Whenever we have a problem, a logical thing to wonder is if the solution is “out there”? Depending on the problem, that question can be deeply philosophical and here we can really only skim the surface. Back in my days as a grad student in physics that was something that would come up in late-night conversations—are the laws of nature out there waiting to be discovered or are they created by us? It comes up in thinking about mathematics as well. Is mathematics something that is already there or is it something we create? In mathematics, it is an open question, in physics it really isn’t.
What Is “Out There”?
We arrive at new laws of nature through experiment and observation of new phenomena. Mathematical models are tried until a model is found that does two things. It avoids contradicting other experiments and observations. A model of why balloons float that is based on the shape of the balloon might predict that eggs float. This would contradict many observations of kitchen floors after seven-year-olds have attempted to make breakfast. So that model would be no good even if it correctly described balloons. The other thing the model needs to do is to match experiment and observation of the new phenomenon every time. No exceptions. If experiments and observations are done correctly and all the extraneous factors are calculated, what is left should be correctly calculated by the new model. After a while that model is considered to be a new “law of nature,” which scientists would refer to as a theory.
I’ve never seen it explicitly stated, but it seems to me that the reason the word theory means something a bit fluffy and undecided in common language but is used in science to mean something that can be mind-bogglingly accurate is that even something mind-bogglingly accurate can be shown to be not quite right by an even more mind-bogglingly accurate experiment. The word theory is not used because there is anything fluffy but as an acknowledgment that there is always the possibility that something more accurate, or with broader applicability, will come along. It would be dangerous then to think of theories of physics being “out there” waiting to be discovered because what we discover are only progressively better approximations.
Trying to Trek to “Out There”
So, are the solutions to our family history problems “out there”? In some cases, the answer is clearly “no.” Records will simply not exist in many cases. In other cases, we might be able to solve the problem in some sense, but only by accepting less accuracy than we originally imagined. Our problem might be that we don’t know an ancestor’s date of birth. Our solution might end up being a month and a year, not the date we hoped for. Records to prove the exact date might simply not exist but, by slightly redefining our problem, we arrive at a solution that we can accept. Was that solution “out there”? Not really. Just as in science, saying that a solution is “out there” means that we can be sure; we can know all there is to know. That isn’t the case. Ideas can be falsified. In science that usually involves improving the underlying concepts or arriving at a more accurate model. In genealogy falsification is often much more extreme. We might find a new document that explicitly states that a person’s parentage was different from what we had arrived at and states it in such a way that we can see how other evidence led us astray. In other cases a new solution might not be apparent but it becomes clear that the old solution must be wrong. Discovering that a girl’s parents died the year before she was born makes it pretty clear that those people were not actually her parents, even if it tells us nothing about who her parents were.
What about when we really do “get it right”? Then it depends on what we mean by “getting it right.” What accuracy do we accept? “Born about 1712” might truly reflect reality but it isn’t the same as knowing that a person was born 23 Aug 1711. There is also more to accuracy than that. Our lives are not simply that dates that bracket them. The question in family history is really “what was that person’s life actually like?” That kind of question invites the same ever increasingly accurate answers that occur in science. The biographies we arrive at, which are the answers to that question, are not “out there” just as the natural laws we discover are not “out there.” What we have is always an approximation that we hope is ever more accurate. We might come to a practical end to what we can learn about a person but those practical ends are not answers that exist “out there.” What we know at any given moment is simply an invitation to learn more.