Sunday Seminar Series: Truth and Belief, Part II

Comet, or Dragon? Image via Wikipedi

Dear Readers,

  After the problems that occured with my "Great Expectations" Friday Seminar, I discovered that the response improved when I posted my seminars to time-normal Sundays rather than Fridays, and I've changed the schedule accordingly.

  If you are just joining us, my Sunday Seminars are a series of posts adapted from material for my first-year undergraduate Anachronism students, CHRN/AUG 100.  Last week we talked about different kinds of information, and I defined some terms for you.  It would be useful to go back to that, but I intend to move on from there, so foreknowledge should not be entirely necessary.

   The important point that I want you to take home from these two seminars is that there are different sorts of conclusions you can make about "reality."

   Let me give you an example.  There is a medieval source, from your history, in which a bishop describes his experience of seeing a dragon.  Historians (as you know them) and Anachronists both are interested in this account for a variety of reasons.  However, even time-normal historians consider this source in two ways.

  The first is literally.  The source gives us an account of what a dragon was to a medieval person.  For this bishop, whatever he saw really was a dragon.  And thus we come to interpretations of truth.  Pragmatist philosophy suggests that if an interpretive worldview is useful to someone, then it is true for that person.  What is true, thus, is not necessarily the same for everyone.  Because of truth-bias from his or her original worldview, the Anachronist has to realign his or her mind to that of the source author.  That is, if the Anachronist seeks a literalist, source subjective impression of the information available.  Furthermore, it gets very interesting when you consider that there are time streams where the objective reality would agree with the subjective reality of a dragon.  Keep an open mind!

   Of course, what if we don't take the source literally?  What if we want to figure out what "really happened"?  Was the dragon a comet?  Ball lightning?  It can be a lot more difficult, because to some degree we just have to trust in our sources.  We can't see these time streams via Augury.  So we often have to look for clues in the sources words that tell us what the different possibilities.  The take home message should be that you can never know what "really" happened or will happen in a time stream.  You just know what could happen.  And that's what Anachronism is all about.

   There is another way, however.  There are the people at the University, who still have their memories from a time normal life, but the perspective of interaction with those who have different perspectives.  When in doubt, consult a colleague.  Often, there is someone here who can tell you what their subjective experience in a given related time stream was, and that can help inform you as to the possibilities for your time stream of study.

  In the end, all we can really say is what our sources believed the truth to be, not the "real" facts.

  And yet, this does not matter.  There are so many possibilities out there, and the mere inspiration from a source provides us with something meaningful.  If a source can imagine it, there is likely a time stream where it will occur.

  Always,

  Dr. John Skylar
  Chairman
  Department of Anachronism
  University of Constantinople

A Day in the Life: Thanksgiving in Omentown, Part II

Image via Wikipedia

Dear Readers,

  Last time, I started a story about Thanksgiving in a Maine town that I study.  Port End, which I like to call "Omentown" in my notes, is a place where the fields that give rise to augury are strong enough to actually affect the natural world.

  As a result, omens in that place are real, and they often come true.  The people who live there have adjusted accordingly.  We followed Omentown resident Ed while he saved his smaller friend Carl from a destitute man who attacked him.  Ed did it to prevent the realization of an omen he saw earlier in the day, but felt unsure if he really interpreted the omen in the right way.

  And now, the conclusion.  When we rejoin Ed, a day has passed, and we are at his family home for Thanksgiving.  Below the cut.

  Always,

  Dr. John Skylar
  Chairman
  Department of Anachronism
  University of Constantinople

Monday Muse: Omentown Ballad

Image via Wikipedia

Dear Readers,

  My work lately focuses on Port End, Maine, a town that I talked about a little bit in my last "Day in the Life" post.  The end of that story will get posted in the middle of this week, but for today I wanted to relate something of a "country" song about this "Omentown."

  I think what is really important about this particular case in anachronism is that the omens in Port End arise from strange abnormalities in the same physical laws that give rise to Augury and my work here at the University.  If the laws exist, then there are time streams where they behave a little funny.  Omentown is from one of those time streams.

Always,

Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople

Wan'drin' out by the bay

With my back to the sea 
I saw Old Man Osprey

And he asked me to tea

Friday Seminar Series: Truth and Belief, Part I

Dear Readers,

  Every Friday I write a piece that represents a "seminar" in my introductory Anachronism class, CHRN/AUG 100, to give you an idea of what our department does at the University.  This we

Image via Wikipedia

ek, I talk about the ideas of relative truth across different time streams, and how that affects both the episteme and techne of our work.

   Recently we've been working on the idea of different ways to connect the information obtained through Augury, but we haven't talked much about drawing conclusions.  The bottom line is this:  If you read a poem from Time Stream X, and that poem says that Anubis favored George W. Bush, which allowed him to win the War in Iraq, how much of that do you actually believe?  In that time stream, is there some prime arbiter named Anubis?  Did George W. Bush actually believe in him?  And was the War in Iraq won because of it?

  It can be quite challenging to separate the various reasons to believe something, and I do not believe that I can cover the entire topic in just one sitting.  There is a long history of philosophies of truth, many of which my colleague Professor Bacon is an expert on.  In our class, it is typically he who teaches this lecture, and I have to acknowledge Francis's help in writing this post.

  The best place to start is to look at the different sorts of information that one may obtain inside Augury data.  One I will call techne and the other episteme.  I am not using these words quite how your Ancient Greeks would have used them, however.

  When I look at a source, I think of the techne type of information to be day to day details about life in the time stream of origin.  As in, like the original definition of techne, I say this category contains the information on how one would go about the art of living and creating within the given time stream.  Until the recent attack on our University, I would have said that one could never really live in another time stream, but with the new technology we captured this may be possible.  At any rate, consider techne to be the kind of information that would help you write a tourist's guide to the time stream that you study.

  In the Anachronist's work, episteme refers to knowledge that a source expresses that betrays their physical and metaphysical understanding of their world.  Scientific texts, philosophical works, religious tomes, all of it is part of episteme, usually.  These pieces of information are vital to breathing life into a translation because they tell you the filter through which time stream contemps view their world.  Where the techne will give you the actual mechanical operations of a person, the epistemiological information tells you how they feel about it and what their worldview is; their inner struggle.  This is vital to writing an anachronistic narrative, just as technical information is vital to having a narrative to write.

  I will end here, since I wish to transition into this topic gracefully and none too quickly.  The story that I began this week will be concluded next week.  For those of you in this time stream who live in the United States, I hope you had a happy Thanksgiving and I hope to communicate with you again in the coming week.

  Always,

  Dr. John Skylar
  Chairman
  Department of Anachronism
  University of Constantinople

A Day in the Life: Thanksgiving in Omentown, Part I

Dear Readers,

   This is another one of my "Day in the Life" posts, where I take a slice of life in one of the time

Image via Wikipedia

streams I study and fictionalize it for your time stream.  The world is real, the events are not.  This one is a two-part story.

   For this time around, in light of the US Holiday of Thanksgiving being this week, I've decided to feature a Thanksgiving story set in a contemporary but divergent time stream.  This Day in the Life is set in Port End, Maine, which does not exist in your time stream.  I like to call it "Omentown."  You'll see why.

 Always,
 Dr. John Skylar
 Chairman
 Department of Anachronism
 University of Constantinople