“What is at issue here is not: What are the facts? but rather: How are the facts to be described in order to sanction one mode of explaining them rather than another? Some historians will insist that history cannot become a science until it finds the technical terminology adequate to the correct characterization of its objects of study, in the way that physics did in the calculus and chemistry did in the periodic tables. Such is the recommendation of Marxists, Positivists, Cliometricians, and so on. Others will continue to insist that the integrity of historiography depends on its use of ordinary language, its avoidance of jargon. These latter suppose that ordinary language is a safeguard against ideological deformations of the ‘facts.’ What they fail to recognize is that ordinary language itself has its own forms of terminological determinism, represented by the figures of speech without which discourse itself is impossible.”

"The fictions of factual representation"

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Hayden White7

American historian 1928–2018

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David Deutsch book The Fabric of Reality

Source: The Fabric of Reality (1997), Ch. 13; commentary on the ideas of Thomas Kuhn, as presented in the book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

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and then, “What must I do?”
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Khaled Mashal (1956) Palestinian terrorist

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Francis Crick (1916–2004) British molecular biologist, biophysicist, neuroscientist; co-discoverer of the structure of DNA

Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966, p. 10.
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Daniel Dennett book Darwin's Dangerous Idea

Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)

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Hayden White7

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