Almost seventy three years ago, in October of 1946, a group of highly accomplished philosophers and intellectuals gathered in a room at King's College, Cambridge to hear two of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century engage in a rather odd colloquy.
The two principals were Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Popper had prepared a paper critical of Wittgenstein's view that there were no genuine philosophical problems, only linguistic puzzles.
According to journalists David Edmonds and John Eidinow who wrote a 2001 book about the encounter titled Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers, as Popper was reading his paper, Wittgenstein, who had a reputation for not listening to papers all the way through, as well as for rudeness and arrogance, interrupted Popper, and an acrimonious exchange ensued.
As the back and forth grew increasingly heated Wittgenstein picked up a fireplace poker and began waving it around. Shortly afterward he threw down the poker and exited the room.
On these major points there was unanimity among eye-witnesses, but on the details there were discrepancies. Some claimed the poker was red hot, others that it was cool. Some say Wittgenstein only used it to make his point, others, including Popper, allege that he threatened Popper with it.
Some say he left after angry words with Bertrand Russell who was serving as a moderator, others, including Popper, asserted that he stormed out after Popper gave as an example of an obvious moral principle that one shouldn't "threaten visiting speakers with pokers." Some claim that Popper only said this after Wittgenstein had left the room.
Some insist that he slammed the door, others that he left quietly.
I find this episode interesting because even though the details diverge among the witnesses, the main facts are not in dispute. No one, not even the most skeptical reader of Edmonds and Eidinow's book, would ever dream of concluding that because there are discrepancies in the telling of the tale that therefore it's all fiction.
Yet this is exactly how some scholars react to the accounts in the New Testament of the Bible, particularly the accounts of the Resurrection of Jesus. We're told that because the reports we have of this event seem to disagree in this or that detail, because there seems to be some confusion among the alleged eye-witnesses as to what, exactly, they saw, therefore the whole thing is rubbish.
It's like saying that because there are discrepancies among the eye-witness reports of the Wittgenstein/ Popper contretemps that therefore there was no disagreement, that Wittgenstein didn't really wave a poker about or leave early, or that there was, in fact, no meeting at all between these two worthies.
The witnesses were somehow hallucinating or otherwise mistaken.
In other words, even if it's true that there are minor discrepancies in a historical account that does nothing to impugn the reliability of the overall narrative, particularly when there's overwhelming evidence that the major events described in that narrative actually happened.
No historical record is 100% accurate in every detail, and to require that degree of accuracy from historical documents is to relegate all history to the realm of fiction.
