The
Memorious blog has recently run
Ted McCormick's analysis of "Why Most Narrative History is Wrong" by Alex Rosenberg, published in the online magazine
Salon. McCormick ain't convinced, shall we say:
[According to Rosenberg,] Science doesn’t just cast doubt on the explanations of “even the best histories”. Cognitive science, evolutionary anthropology, and neuroscience are now showing that all the explanations history has ever offered are wrong. Get ready, historians, your minds are about to be blown!
Spoiler alert: I’m still here, mind unblown. The article, excerpted from Rosenberg’s new book, is so horrendous a muddle that I had to start tackling it paragraph by paragraph — at times sentence by sentence ... just to keep Rosenberg’s shifting claims and multiplying promissory notes straight.
McCormick is persuasive .I haven't gone back to the Rosenberg post or the book it draws on.
