Evidence and Oppinion is a discipline for keeping Living History honest without making it sterile. It starts with a simple rule: contradictions are allowed when they are plausible differences of perception, but contradictions become contestations when they claim different facts about the shared world. That distinction lets us host a chorus of human viewpoints without letting the record dissolve into “anything goes”.
In Living History we hold three visibly distinct rings. The Core names the subject and keeps the guide oriented. Empathetic Narratives carry perception, motive, emotion, and interpretation. Hard History carries contested fact claims, each linked to sources and forked from the Anarchive. Epistemology is the glue here: it gives us a vocabulary for what counts as knowing, what counts as showing, and what counts as merely saying.
A useful starting lens is the difference between Proposition and Experience. A proposition is a claim about the world that can be true or false in principle. An experience is what it felt like to be there, which can be sincere and still be mistaken about causes, timings, identities, or meanings. Narratives are allowed to contradict each other at the level of experience: “he sounded calm” versus “he sounded cruel”. But when a narrative asserts propositions that conflict—“the gun was drawn first”, “the shot came from the alley”—those become entries in Hard History as contested claims tied to evidence.
Epistemology also asks us to separate Evidence from Authority. In many historical traditions, printed text, institutional records, and prestigious speakers become proxies for truth. But authority is not evidence; it is a social shortcut that sometimes helps and sometimes misleads. A courtroom transcript is powerful not because it is holy, but because it is attributable, dated, contextualised, and cross-examinable. A newspaper is valuable not because it is confident, but because it is located in a time and market of incentives, rumours, and political alignments.
We should also distinguish Primary Source from Secondary Source without turning the distinction into a moral hierarchy. Primary sources are closer to the event, but they are not pure. They carry bias, fear, self-preservation, propaganda, and the limits of language. Secondary sources may be further away, but they can add synthesis, comparison, and error-correction. In Living History we treat both as materials, and we disclose which is which.
A foundational idea here is Underdetermination: the same body of evidence can support multiple incompatible interpretations. That is not a failure, it is the normal condition of historical knowledge. Our method uses underdetermination as a design feature. Where evidence underdetermines the story, we allow multiple Perspective branches to grow, each declaring what it assumes, what it infers, and what it cannot know. The branches are not equally good, but they can be equally permitted, until further evidence arrives.
Another key idea is Inference versus Observation. Many “facts” in history are not directly observed; they are inferred from traces. A signature may imply presence, but could be forged. A wound may imply a weapon, but not a motive. A testimony may imply a timeline, but not accuracy. The archive should label inferential distance: what is directly attested, what is reconstructed, and what is speculative. This keeps the narrative layer creative without letting it pretend to be proven.
We also need a language for Uncertainty. Historical writing often performs certainty because readers crave it, but epistemic humility is part of truthfulness. A good Hard History layer is not just a list of claims; it is a map of confidence, disagreement, and missingness. Where possible, we record why something is uncertain: conflicting witnesses, ambiguous phrasing, lost documents, incentives to lie, or later editorial distortion.
Bias is not a special problem; it is the default. The question is not “is this biased”, but “biased in what direction, under what pressures, for what audience”. Courts bias toward legal categories and strategic speech. Newspapers bias toward sales, faction, and speed. Memoirs bias toward self-justification and retrospective narrative neatness. Our method treats bias as metadata: something you attach to evidence as part of its context, rather than pretending you can subtract it out.
A related idea is Perspective Dependence: some claims are only meaningful from a point of view. Distance, line-of-sight, hearing, lighting, stress, intoxication, and social position change what was available to be perceived. Two witnesses can sincerely report incompatible accounts because they occupied different perceptual worlds. These contradictions belong in Empathetic Narratives first, and become Hard History contestations only when the claims assert mutually exclusive propositions about the same event.
We should also account for Motivated Reasoning and Strategic Speech. In court, people speak to win. In politics, people speak to signal allegiance. In memoir, people speak to be remembered well. This does not make statements useless; it makes them interpretable. The epistemic move is to treat utterances as actions with incentives, not just as containers of truth.
Finally, we need a boundary between Oppinion and Value. Many opinions are not empirical claims but value judgements: what was right, what was shameful, what was brave. Values cannot be falsified the same way propositions can, but they can be made accountable by revealing their premises and social context. In Living History value statements belong primarily in the narrative ring, but they should remain linkable to the evidence that shaped them.
The outcome is a guide that can hold both tenderness and rigour. We do not force the chorus into a single voice. We also do not let the chorus rewrite the archive. We keep perception contradictions alive as human truth, and we elevate fact contradictions into explicit contestations, where they can be sourced, argued, forked, and improved.
# See - Living Historyaand Rewilding History - Evidence and Opinion - The Anarchive and Hard History - Perspective - Primary Source and Secondary Source - Inference, Underdetermination and Uncertainty - Bias