Should the "default position" for (mundane) historical claims be that they happened until some evidence casts doubt on the claim?
Or that they didn't happen until some evidence supports the claim?
Or some third option?
What is the normal "default position?"
How does history really WORK regarding this?
In other words, if a document says that it rained on such-and-such a day or that there was a man named Bob who lived in such-and-such a city who ran a shop then should we assume that that (mundane) claim is true until something casts doubt on it?
See Matt Dillahunty's point here.
It happens to come up in the context of a Jesus-historicity debate, but let's put aside the Jesus-historicity question, because Matt is making a very basic claim.
He claims that all the historians he talked to said that historians will accept a mundane claim until there is reason to doubt it.
So he said there is a "positive" default position regarding mundane historical claims.
The other guy in the debate says that there is a "negative" default position.
Well, it depends. As a historian, you develop a sense of understanding the intricate system that governs facts in different documents. I would say that when it comes to factual information (it rained; the market was closed; a baby girl was born etc), I tend to accept what they say.
It is not always that easy, though. Bernard Lewis, for example, was one of the most prominent historians of the Middle East in the twentieth centuries. In one of his most influential articles, "Ottoman Observers of Ottoman Decline" he read Ottoman treaties that spoke about the state of decline and just took their word for it. Sure, they had many correct factual statements about battles lost and won (which we can also verify rather easily), but he took not their facts for granted but also their interpretation. Here lies the problem: he simply assumed that there was decline because they said there was and it made sense to him. More often that not, we have no basis to challenge the facts, but their interpretations.
We do challenge facts, of course, when the matter is highly controversial. It might be helpful to separate it to two different tasks though: Verifying facts is one task which can be productive and fruitful, but sometimes the truth is not really what matters (that is, what were the real facts or who really did this) but how people used these facts. Again, historians have senses (common sense being a particularly important one) for classifying facts for their reliability: a woman's diary about her own family and about her own life is much less prone to factual errors than someone recounting in a newspaper a battle in which he did not participate or witnessed. A historical account about Moscow in the year 1420 would be less prone to factual errors if it was originally written around 1420 and not far from Moscow.