rationalskepticism.org

MS2 wrote:

igorfrankensteen wrote:As one of the few resident Historians, I'll point out that your opening post is disorganized, and strongly suggests that you made no effort at all to even so much as look up the various definitions of the term 'History.'

Pretty quick on to the attack. 'Disorganized', 'made no effort at all': obviously, I will take to heart the telling critique of a 'resident Historian' (with a capital H, no less)

If I had wanted to look definitions up, that is what I would have done.

If you had wanted to ask a cogent question,instead of stating a prejudice and requesting comment, it would have helped you tremendously to do at least a tiny amount of research into the words you used in your question.

You seem to be leaning heavily towards dismissing all Historical research as mere conjecture out of hand, on the grounds that people have to interpret events, in order to describe what happened.

And you reach this conclusion because I asked people here what their opinion was?

No, I reached that deduction, because (as you have repeated since) you said

So what are we doing? Just offering personal interpretations? I tend to think we at least want it to be more than that, because people talk a lot about 'evidence', and evidence is something that is used to try and make some sort of objective case. And if it isn't anything more than personal interpretation, does that mean we can't say anything meaningful about the past?

and

There no doubt followed a lot of hard work, a lot of tests, comparisons with other finds, etc etc. But at every stage along the way there will also have been subjective interpretation, guesswork and so on, involved.

...thereby indicating that you are starting from the firm conviction that attempts to describe the past, all require subjective guesswork "at every stage."

Hardly an unbiased starting point for you.