6 ms·

This particular claim could be exaggerated, but it looks like most of the story is true: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15afe2/are_these_two_wi

• empath75 8y ago
  True in the sense that contemporaries reported witnessing such things, but who knows if what they reported was accurate.
  • gnulinux 8y ago
    If they're consistent, you'd have to explain how can multiple actors imagine a similar story (assuming those witnesses didn't interact). You can use probabilistic reasoning to determine whether a large portion of the story is close to reality.
    • ndiscussion 8y ago
      Right, just like with bigfoot (?)
      • gambiting 8y ago
        I feel like there is a difference between "we saw something between the trees! It must have been the bigfoot!" and "we gave this guy a cat and he ate it whole in front of us".
  • skywhopper 8y ago
    Turns out there's an entire academic field dedicated to this question! And a word for the concept: historiography! And over centuries, tens of thousands of academic historians have worked out any number of methods for assessing this sort of thing... there's even a history of historiography on the Wikipedia page about it! But you know, who knows if anything reported there is accurate?