Internal Criticism: Historical Reliability
Noting that few documents are accepted as completely reliable, Louis Gottschalk sets down the general rule, "for each particular of a document the process of establishing credibility should be separately undertaken regardless of the general credibility of the author." An author's trustworthiness in the main may establish a background probability for the consideration of each statement, but each piece of evidence extracted must be weighed individually.
Read more about this topic: Historical Method
Famous quotes containing the words internal and/or historical:
“What makes some internal feature of a thing a representation could only its role in regulating the behavior of an intentional system.”
—Daniel Clement Dennett (b. 1942)
“Among the virtues and vices that make up the British character, we have one vice, at least, that Americans ought to view with sympathy. For they appear to be the only people who share it with us. I mean our worship of the antique. I do not refer to beauty or even historical association. I refer to age, to a quantity of years.”
—William Golding (b. 1911)