There are three distinct
epistemological problems that relate to each of three stages
inherent in the study of history: the weaknesses of the raw
material (sources), the process of historical research (method)
and the textual presentation (product).
Epistemological problem 3 -The
historian’s product - writing the text.
The final epistemological
weakness of history stems from the simple inability to be able
to compare like with like. History cannot be compared with the
past and cannot be verified against the past, because the past
and history are different things. You may have come across this
in your TOK lessons as correspondence
theory. The correspondence theory of
truth states that the truth or falsity of a statement is
determined only by how it relates to the world, and whether it
accurately describes (i.e., corresponds with) the world. The historical text, the
narrative account can never correspond to the past as it
was, because unlike history the past was not a text, it was a series of
events, experiences, situations etc.
‘We won’t understand a thing
about human life if we persist in avoiding the most obvious
fact: that a reality no longer is what it was; it cannot be
reconstructed.’ Milan Kundera
The correspondence theory of truth states
that the truth or falsity of a statement is
determined only by how it relates to the world,
and whether it accurately describes (i.e.,
corresponds with) the world.
If I drew a picture of you and
then took a photograph from exactly the same position I can
guarantee that the photograph would provide the more reliable
indication of what you look like ‘in reality’. But when a
historian writes an account of the past, all there is to compare
it to are other written accounts whether contemporary or
historical. History has no absolute or ‘objective reality'
(Lévi-Strauss)
to compare itself to, only other texts.
So in the absence of an
‘objective reality’ to judge against, what does our society
consider to be good history? Factual accuracy is assumed and
does not in itself constitute good history.
Read the reviews of
the latest historical best seller and they do not commend the
author for ‘getting her dates right’ or for ‘putting events in
chronological order’. Much more likely is praise for the
historian’s ‘depth of research’ or his or her ability to ‘bring
the past alive’.
TOK
Prescribed Essay Title
As an IB
student, how has your learning of literature
and science contributed to your
understanding of individuals and societies?
Nov 2011- May 2012
If archival research constitutes the
social-scientific craft of the historian, then bringing the past
alive relies on the historian’s art; a creative, artistic
ability that is rarely acknowledged. If history is just a text,
its artistic effectiveness must rely upon the same skills that
make all literature ‘good’ whether factual or fictional.
Consider the following set of extracts from one of the most
celebrated recent historians of the Russian Revolution, Orlando
Figes, as he describes the events of Bloody Sunday in Russia in 1905:
Orlando Figes - A People's
Tragedy
Snow had fallen in the night
and St Petersburg awoke to an eerie silence on that Sunday
morning, 9 January 1905. Soon after dawn the workers and their
families congregated in churches to pray for a peaceful end to
the day…Singing hymns and carrying icons and crosses, they
formed something more like a religious procession than a
workers' demonstration. Bystanders took off their hats and
crossed themselves as they passed. And yet there was no doubt
that the marchers' lives were in danger…Church bells rang and
their golden domes sparkled in the sun on that Sunday morning as
the long columns marched across the ice towards the centre of
the city. In the front ranks were the women and children,
dressed in their Sunday best, who had been placed there to deter
the soldiers from shooting. At the head of the largest column
was the bearded figure of Father Gapon in a long white cassock
carrying a crucifix. Behind him was a portrait of the Tsar and a
large white banner with the words: 'Soldiers do not shoot at the
people!' Red flags had been banned… Suddenly, a bugle sounded
and the soldiers fired into the crowd. A young girl, who had
climbed up on to an iron fence to get a better view, was
crucified to it by the hail of bullets. A small boy, who had
mounted the equestrian statue of Prince Przewalski, was hurled
into the air by a volley of artillery. Other children were hit
and fell from the trees where they had been perching… When the
firing finally stopped and the survivors looked around at the
dead and wounded bodies on the ground there was one vital
moment, the turning-point of the whole revolution, when their
mood suddenly changed from disbelief to anger…
Strip back this account to its
factual essentials – a list of events in chronological order –
and what are we left with? Other than the chronologically
determined facts that make up the raw material of history,
everything else – selective emphasis, anecdote, poetic scene
setting, dramatic structure of the story, figurative language,
moral judgement and significance ‘the turning point of the whole
revolution’– all come from the imagination of the historian.
TOK
Prescribed Essay Title
Can
literature "tell the truth" better than
other Arts or Areas of Knowledge?
November 2006 - May 2007
This third epistemological weakness is
therefore perhaps the most profound of all. History is a largely
imaginative text that cannot be verified against absolute
reality, but only against other imaginative texts. Chronology
and factual accuracy do not in themselves constitute history.
These raw materials must be shaped and given meaning by the
historian. As Hayden White, the most influential commentator on
the problem has argued: ‘The events must be not only registered
within the chronological framework of their original occurrence
but narrated as well, that is to say, revealed as possessing a
structure, an order of meaning, that they do not possess as mere
sequence’.
TOK
Prescribed Essay Title
Compare the
roles played by reason and imagination in at
least two Areas of Knowledge.
November 2006 - May 2007
Student activity
– Post-modernism and the challenge to history
‘In battling against people who would subject
historical studies to the dictates of literary
critics we historians are, in a way fighting for
our lives. Certainly, we are fighting for the
lives of innocent young people beset by devilish
tempters who claim to offer higher forms of
thought and deeper truths and insights – the
intellectual equivalent of crack’.
In my section on the three epistemological
weaknesses of history above, I have relied
heavily on the ‘post-modern’ critique of history
that has emerged over the last thirty years or
so. In that sense I have played the role of
what Elton described as a ‘devilish tempter’.
Post-modernism is a general intellectual
movement that has influenced most academic
disciplines, but of particular relevance to
history is the view that language is not simply
an objective reflection of reality (the
‘linguistic turn’). For some historians, like
Elton quoted above, the post-modern contention
that historian’s create meaning as much as
discover it, is a dangerous threat to a subject
that aspires to Ranke’s
ideal of finding out ‘what really happened’ from
the sources of the past themselves.
One of criticisms levelled at post-modernism is
that of ‘relativism’; that in the absence of
absolute certainty, ‘anything goes’. How would
you reassure Sir Geoffrey Elton that despite
history’s epistemological weaknesses, history
can be done and should be done by historians
still using more-or-less the same methods as
they have always used?
