From my perspective, the "history" of a bead is an immutable fact. It has nothing to do with the beholder's views.

Now that said, we rarely know a bead's full history. We only glimpse various facets of the Platonic truth, and from those glimpses we construct a model that approximates the bead's true history. As the quote goes, "all models are wrong, but some are useful."

So put me firmly in the camp that the bead has an independent factual history which may be obscured by the viewer, but remains fact. I'm reminded of Donald Rumsfeld's wonder quote about known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. I feel like every bead has both a known history, a history that we know we don't know, and then a secret history that will probably never be known and that we don't even know about.

Whew. Abe @ Beadstore.com