The Correlation Of Reliability Of Historical Knowledge With Its Accuracy
History affects our daily lives, the past constructed by those who preceded us, or our experiences that define us, revolutionizing everything we know now. It is disturbing to know that it allows understanding and open interpretation about the past, therefore creating space for bias. Hence arises the questions, to what extent does reliability of historical knowledge correlate to the accuracy of it and what roles do memory and language play in distorting truth?
History is the reconstruction and the study of the past and since the past cannot be changed, it should be objective. Yet it only becomes subjective when it becomes altered for a purpose. If truth means facts that are generally accepted as true by a community and facts mean proven truths. Then knowledge is reliable on a communal level but also culturally biased. Arguably, the filtering in processes of selection and interpretation may distort ‘truth’, as each historian have a different background, they select questions to investigate, sources to answer those questions, then interpret it based on their values and upbringing and express it in language that appeals to the public. Here, historians can be said to create paradigms (the framework of ideas which society functions in). As it is often based off authority, it is usually subjected to bias. A paradigm is considered true unless there are enough inconsistencies to disprove it, therefore it cannot be completely accurate but requires mass approval to be ‘true’. In this process, bias, which is an unbalanced opinion, is inherent in the way they interpret and communicate.
Language can be used to inform, to persuade and to entertain and this itself is linked to the historian’s motives. An example is the manipulation of sources for political reasons. In Japan, there is a reoccurring issue that Japanese do not understand why neighboring countries hold a grudge over events that happened in the 1930s to 1940s. In 2005, there were protests in China and South Korea on textbooks that “gloss over its war (Japan) atrocities. ” The disparity of perspectives show historical truth ends up being vastly different in different communities due to bias. The identity created is due to the selection of sources they choose to emphasize and study on, as Fujioka said he wants the younger generation to be “proud of our past. ” Truth ends up as a matter of personal bias. Our values and culture influence our reality and how we react to it, how we uncover events and convey them. It is not necessarily true that secondary sources like textbooks are less reliable than primary sources. Primary sources mirror cognitive biases of the writer, such as eyewitnesses accounts (relies on sense perception) is also unreliable as it can be shaped by our emotions and cultures. Secondary resources can be more reliable in the sense that it may be more accurate and valid due to the compilation of many sources but it depends on the way the historian portrays it.
Linking to historiography, which is the study of the way historians communicate history, we study how they use available evidence to construct credible accounts and conclusions of events. As language is involved to communicate ideas, narrative bias forms. An example is China’s view on the Nanjing massacre is affected by their strong emotions of anger which in turn affects how historical knowledge is imparted. Both shared and personal knowledge of the massacre are molded in ways that denigrate the Japanese. When the spirit of age is weighted significantly heavier than the spirit of an individual, to be qualified as historical truth, it has to be accepted by the general public. This means that historians often resort to appealing to societal norms of the time period so laymen languidly follow stories. However, this means that the image the historian has created is born from their mind and that requires imagination. When conveyed, many linguistic fallacies are employed, depending on the historian’s motives. There seems to always be a tradeoff between accuracy and simplicity, so some truth ends up being distorted for the public to understand.
As history largely depends on memory, it makes it fallible due to its subjectivity (influenced by emotion) and can end up as an inaccurate portrayal of the past. Memory is defined as the faculty of mind that stores information. Smell can bring back emotions and memories. For example, I remember walking into a stall and smelling a certain perfume that reminded me of someone and triggered my admiration and nostalgia. Odour particles are detected by protein receptors which then transmit messages along nerve tissue to the olfactory bulb in the brain. This then travels to the amygdala (controls emotions) and the hippocampus (controls memory storage) linking smell, memory and emotion together. People who have post traumatic stress disorder selectively discard memories subconsciously. In the 1990s, Dr. Bremner found in the hippocampus of American veterans of the Vietnam war had shrunk suggesting that trauma has taken away part of the brain that is subjected to memory and fear. Like memory, on an individual and societal level, history constructs our identity, and this would not be possible without knowledge of the past.
“A country without history is like a person without a memory” – Arthur Schlesinger Looking at the method to acquire evidence, history, like science aims at objectivity and accuracy. The scientific methods aim to follow a standardized proves of observation, hypothesis (‘selecting’ evidence to support a claim is a confirmation bias), repetition and conclusion. The laymen would naturally believe the expert due to their faith in objectivity of the method and evidence provided. Facts are apt to be distorted in the reader’s mind by their own preconceived ideas, cultural and environmental upbringing. Surviving sources can be tainted by perspectives and intentions of the historian, then further perverted through interpretations of the reader. Perhaps instead of historical truth, we seek for historical validity as the past does not change but our knowledge and perspectives continue to develop. Based on the historian’s textual analysis, validity and knowledge of the past inevitably changes. To an extent, there is some historical truth in the dates, events, and consequences of actions that have made up the past.
The historical method of validity allows facts to be set and accepted through large public consensus. Patterns can also be ascertained by multiple sources or accounts that point towards the same truth. Similar to the natural sciences, historians seek the truth and use objective methods of fact finding and arriving to generalizations. History also contains both facts and theories, while facts are proven to be true and considered as truth, theories are justification for events and phenomenon. The collision theory states that for a reaction to occur, reactants must collide with enough energy and of the right geometric orientation; a theory that is almost impossible to be proven true but what scientist believe in due to lack of contrasting evidence. Theories can be disproven, such as the synthesis of urea that falsified Vitalism; the theory that organic molecules can only be synthesized by living organisms. In history, our records of dates, times and locations can be considered true as we have evidence such as footage, reliable primary sources, so to an extent there is some historical truth. For instance, the Cold War did take place, with dates recorded and evidence shown, yet regarding the cause, they are only theories developed from historians. Different schools of thoughts would have different interpretations, such that revisionist would say it is the US’s fault whereas the post revisionist would say it is the US’s and USSR’s fault. In the end, history may end up being the intersection of multiple truths and move forward based on incoming paradigms. History can be remembered, recovered or reinvented.
“History tells us more about the person who wrote it than about the people being written about” – CarrInstead, this unreliability in history does not stipulate that historical knowledge is obsolete, but it creates identity by shaping out collective shared knowledge. Would there be such thing as historical truth in the end? Perhaps human history is no more by what is true than what men determine to be true. It is never stagnant due to paucity of sources and instead what gives truth its value may be the certainty and reliability the public feels. At its core, history should be a discipline where it requires thorough analysis of evidence and writing in language of precision. There is awareness of the methods on how it is taught and how on different levels, it is communicated to wider audiences.
