Catahistorians who deny truth serve falsification rather than neutrality

Evidence

There are others. According to some currently fashionable epistemological no­ tions, good evidence and bad evidence are meaningless terms. All evidence is, so to speak, born free and equal. And since there is no such thing as truth, there is no such thing as authenticity; these are irrelevant and meaningless, even mis­ leading, concepts. This approach serves a double purpose; it makes it possible both to discredit good evidence and to validate bad evidence, and this helps enormously in the process of falsification. We might call these “catahistorians,” in contrast to the so-called metahistorians, who reflected on the nature of his­ torical reasoning, and sometimes—the more rash among them—tried to for­ mulate rules governing the historical process itself. I use the Greek prefix “cata” as in cataclysm, catastrophe and catalepsy. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1826

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the coinage ‘catahistorians’ against ‘metahistorians’ — the prefix carries deliberate negative connotations.
• SEED: Angle: a taxonomy of historians as metahistorians, catahistorians, and the rest — a framework for writing about historiography.
• XREF: connects to: Grey vampires pose as neutrality to avoid refutable claims — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2447