Practice question · True or false
Because histories are constructed, any construction is as good as any other.
Hints
- Constructed does not mean arbitrary.
- Evidence underdetermines the story without permitting any story.
Show the answer
False
Why
Constructed is not arbitrary. A cathedral is constructed; you still cannot build one out of soup. The evidence underdetermines the story, it does not underdetermine it infinitely.
Practise Postmodernism and the Linguistic Turn
The app has 4 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. History I is free to start.
More questions on Postmodernism and the Linguistic Turn
- "There is nothing outside the text" is the phrase most often used to dismiss the linguistic turn. Why do…
- White argues that historians emplot the same events as tragedy or as comedy. Why does that not license the…
- Complete the settlement.
- Match each of White’s emplotments to the shape it imposes.
- Sort each claim: the weak (absorbed) narrativist claim or the strong (rejected) one?
- On what grounds does the discipline hold that Holocaust denial is wrong rather than merely differently…
- Set aside what the linguistic turn threatened. What did it durably give the discipline?
- What is the decisive asymmetry between a historian and a novelist?