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:
“No real vital character in fiction is altogether a conscious construction of the author. On the contrary, it may be a sort of parasitic growth upon the authors personality, developing by internal necessity as much as by external addition.”
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“By contrast with history, evolution is an unconscious process. Another, and perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that evolution is a natural process, history a human one.... Insofar as we treat man as a part of naturefor instance in a biological survey of evolutionwe are precisely not treating him as a historical being. As a historically developing being, he is set over against nature, both as a knower and as a doer.”
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