Perspectives, methods and tools in history
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The three epistemological weaknesses of history
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, the process and method of historical research and the textual presentation. Epistemological problem 1 - The historian’s sources - the raw material. The first thing that makes historical knowledge difficult to acquire is the inadequacy of the raw materials that the historian is forced to work with. Unlike a social scientists, historians cannot directly observe participants in a controlled experimental context. |
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Our inability to travel through time means that the historian relies on indirect and uncontrollable evidence – the ‘heap of broken fragments’- that the past has left behind. Even more significantly, most of the past has left no evidence at all of what happened, it is simply unknowable – this is the ‘darkness’ that Butterfield refers to in the quote below. Most people who have ever lived and most events that have ever happened left no record, no fragments from which historians might reconstruct a version of the past.
‘The Memory of the world is not a bright, shining crystal, but a heap of broken fragments, a few fine flashes of light that break through the darkness.’
Herbert Butterfield
Those records that do exist are often atypical or accidental. We may have sources deliberately left to posterity but their atypicality makes them unrepresentative. The same is true of sources that have survived centuries of fires, wars and revolutions. The historian has to use sources never intended for future interpretation, accidental by-products of past events, unintended communiqués with the future.
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The evidence only speaks to us indirectly, with no guarantee that they will answer the questions historian’s pose. As a consequence, historians must resign themselves to a patient trawl through the records most of which have no relevance to their needs.
Historians depend entirely on the people who have interpreted the events they have lived through and who have left us a record to consider. The process of making sense of the world, of committing thoughts to paper or a photograph to posterity is itself an interpretation. One of the best illustrations of this first level of interpretation is made by E.H. Carr in the classic introduction to the philosophy of history: What is History? |
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Carr describes the archive of ‘primary documents’ left by the Weimar Germany’s Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann and the hundreds of diplomatic conversations he conducted. What do the documents tell us, asks Carr?
‘They depict Stresemann as having the lion’s share of the conversations and reveal his arguments as invariably well put and cogent, while those of his partner are for the most part scanty, confused and unconvincing. This is a familiar characteristic of all diplomatic conversations. The documents do not tell us what happened, but only what Stresemann thought had happened, or what he wanted others to think, or perhaps what he wanted himself to think, had happened.’ More |
TOK - Prescribed Essay Title “The knowledge that we value the most is the knowledge for which we can provide the strongest justifications.” To what extent would you agree with this claim? November 2008 - May 2009 |
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Epistemological problem 2 -The historian’s method - interpreting the evidence
One of the key features of the scientific method depends on an ability to test theories by predictive experimentation. We can examine the importance of light as a cause of plant growth by examining parallel plants, one in the light and one in the dark. But history lacks this ability to control the variables so essential to the scientific method. We cannot stop the car from making a wrong turning on the 28th June 1914 to see if the First World War would have happened without the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. In the absence of control over variables, all historians can do is intrepret. |
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In this second level of interpretation historians gives the past meaning that the past itself cannot have had for those who lived through it. As Sir Herbert Butterfield once put it, the role of the historian is to understand the people of the past ‘better than they understood themselves’. Historians look back on the past seeing connections between events, the significance, and the patterns of cause and effect that were impossible for those living through the events to see for themselves. As Margaret MacMillan has recently argued ‘The idea that those who actually took part in great events or lived through particular times have a superior understanding to those who came later is a deeply held yet wrong-headed one.’
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Nobody in 1917 could know how significant the Bolshevik Revolution was. Few expected Lenin’s party to hold on to power for long and had the Bolsheviks lost the Civil War then the relative significance of the Revolution would have been different to what it became at the height of the Cold War in the 1950s. And now 20 years after the end of the Cold War, the study of 1917 no longer seems to have the same urgency it once did, with the study of the history of China and the Middle East now seeming much more pertinent This is one of those odd features of history that people often struggle to understand, that history continues to change and evolve even though it’s the same old past that is being described.
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TOK - Prescribed Essay Title “We see and understand things not as they are but as we are.” Discuss this claim in relation to at least two ways of knowing. November 2009 - May 2010 |
‘I am beginning to believe that nothing can ever be proved... slow, lazy, sulky, the facts adapt themselves at a pinch to the order I wish to give them’.
Antoine Roquetin the historian in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea
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Each generation writes its own history of the French Revolution or of the First World War, why is this? Part of the explanation for the continual need to produce new histories of old subjects is to be found in the uncovering of new evidence in the archives. For example, the periodic declassification of once secret government documents provides a regular supply of new materials that inevitably changes our earlier perspectives.
But a much more profound explanation for our need for new histories is to be found in the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce’s famous observation that ‘All history is contemporary history’. History is made by historians and what they write will therefore reflect both their personality and more importantly the times they are living in. |
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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 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.
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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. 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.
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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’. 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.
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TOK - Prescribed Essay Title Can literature "tell the truth" better than other Arts or Areas of Knowledge? November 2006 - May 2007 |
‘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, Ignorance
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’.
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’.
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The official list of TOK perspectives in history questions.
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The official list of TOK methods and tools in history questions.
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