparte was originally supportive of the French Revolution & then became an anti-democratic authoritarian who re-established a form of monarchy in France, therefore the man who ruled under that name was not the real Bonaparte, but someone who killed him & stole his identity to replace him” is a historical theory, & it’s a terrible one. The supporting evidence for it is weak (there were no rumours in his time that this might have happened, nobody anywhere is recorded as having seriously believed this while he was alive, he himself did not leave any kind of records or diaries that might indicate he wasn’t who he purported himself to be, etc.) & the evidence to the contrary is quite strong: he was close to his family & none of them ever seemed to have any doubts as to his identity, he was educated in communal settings & spent his military career surrounded with people who had known him when he was much younger & nobody ever seemed suspicious of him, he quickly became a public & well-known figure in whom no particular unexplained sudden changes were noted, his handwriting, spelling (which is distinctive & idiosyncratic) & written idiolect are similar throughout his adult life, DNA samples taken from hair said to have belonged to him show a family relationship with hair said to have belonged to some of his brothers and sisters and a family relationship to people said to descend from his siblings, etc.
You can come up with ad hoc explanations (the man who replaced him was a secret twin brother or half-brother with a freaky resemblance who was coached to act, speak & write exactly like him, for example), but there is no evidence supporting this claim: in short, it’s just handwaving away holes in the theory by making up something that could plausibly fill the gaps, but this is not the same thing as providing proof for the claims you’re making, & in fact there is quite a bit of (admittedly anecdotal) evidence that directly contradicts this possibility, as well as some obvious logical weaknesses. Laetitia Bonaparte was by all accounts a devoutly Catholic woman who lived a very regimented life, & the birth of Napoleon was attended by several witnesses: if secret twin brother there is, where did he come from, & where was he hidden, & how did nobody notice that she was obviously pregnant with twins, & how did she convince everyone present at the birth to hide his existence? if it’s a secret half-brother, who was the father (it seems unlikely Laetitia Bonaparte would cheat on her husband or, once widowed, have sex out of wedlock), & how did nobody notice the pregnancy? ultimately, who found that hidden child & coached him to replace his brother? why would they do this? It’s a lot of complications & not a whole lot of reasons to believe in them: you’ve got a theory, that is, a supposition meant to explain what to you seems like a discordance in the facts (the contrast between his original support for the French Revolution & democracy, followed later by political choices that you interpret as going in the opposite direction), but you don’t have any real evidence to support it & no real way to refute evidence that contradicts it. It has no historical value, &, unless more evidence is provided, can be discarded as worthless. It does not do anything to clarify the apparent contradiction you’ve identified & in fact largely complicates the situation by introducing a lot of speculation not rooted in fact. As a tool of interpretation, it’s clearly useless, & will lead you down an intellectual dead-end.
“Napoleon Bonaparte was never really supportive of the French Revolution, he only saw it as an opportunity for his family to gain more power in Corsica & as a way to advance his own career, & his use of plebiscites later on was a cynical move meant to cloak himself in a legitimacy he did not have after he seized power via a military coup” is another theory, & this time, it’s a better one: we know that when Catherine II, empress of Russia, made overtures to French nobles so they would join her army in 1791, he answered, & that the reason it fell through is apparently because he asked to be promoted to major upon joining (he was a lieutenant at the time) & was denied. Additionally, we also know that in 1788 he was in charge of repressing a hunger riot in Paris, which he did with brutal efficiency - certainly does not look like the actions of a future committed revolutionary. His family was also locked in a terrible power struggle with the Paoli family at the time, & the Paoli were supporters of the monarchy: throwing in your lot with the revolutionaries would be an excellent way to harness their power & direct it towards your monarchist enemies. An additional element, more psychological this time, is that he is known to have been bullied during his school years by other students who were richer than him, & from more illustrious families (the Bonapartes were noble, but it was small nobility, what would have been called “noblesse crottée” - “muddy nobility”, in reference to their small estates in which they often had to work as farmers). A possible picture is certainly emerging, of a power-hungry opportunist trying to elevate himself & his family, perhaps in part to avenge childhood humiliations. However!
We have private notes he wrote during his late teenage years, during which he was studying Greek & Roman authors, & in which he expresses a certain enthusiasm for the idea of democracy & the way in which classical societies were ruled. It’s something that clearly fascinated him all his life: he favoured a hairstyle most often seen on Roman & Greek statues, loved ancient architecture, crowned himself with a golden diadem fashioned to look like a wreath of laurel, drew inspiration from Roman & Greek law to draft the Civil Code, used Roman & Greek strategies in battle, was fixated on Greek & Roman state religion, & so on & so forth. & he wasn’t alone in that, certainly - the Enlightenment had triggered a new interest for classical societies across Europe, & many revolutionary circles explicitly drew from Greek & Roman history as inspiration & as ideological justification for their goals. The words “republic” & “democracy” themselves are Latin & Ancient Greek, specifically, & were ideologically foundational in those societies - they were markers of Roman & of Athenian (etc.) identity. Late 18th-century France was wholly oriented towards those mythical ancestors, & was leaning, specifically, towards the Romans, claiming them as the progenitors of the “French race” (the Gauls are a later obsession).
Napoleon would have been immersed from a young age in this general atmosphere of attraction for Rome & Ancient Greece, at a time where this was an attraction shared by everyone: the Grand Tour is good evidence of that, but you can look at the literature, the art, the fashion... of the times & find this crop up again & again. Political theory in particular was strongly marked by this fascination: any ambitious young man planning a political &/or military career would have come into contact with works that tried to explore Roman & Greek outlooks on the organisation of the polis, & particularly republican &/or democratic distribution of power. Could his early convictions have been genuine, & influenced by both his readings & the zeitgeist? From a psychological standpoint, is it surprising that, as a young man who felt disenfranchised by his peers, he might have been sincerely & genuinely attracted to a system that he felt might allow him to rise above them through merit? That brings you to another theory, which is “He was a true democrat at the beginning of the Revolution, but started to change his mind during the First Republic & developed a different, more complex outlook on democracy, & might never have detached himself wholly from his original interest in it, as his use of plebiscites demonstrate”.
This puts one fact (”Napoleon Bonaparte used plebiscites as a tool of government”) in two wholly different lights: according to one theory, he incorporated them into his practice of power because he was aware that he had no real right to the seat he had seized, & was attempting to paper over that by very ostensibly asking for the People to express their Will at regular intervals; according to the other, his use of plebiscites was genuine, which might indicate that he did not perceive himself as an illegitimate ruler & did not feel that he had to justify his position as head of state, & in any case puts forward interesting questions with regard to the way he perceived his authoritarianism as it related to that eminently democratic tool. & this has interesting implications with regard to, for example, the history of populism: was Bonaparte a proto-populist, or perhaps one of the first real populists (more in line with theory 1), or was he trying to invent a political form that reconciled the democratic/republican leanings of the time with the absolutist outlooks that were still the norm in European politics, something that might be considered an ideological tributary to populism but certainly not a direct ancestor (more in line with theory 2)?
Obviously, these are pretty crude & sort of exaggerated positions - I’m sure many among you desperately want to attempt a synthesis, or to bring in new elements that might open new doors, & that’s exactly my point. When you consider these two theories, they are both logical & both make a certain amount of sense, both on a social & on an individual level, & they are both supported by a certain amount of historical evidence. They lead you to fairly different conclusions on certain non-trivial points, but it would be difficult to state, with absolute certainty, that one is objectively “wrong” & one objectively “true”. I think you can even see how both could be sort of true at the same time, if you squint. If you dive into archival material, you will perhaps find more evidence for one than for the other; if you consider other facts that I haven’t discussed, you might think that one theory does a better job explaining them than the other; you might find evidence that directly contradicts one of those theories; you might even come up with a wholly different theory entirely; but when two decent historical theories are presented side by side, you cannot categorically declare one “true” & one “false”, one “real” & one “not real”, in the way that you can with historical facts.
In short: a fact is one element of history for which there is ample enough evidentiary support, & against which there is little enough contradictory data, that the most logical choice is to accept it as real - that is, having actually existed or occurred. A theory is a mental structure through which you try to elucidate facts by pulling from all the available evidence to explain them & put them into perspective. Some theories are better-supported &/or better-constructed than others, some are more useful & more clarifying than others, but it remains, ultimately, an intellectual exercise. You are creating a model through which you are trying to: 1/provide an explanation as to why facts occurred in the way that they did, & 2/clarify known aspects of historical societies & cultures by creating tools that you can use to examine & make sense of the material evidence we have. You can agree or disagree with them, you can offer supporting or contradictory evidence, you can come up with alternate frameworks within which facts can be held with equal plausibility while giving them a different signification - but even when a theory is widely accepted & used by historians as an analytical lens, it is still not the same thing as a fact. Theories are plastic in a way that facts are not, & within the concept of “theory”, the possibility of contradiction always exists.
“Ancient Romans sewed hair to construct the elaborate coiffures that are typical of the Flavian period”, for example, is a theory, & it is an interesting one, that certainly would elucidate a few strange observations that were never fully clarified (why did Roman women so often seem to have long, blunt needles with a very small eye in their beauty kits?) However, while that specific paper is now a classic, this is still just a theory: a well-constructed one, that draws from real archeological & textual evidence as well as from material experience in the present, but it remains an intellectual construction. We have never found a corpse with its hair sewn in place (it would be a possibility - in some tombs the hair of the dead were sometimes extraordinarily well-preserved), we have no primary sources (textual or iconographical) describing the process of sewing hair - in fact, isn’t it surprising that despite the number of mosaics, but also of poems & plays, that depict women at their toilette, not a single one seems to show hair being sewn? Isn’t it also surprising that among Roman satirists, nobody ever seems to mention stitches or seams showing among the hair, even though they regularly make fun of bad wigs? We know that sewing hair does work to construct those hairstyles, & that you can use the type of needle often found with Roman beauty products to do it, but we are not certain - absolutely, irrefutably certain, via direct evidence of this process actually existing in Ancient Rome - that this is what the Romans actually did. We could be wrong! We could have invented an entirely novel & ingenious way of producing the same results that they got through different means!
Historians maintaining a barrier between theory & fact are not pisse-froids trying to rain on everybody’s parade for nefarious historian reasons. This is an essential distinction, epistemologically, hermeneutically & heuristically speaking, & it’s an essential part of the discipline’s methodology. When you start mixing up theories & facts & confusing the one for the other, bad things happen - bad intellectually (you’ll get yourself in some strange theoretical predicaments) but also often bad ethically & politically. The hairstyle example above assumes implicitly that because no modern hairdresser has found a way to build those coiffures without sewing, this means that none exist; that because a modern hairdresser would need to use a sewing needle to get there, that the Ancient Romans must have as well. This is a dangerous form of arrogance, & it rests upon the unexamined assumption that we are “more advanced” in every way than the Romans: if we can’t find a way to do it except with that specific method, the reasoning goes, then this is obviously how they must have done it as well. The idea that they might be more technically advanced than us in some areas, & that they might have been able to manage extraordinary hairstyling feats of which we’re no longer capable, is not honestly examined, even though we know that their weaving capabilities (for example) were far superior to ours. Some medieval stained glass is of a quality, clarity & intensity of colour that we are unable to replicate today! We are often outsmarted by our ancestors, & you cannot work from an assumption to the contrary.
In addition, that theory regarding Roman women’s hairstyles has implications with regard to Roman portraiture. It has been speculated for a long time that Roman portraits are non-mimetic or at best semi-mimetic - that is, that they’re not literal reproductions of someone’s appearance but rather elaborately symbolic representations which can be personalised with some salient features of someone’s physiognomy but which are not meant to capture their likeness precisely. We know, through archeological finds, that many statues of women came with detachable hairstyles that could be switched out with something more fashionable, for example, or that “blanks” (blank faces, blank silhouettes) were produced in advance by sculptors’ workshops, to be selected by clients & finished with a few custom elements. It was theorised that “missing” elements (such as the hair pins you would expect to see to hold up a bun, for example) might be an example of ideological stylisation: we know (again, thanks to archeology, but also textual sources) that the dress of rich Roman women - the ones most likely to have a statue of them made - was much more ornate than it appears to be in statues. A woman whose hair is done up in an elaborate Flavian style would also have been wearing earrings, ornate necklaces & rings, & yet these are rarely seen on sculptures (google “Flavian hairstyle” & you’ll see what I mean): it wouldn’t necessarily be surprising, according to that theory, that hair pins & other hair accessories might be missing, & that the hair might be depicted as staying up “by itself”. Some sculptures don’t even show the fibulae that we know for a fact were used to hold up dresses. There’s also the fact that we have found tons of hairpins (”stick”-style, those long needles you use for buns & co) made from all kinds of materials on archeological sites, which means they were definitely used a lot in Roman society regardless of how often they appear in portraiture, & which indicates that, like other types of jewellery & accessories, they might well be underrepresented in sculptures of women for cultural reasons (ideal womanhood & Romanhood more generally being associated with simple taste & lack of interest in luxuries & frills, aesthetic preference for unadorned portraits, perhaps even a matter of simplification due to cost &/or technical difficulty...)
By treating those portraits as mimetic - that is, assuming that they depict fully & accurately what those hairstyles would have looked like in real life, & that if no accessories are shown then none must have been used - you are taking an interpretative risk that goes against the grain of currently-accepted frameworks, & that actually might upend or at least seriously disturb said frameworks. This might be justified! Maybe those frameworks are incorrect! But the fact remains that treating Roman portraits as non- or semi-mimetic seems to work better, for now, than does treating them as strictly mimetic, & so, when historians approach the sewed hair theory with circumspection & remain noncommittal about it, it is also because it would directly contradict or at least seriously undermine another, broader historiographical framework that, for now, has been shown to be robust. Doubt (which is always necessary whenever a new theory is put forward) springs from the way in which this new intellectual structure does not fit well with other structures that so far have demonstrated their excellent elucidating qualities, & that have also been bolstered rather than contradicted by several new discoveries (reconstructions of faces of corpses show they often do not look like their sculpted & painted portraits, for example).
What I’m trying to say is that it’s common in pop history materials to: 1/confuse theory & fact, 2/overstate how widely accepted a specific (often seductive in a “fun”, bite-sized way) theory is, 3/misrepresent contradicting theories or outright not describe them, 4/obscure or stay shy of the general intellectual landscape in which that theory would have to fit, & not examining the jagged edges. The sewn hair thing is something I see passed around often, as is something about bone tools used by Neanderthals that were identified as leather burnishers by a leather worker (these tools are 50.000 years old - what if they had organic elements that decomposed? more generally, what are the elements of archeological proof - sites of discovery, common relationships with other objects, traces & marks of use on the tool itself... - that allow you to be reasonably certain this was used in leather working? just because this looks like a leather burnisher to us & could conceivably work as a leather burnisher does not make an object a leather burnisher, & while it’s certainly an interesting insight that’s well worth considering, sometimes when we try to extrapolate based on our own practices we are wrong! without historical evidence, saying “this is a leather burnisher because it looks like our own leather burnishers” puts you on damn shaky historiographical ground). There’s a bunch of others, that I won’t all list here (long-time readers will remember the 1950s Hats Incident).
You’ll note that I made no pronouncements as to how “accurate” those theories might be: I am not a prehistorian & was only ever barely a classicist. What I am attempting to interrogate or critique is not the value of the theory itself, but rather how it is presented, & what it says about how we perceive history & the work of historians. Historians are in the theory business, that is, attempts to provide clarifying frameworks for identified facts. The work is reading a lot of primary sources, trying to connect them or contrast them, trying to find patterns that will lead you to others patterns that will lead you to overarching conclusions - but, & this is important, you are never doing this alone. Everything you put forward is part of a long conversation, that you are participating in to the best of your ability. You are always responding to others’ work & they are responding to yours. This creates a complex tapestry of theories that fit - or do not fit! - together along a variety of lines. New theories, when they emerge, will in part be judged on how well they fit with other pre-existing theories that have so far shown themselves to explain various facts well & that new discoveries have strengthened rather than weakened. When the fit is imperfect, reactions will naturally be more circumspect than if it were seamless: a theory that seems to disprove the validity of, say, the first law of thermodynamics will be subjected to a lot more scrutiny than a theory that slots smoothly with(in) it, not because people have a particular ideological commitment to that law but because it’s been shown to work (that is, it explains a variety of observations, allows you to predict phenomena well, & has been tested both experimentally & against new discoveries).
Occasionally, historians will discover new facts (this is usually thanks to archivists, who #makeitdiscoverable not just by physically uncovering new documents but also by classifying, ordering or describing them in such a way that it’s suddenly possible to identify them as potentially useful sources, everyone say thank you archivists; it can also be through methodological innovations, such as finding ways to extract information from materials that had remained unexploited before), but usually historiographical mutation comes in the form of new theories, that is, a reordering of facts in relation to one another. Some facts that were thought unimportant will be brought to the foreground, something that was interpreted as consequence will be put forward as cause, two facts that had never been connected before will be put in relation with one another - & this is how you get historiographical schools & movements! What you think is important, the ways in which you connect facts to each other, where you look for elements & how you look for them, the frameworks you use to look at them - that’s the meat of historiography, & therefore of historians’ work. When Marc Bloch & Lucien Febvre showed that field typology in medieval Western Europe predicted certain social features at the local level, they didn’t discover any new facts, but they created a theory that connected facts no-one had thought to connect before, & which opened wholly new avenues of analysis: the shape & surface area of medieval fields, which had never been thought to be a very important type of historical fact, was suddenly shown to be so central to the social structure of medieval Western Europe that stable social patterns could be reliably associated with certain types of land division & management. This is deeply significant, not just because it reorients historians’ inquiries along new lines, but because of how much it reveals about medieval western European societies - clearly deeply agrarian in ways that may have been underestimated! & of course, today, this is a theory that has been questioned & poked & prodded & discarded by some & defended by others & so on & so forth. That’s the whole point!
Pop history makes little to no room for that process, & instead presents history, not as a dynamic construction through which we attempt to make sense of the past, but rather as a block of knowledge to be uncovered by historians very much like paleontologists in movies are shown to be digging up dinosaur bones. There is dust on history, which historians brush away to reveal something beneath that is “true”, unless they looked at it incorrectly, in which case when they show it to others they will describe it “wrong”. All that is needed is for someone to, metaphorically, put what they’ve unearthed right side up to show everyone what is “true”. You then line up all of your “true” small-h history blocks together to create capital-H History, & then you go back in the dust to dig up more of it (until presumably at some point we’ll finally have dug up all the blocks relating to a specific time period & medievalists or classicists or whoever will be out of business).
I hope I’ve managed to convey why this is an incorrect way of looking at the issue: history is not prediscursive, that is, it does not exist before or outside human understanding & verbalisation in the way that, say, Coulomb’s law does. Humans called Coulomb’s law Coulomb’s law, & wrote it down in a way that was useful & understandable to them, but it exists by itself & would still exist even if humans had no awareness of it. The past - historical facts - will of course always have existed & will always have happened a certain way regardless of how or whether it was recorded, but history is a construction. It’s a scaffolding of theories slotted into one another. We can’t directly test or falsify the hypothesis that Roman portraits were non-mimetic: we can’t figure that out experimentally. All we can do is theorise, & see how well a certain theory allows us to explain certain facts we’ve observed, & how well it holds up against new discoveries. We cannot pronounce a historiographical theory to be “true” in the way that the laws of thermodynamics are true, unless we’ve got an accumulation of probative elements that is such that literally no other explanation would suit. This is a very high threshold to meet! & until it is met, theories will be treated as what they are: theories, some more or less likely, some more or less valuable, some more or less clarifying. This is a fundamental methodological necessity, not historians being all the way up their own asses.
There’s a fascination for the disruptive, I think, which is understandable: an outsider making a major discovery in a field by bringing in left-field knowledge that unexpectedly & elegantly ties together disparate facts is a great story, & compelling! There’s also an undercurrent of anti-intellectualism there (the blue-collar worker “showing up” the fussy, over-educated academics with “basic common sense”) that I think is worth analysing but that has been analysed better by others than me. Of course, the fact that historians have not been & are currently still not always great at differentiating between “makes logical sense” & “reinforces my preexisting prejudices”, or “this is inconceivable” & “this is one of my personal blind spots” really does not help. & still, though, it is vital that we do not cross these streams, & do not blur the line between theory & fact. I understand the urge to roll your eyes at historians’ hesitation when something seems utterly, transparently obvious, & sometimes the eyeroll is more than deserved! But here are some questions that I believe might be useful, when you are encountering a seductive new historiographical theory in the wild, especially one that is presented as “DUMB historians WOULD NOT LISTEN TO HER! What happens next will SHOCK YOU”:
1/ Am I certain I fully understand the terms of the debate? (eg, when someone says “there was no bear cult in Northern Europe”, is it possible they mean “I acknowledge the existence of various forms of bear worship across cultures in Northern Europe, but reject the concept of a ‘bear cult’ as a unified practice, or as a original proto-religion from which all these forms of bear worship are descended” - & therefore, how do I feel about the theory put to me that “there was an Ur-religion that unified all Northern European people, obviously, look at how they all worshipped bears & had similar fairy tales, but historians are dumbasses who can’t see what’s right in front of their eyes”.) Is it clear to me what exactly is being questioned or critiqued, or why historians might be prudent with regard to the specific theory being put forward?
2/ Are competing theories presented, & if so, in what terms? Is there another theory that occurs to me as I think about the facts that this specific framework is trying to connect? Does it seem more or less plausible than the theory I’m asked to accept? Does it seem simpler or more complicated?
3/ What kind of evidence is presented? Is at least some of it historical &/or archeological evidence, that is, contemporaneous texts or representations, similar objects found in other archeological contexts within which their use was more obvious..., but also knowledge held by communities with ties to the event-s, figure-s or object-s discussed? If no evidence of that kind is presented, why?
4/ Can I think of the ways in which this theory might have been constructed? What kind of inquiries would be required to find the evidence from which it was built? Does it seem like the person presenting the theory has in fact conducted that research? Would it even be possible to find the evidence that would be required - has it ever existed, & does it still exist now?
5/ Can I think of ways in which this theory might be falsified? What kind of material evidence would prove this theory incorrect? Has material evidence of that kind been found? If yes, how does the theory account for it? If no, are there reasons that would make it impossible or nearly impossible for such evidence to have survived (material degradation, voluntary destruction...)? How does that impact my outlook on the theory?
6/ Does this theory (implicitly or explicitly) invoke conspiracist outlooks or have hallmarks of conspiracy logic (alleged secret plot PLUS a group of conspirators PLUS “no coincidences” outlook seeking to connect every single event in a cohesive whole PLUS black-and-white logic dividing the world in “good” & “bad” PLUS scapegoating - implicit or explicit - of certain people & groups = conspiracy, but any of those elements, even in isolation, is a red flag)? Generally, does this theory reinforce beliefs or prejudices I might already hold? Along what lines?
7/ Does this theory contain ad hoc explanations, ie, are apparent gaps in logic filled with speculation presented without evidence & that you are meant to accept simply because it allows the rest of the theory to stand? (eg, “the moon is made of cheese, but we can’t tell because it’s extraterrestrial cheese that to us looks exactly like rock” -> the theory acknowledges the fact that we’ve got access to samples of moon rock, & produces an explanation that still allows the theory to function, but does not give any evidence to support it) If I remove the ad hoc explanations, how credible does the theory seem to me? If I consider the ad hoc explanations by themselves, how much sense do they seem to make?
8/ Is the theory’s creator presented as a lone genius erupting into the field with stunning new knowledge? Are they treated as the only bright light in a sea of idiots? If I remove the theory from that context, & instead try to think of it as only one possible viewpoint among others, what opinion do I have of it? Does it seem more or less convincing? Can I imagine what a contradictory viewpoint would be?
9/ Does it seem like the question this theory purports to answer could ever get a definitive answer? Can I think of a similar issue, practice... in our current society, & can constitutive elements of it &/or contributory factors to it be identified with ease & without much debate? Are there a lot of them, or only a few? If the theory treats that issue, practice... as less complex in historical times than it is or would be in our society today, why? If it treats it as more complex, why?
10/ Ultimately, is this theory presented as “true” in a way that vastly overstates the kind of “truth” historiographical methods can produce? Is it acknowledged that, due to the nature of history as a field & as a discipline, there are very few theories that can be treated as certainties or near-certainties? Is there room in it for history-as-narrative, or does it work from an outlook of history-as-discovered-object?
