Chapter 5 provides a similar analysis of typical "Historicity Criteria" used in Jesus Studies, e.g. "multiple attestation."
Is there a summary anywhere? I just remembered one of Hanson's better papers:
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. But on uninteresting topics, surprising claims usually are surprising evidence; we rarely make claims without sufficient evidence. On interesting topics, however, we can have interests in exaggerating or downplaying our evidence, and our actions often deviate from our interests. In a simple model of noisy humans reporting on extraordinary evidence, we find that extraordinary claims from low noise people are extraordinary evidence, but such claims from high noise people are not; their claims are more likely unusual noise than unusual truth. When people are organized into a reporting chain, noise levels grow exponentially with chain length; long chains seem incapable of communicating extraordinary evidence.
Think I'll email a pointer to Carrier, it seems very appropriate for one of his footnotes in chapter 4:
18. Accordingly, Hume's antiquated argument against miracles has been corrected using BT, verifying my conclusion here: Aviezer Tucker, “Miracles, Historical Testimonies, and Probabilities,” History and Theory 44 (October 2005): 373–90 (with further sources cited, e.g., p. 374, n. 3); Robert Fogelin, A Defense of Hume on Miracles (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Michael Levine, “Bayesian Analyses of Hume's Argument Concerning Miracles,” Philosophy and Theology 10, no. 1 (1997): 101–106; Jordan Howard Sobel, “On the Evidence of Testimony for Miracles: A Bayesian Interpretation of David Hume's Analysis,” Philosophical Quarterly 37, no. 147 (April 1987): 166–86. See also Mark Strauss, Four Portraits, One Jesus: An Introducrtion to Jesus and the Gospels (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2007), pp. 456–68 (with pp. 363–65); and Yonatan Fishman, “Can Science Test Supernatural Worldviews?” Science and Education 18, no. 6–7 (August 2007): 813–37. Also pertinent is Jaynes's Bayesian treatment of ESP, in Jaynes and Bretthorst, Probability Theory, pp. 119–48. As a result, while “naive” Humean arguments against miracles are soundly refuted in Keener (“A Reassessment”), sound Bayesian reconstructions (such as I have briefed here) are not.
(Philpapers, as it happens, links it to a paper by Cavin, "Is There Sufficient Historical Evidence to Establish the Resurrection of Jesus?".)
That Cavin paper is hilarious.
I recently received an advance review copy of historian and philosopher Richard Carrier's new book, Proving History: Bayes' Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus.
The book belongs to a two-volume work on the Historical Jesus that argues for two major claims:
Claim #1 might provoke a yawning "Yes, of course..." from many scientists and philosophers, but both claims are currently heretical in the field of Jesus Studies, which shows many signs of being an unsound research program in general. The book is written for a mass audience, but is also aimed at historians in general. It is, as far as I know, the first book to lay out the detailed case for why historians should be using Bayesian methods. (For an overview of the other methods historians typically use, see Justifying Historical Descriptions.)
Though the Bayesian revolution of the sciences has already slammed into archaeology and a few other fields of historical inquiry, it has not yet overwhelmed mainstream historical inquiry. Carrier's book may be seen as the first salvo in that attack, but this makes me wish his case had not been presented in the context of such a parochial and disreputable sub-field of history as Jesus Studies. No chapter in the book discusses the evidence concerning the historicity of Jesus in much detail, and it clearly isn't necessary to make Carrier's points, so why poison the presentation of such a clear and powerful case (in favor of Bayesian historical methods) by marinating it in such a disreputable field (Jesus Studies), and with anticipation of a startling conclusion almost everyone disagrees with (Jesus myth theory)? (For the record, I take Jesus myth theory pretty seriously, but most people don't.)
Chapter 3 is a tutorial on Bayes' Theorem, similar to Carrier's Skepticon IV talk. Chapter 4 provides an analysis of non-Bayesian methods of historical analysis, showing that they are wrong in exactly the degree to which they depart from the Bayesian method. Chapter 5 provides a similar analysis of typical "Historicity Criteria" used in Jesus Studies, e.g. "multiple attestation." The final chapter tackles some more detailed issues with the application of Bayes' Theorem, for example the interaction between frequentism and Bayesianism.
At first, the contents of Proving History seemed too obvious and underwhelming for me to strongly recommend it. Then I remembered that no other book I've read on historical methodology or the Historical Jesus had correctly used probability theory to justify its judgments. Which means that Proving History may actually be the best book yet written in either field.