Everything is copy, Nora Ephron said. For me, everything is evidence. But that in itself is less useful. It is not true that whatever life throws at me in the archives, can be turned into content. It is rather the opposite: the more there is, the more doubt and double-checking emerges. The story is not sharpening up, it is rather watered down.

There is no one out there to tell me the actual truth. Of course there isn’t: there could only be one person who could tell the truth about Janina Hosiasson’s life, and she did care to do that (Me? Why would you be interested in me?—she would say. Read my papers!). I am left with hundreds of tiny puzzle pieces, and a task of putting them together to capture—what? A story, a picture of some probability. The best I can do, given the data.

How strongly can I believe my conclusions, given the evidence I collected? This is exactly the question that Hosiasson started her philosophical career with, and maybe there is no better way to honour her mind than to use that question as a guide in the process of getting to know her. Every time I have to balance the different sources in the pursuit of the facts, I come back to her own obsession with credibility and the weighing of evidence.

I am reading a memoir of a (somewhat removed) cousin of Janina. He was a young boy in the 1930s and his recollections are so full of details and so well narrated that everything in there feels real. With full conviction of someone who grew up in that family, he recalls the turn of the century scandal when Janina’s mother left her husband, Mr Hosiasson, and their three small children to follow an all-consuming love affair with a famous neurologist. Her father (Janina’s grandfather) “was so shocked that he lost his sight, not to mention several tenements which he had to turn over to his former son-in-law in exchange for a divorce.”

Oh, what a scene! And such a good source, too. Let’s write about it! Except, wait—did I not see that the father in question was buried at the Okopowa Street cemetery in 1894, five years before the said elopement took place? The tomb is still there. Not only had the father no eyesight to witness it—he wasn’t there at all. A family tale from ninety years prior evolved perhaps a little too much. And so the digging and the cross-examination begin: how much of his account can be trusted? What are the other sources and where are they?

Some eyewitness accounts turn out to be more like cousins thereof, multiple times removed. Someone publishes a short paper in 2015, based on a note he made in 1986, after a conversation he had with a woman who met Janina and her husband in Vilnius and Białystok in 1941. Probably in July, likely no later than August, perhaps with the sister… With each decade and each person in the Chinese whispers of history, the lines blur and facts become fable.

In the state archives in Warsaw I find a death certificate of Janina, her husband, and a woman that is supposed to be her mother, issued by the local court in 1947. A sworn witness declared in court that she attended their funerals in the Warsaw ghetto. This is so far the only official document that certifies their death. But how could they die in Warsaw if she lived in Vilnius and he lived in Białystok? What truth can there be in a document that gets even their birth dates wrong?

In this case the explanation is easy: after the war, with so many people missing and having perished in dramatic circumstances, life needed to go on. Those deaths—and the inheritances that they implied—had to be made real by being filed into appropriate registers. It was much easier to pay a “witness” and get it done in Warsaw, where Janina and Adolf lived before the war, than to try to get witnesses or prison statements from what was now the Lithuanian Soviet Republic. It was about practical matters, not the historical truth. Another lesson in how not to take any documents at face value.

I need to constantly weigh the evidence, taking note of not only what is being said, but also of who says it and when, of how likely they were to be correct. Every fact is packaged in its own origin story and its own level of credibility. It can drive a person mad, the layers, the caveats, the exceptions.

This is also something she wrote about, at the very beginning of the war. Once we arrive at the conclusion of our inductive reasoning—decide which hypothesis is best confirmed by our evidence – can we then discharge the data that got us there and store only the conclusion in our records? Can we forget how we arrived at a theory and just accept it as it is? No, we should not, she argues. Our theories never stand on their own, they need to carry their context with them, just in case in the future we discover something that will change the picture.

And so I carry along every bit of information I find on the way. Only that I worry sometimes that through this voracious collection of evidence, and evidence for evidence, and the context of the evidence, the story could become one of collection and discovery and not one of Janina. But then, maybe, one should give up the pretence that the truth is attainable here. None of this is the real thing—it is all copy.

Notes:
Hosiasson first posed the question of rationality of inductive reasoning in her PhD thesis, the first chapter of which was published as “Definicje rozumowania indukcyjnego,” Przegląd filozoficzny (1928) 31:4, pp. 352-367.
The quote about Janina’s mother comes from Antoni Marianowicz (Life Strictly Forbidden, London: Valentine Mitchell, 2004, p. 184)
The 2015 note is: Bogusław Wolniewicz, “Nota do biogramu Lindenbauma,” Edukacja Filozoficzna, vol. 60, 2015.
Hosiasson considers the question of evidence and detachment in her 1948 paper “Theoretical aspects of the advancement of knowledge,” Synthese, pp. 253-261.