board77

So you found one internet article which agrees with you?

Or at least, you quoted the selected portions which agree with you.

And the article may have gone through hundreds of quotes from Professor Schlesinger to get those few indecisive words.

So what?

The answer to "so what?" is a distraction from the core question put to you by both Wolfgangbos and myself.

Information:

Knowledge derived from study, experience, or instruction.
Knowledge of specific events or situations that has been gathered or received by communication; intelligence or news. See Synonyms at knowledge.
A collection of facts or data: statistical information.
The act of informing or the condition of being informed; communication of knowledge: Safety instructions are provided for the information of our passengers.
Computer Science Processed, stored, or transmitted data.
A numerical measure of the uncertainty of an experimental outcome.

So all this information, meaning everything anyone has crammed in their brains has come from the knowleged derived from study, a collection of facts. What on gods green earth did people find the stuff to study? probably from other people.
You have to be taught by other people to think for yourselves. Every opinion anyone makes is influcence by someone elses thinking.

Every action has an oposite and equal reaction, including human thought.

You know what you know because someone else wrote it down and you read it. You heard someone say it and repeated it. You walked because someone taught you too.

Inteligence is knowing that others know more and being able to open ones mind up to realizing that an uninformed knowledge is not as complete or useful as an informed knowledge. Only closed minded people believe they are right with their limited knowledge.

Smart people surround themselves with those smarter to gleen their knowledge. The respect that knowledge is valuable. They know that they themselves can not form a valid opinion if they do not know what they are talking about.

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Information:
A collection of facts or data

That's the definition I was going for. Compare this to opinion:

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opinion:
A belief or conclusion held with confidence but not substantiated by positive knowledge or proo

Historians are experts on information.

no yovargas
To characterize historians as "experts on information" is to minimize their profession and duties. You make it sound like they are robot recorders in the great library at Minas Tirith.

They apply what they have learned and make sense of history through analysis, perspective, use of judgment, and evaluation.

You purposely cut the cloth far too short to fit your midget definition.

wolfgang

my claim is a simple one ..... the most authoratitive studies that we have of the evaluation of the presidents are done in several studies - two by the Schlesingers, one by the Wall Street Journal, among others.

I am not claiming that these are the DEFINITIVE LAST WORD on the subject or that they are infallable. Simply, that they are the best we have from the best minds we have available to make such judgments.

If anyone else has other authoratative studies of the same topic, I would be glad to examine them. So far, I have see no such presentation here or anywhere else.

Until that happens, I hold these, and academia holds these, to be the best we have available at the present time.

That is why they are quoted in reference books along with the usual information about the presidents. They are the best tools we have presently for evaluating the presidents.

sf,

I think I understand the thrust of your argument. I merely disagree with the way you are presenting it, as well as with some of the conclusions you are asking me to draw.

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Until that happens, I hold these, and academia holds these, to be the best we have available at the present time.

But the best what? Opinion? I'm not even sure what it could possibly mean for an opinion to be "the best". What does that mean? Does that mean that it's the opinion you agree with the most? Does that mean the most popular opinion?

Edit to note:

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If anyone else has other authoratative studies...

These are NOT studies. These are surveys.

forget it

this is like talking to a wall

Exactly.

merildrivebypost#1,539
another well explained and incisive post going over all the merits of the debate ....

Wait...this debate had merit? Where!?

Wow, you went and tallied up all my drive-by posts and got a number greater than my actual post-count.

What is the point of me giving a well explained and incisive post? What's the point of trying to play tennis when the other player dives away from the ball?

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Wait...this debate had merit? Where!?

my side of it

from meril

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Wow, you went and tallied up all my drive-by posts and got a number greater than my actual post-count.

perhaps it only feels like its ten times that number

Yov

Please define facts and data.

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Historians are experts on information.

But their expert information that a president is a good president is meaningless right?

Historians have rated presidents but according to you all it means diddly squat because joe blow high school drop out has a different opinion.

Umkay, rough definition, things observable/detectable/measurable/recordable in the physical world.

"The world revolves around the sun" is a fact because it is observable in the physical world. (Yes, our observations can be mistaken. Our mistaken observation doesn't change the facts about the world's location).

"Sunsets are pretty" is not a fact because I can't measure "pretty" in the physical world.


EDIT:

" But their expert information that a president is a good president is meaningless right? "

Did anyone here ever say meaningless? Whether a president is "good" is not information (meaning, "facts or data") because "goodness" cannot be seen in the physical world. Unless you can show me what "good" looks like, whether or not something is good is not "facts or data".

Who says the world revolves around the sun?

Consider the two following statements:

1. Abraham Lincoln was assassinated

2. Abraham Lincoln should have been assassinated


Statement 1 is a descriptive statement - an expression of fact. Statement 2 is a normative statement - it is an expression of preference or value. Historians are trained to discover and elaborate on the specifics of descriptive statements. Ethicists are trained to discover and elaborate on the specifics of normative statements.

So yes, the opinion of historians on value/preference/normative statements is not necessarily worth any more than Joe Blow dropout, as they do not necessarily have any more training in ethics than Joe Blow dropout does.

If I may offer some anecdotal evidence, a friend of mine is a historian. She absolutely refuses to comment in her capacity as a historian on matters of value (i.e. whether Jesus was a good man, whether the Bible should be considered a "great" book, whether the moral lessons in the book of Romans should be followed today, etc.). This is because her credentials as a historian do not lend any authority to value judgements that she might make within her field.

I am speaking, of course, of our very own Kushana.

Some of you here would likely learn a great deal were you to speak to her about the nature of historical scholarship.