by Gary C. Gibson

Created on: June 15, 2009   Last Updated: October 07, 2009

To answer the question present for this essay-is an historian's craft more like that of a painter or a photographer- we should need to consider what the differences are between painters and photographers works. Are they entirely different today. Do photographers still produce naive realist representations of reality, or do they use Photoshop and repixilize their content placing fictional scenes together as easily as a surrealist painter?

Historians ought to try to write about the reality of the past without the fictional elements of painters or photographers. Historians must recognize the inherent limit of being non-present at historical scenes and try to be as close as they may to the truth that was.past. Historians must use language meanings in constructions taken from eras with different lexicons and try to translate the terms into accurate ideas. The meaning of sentences isn't just in the abstract lexical analysis of the constructions though-the lexicons of past eras-even those of dead languages and extirpated societies-that are presented to historical investigations were representations of real things in the empirical world prevalently that are no longer visible or existent for the historian's review.

Photographers and painters do not usually paint or picture things that are not present, yet they might with skill. Historians however would try to comprehend what was from the words and records of what still is rather than to imaginatively construct images and relationships that never were or at best are inaccurate, non-rigorously constructed shots in the dark. Historians must analyze ancient records and technical infer elements of true associations with their own knowledge of sentence meanings. When they can put together a sufficient translatable data base at some point they may have enough fragments of true knowledge to piece together a kind of crossword puzzle word image of the past. The challenges are encountered all the time in popular Bible interpretation of ancient terminology into modern concepts. The Wittgensteinian problem of the indeterminacy of translation was in part a substantial cause for much of the rifting in understanding between science and religion that developed in the United States in then 19th and 20th centuries.

Developing a philosophy of history is different in a darkroom of uncertainty than in the daylight of well known public events such as the Kennedy assassinations. Unanswered questions remain for each of those however such as

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