Week 9 Seminar: Contested losses

Damascus steel and Stradivari varnish are claims, not facts. How to assess an assertion that something was lost at all.

19 April 2027

Open the slides

The case, or the argument#

Every case so far has taken “this capability was lost” as a settled fact and asked what kind of loss it was. This week asks the question the course has been quietly skipping: how would you know a loss claim is even true? “The secret of Damascus steel was lost” and “Stradivari’s varnish can never be reproduced” are two of the most repeated claims in this genre, and both are contested by historians and materials scientists who argue the originals can be substantially explained or matched by other means — that the mystery is partly a story the objects’ reputations outgrew, not a clean case of institutional forgetting.

That doesn’t mean every dramatic loss claim is false. It means “lost” is a historical assertion that needs the same evidentiary standard as any other, and a compelling story is not evidence. This week’s diagram is the one place in the course where the record track itself is drawn uncertain, because the uncertainty here is prior to any question about capability — it’s about whether the historical record supports the loss claim at all.

What we do in the seminar#

Take a “we lost the ability to…” claim you’ve heard outside this course — about food, craft, architecture, anything — and try to find out, in the seminar, what evidence would actually settle it. Notice how much of the claim’s appeal survives contact with that question.

One reading#

Collins (1974) — reread with this week’s question in mind: Collins could verify the tacit-knowledge claim by testing whether labs could build a working laser. Damascus steel and Stradivari’s varnish don’t offer that kind of test. What does that difference change?

A question left open#

If a loss claim can’t be tested the way Collins tested the laser claim, what’s left to assess it with — and is “we can’t tell” itself a legitimate answer this course should be willing to give?