Hey all. I was wondering: how can we be certain of what we know from history? More of what I am asking is, how can we KNOW what we know? How can we be sure we didn’t get some of our facts wrong, or that the writers were actually talking about propaganda. I forget the quote, but it says something like, “those who have won the war are the ones who can say how things went” or something. Well, that is pretty much everything.
We can’t.
History is always being refined, changed, re-evaluated.
So what?
America won both World Wars.
Beowulff, thanks for your response. So in other words, if history is always being changed and refined and all that, we can’t really say that we know history, we can only say what we think we know about what might have happened in the past. It sort of makes it hard to get an accurate perspective of where we came from or what was effective or ineffective for societies in the past and all that, or do you not think so? But I’m sure that historians feel they have some sort of certainty about SOMETHING that happened in the past, as their motive in learning history is to actually know. So… I guess what I am asking for is the methods by which we know something happened or at least can make an educated guess on…
Chacoguy, I am talking more about ancient societies where who won was more likely to be coming from only the victors, but maybe surrounding countries as well.
I’m not an historian, but I think that most of them would agree that the history we are taught is the best version based on the available facts, and our inevitable biases. As new data comes to light, the “facts” are updated. I think it’s rare that an historical “fact” is completely turned upside-down - most often it is changed subtly by new information.
Also, it’s more often trivial facts and legends that are wrong - the big events - like WWII - may have details that get updated, but the overall history is pretty well agreed upon.
The Grasshopper Lies Heavy!
But seriously, we always look for multiple lines of evidence from different sources to verify as much as we can; sometimes, all we have for a written record is the official sources as represented by records commissioned by Emperors and such like, but even then we have other forms of evidence to use, such as digging things up and looking at the junk people left behind to be buried in the often-quite-literal sands of time. Archaeologists spend a lot of time digging through old trash dumps and latrine pits. (Cross-checking against physical evidence is where archeology and astronomy intersect, for example: You have records from some distant realm, but they used their own calendar system and you don’t know how it matches up to anything else. Solution? Look for anywhere they made mention of a solar eclipse, a comet, or a star going nova or supernova. Those are big, portentous events which anyone is likely to notice and write down, and we have a very good knowledge of when those kinds of things happened going back into the distant past.)
We can also cross-check civilizations against each other. For example, if Empire A and Empire B knew of each other and fought, we can get battles from both perspectives, assuming the historical record is good enough.
Some eras are pretty much dark to us. Others have evidence so slender we can barely check anything at all. We even have written records which do us no good, because we don’t know how to read the writing system in use.
The same way we know anything else. Distance in time isn’t much different from distance in space, for example. How can you KNOW what is going on right at this moment on the other side of the Earth? In Nepal? Et cetera. There are a zillion ways, starting with physical objects and records (TV transmissions, written documents, photographs, artifacts), and going all the way down to basic physical law, biology, logic and common sense.
The really difficult part is assigning a precise degree of confidence. What may be convincing to you may seem laughably speculative to me, and vice versa. And it would be profoundly difficult to come up with some objective measure of confidence of truth. We usually fall back on more or less a consensus of those most informed, which is terrible, but nobody has yet thought of a better method.
I’ve recommended this book before, but I’ll do it again: After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection by James West Davidson and Mark Lytle. It’s a really excellent book. Its subject is what the OP is asking about: how do we judge the credibility of historical evidence? And the principles it describes can be used in much wider applications.
This is not a question of history, so much as epistemology. How do we know anything, beyond what we can directly experience with our own senses (or even our senses, for that matter)? The thing is, facts are contextual. Every fact provides the context for every other fact, and nature abhors contradictions. Call it the “butterfly effect” if you will. We know that the allies won World War II, because that fact is connected to a kazillion other facts, and if they as well are not true, the world around us would be radically different than the one we know. And ancient history is no different. No facts exist in a vacuum, but provide context for all other facts.
This of course is not true of hearsay. But how many historians invent “facts” on their own, ripping the truth haphazardly out of the flow of history? Eventually the true facts are restored by skeptics. So the question remains: when and how is a healthy skepticism warranted? Again, it has to do with contradictions. Eventually a distortion will stretch the bounds of its context. That’s when historians are called upon to correct the contradictions, and in doing so, regain the truth.
There is a great deal of history that is kept hidden from you, because it is not in the best interests of the powers that be in your country (for example. the USA) for certain facts to be general knowledge. Go and read (Wiki will do) about why there are no trolleys in most big cities, or how Hawaii came to be American territory.
History is known, but most people are sheltered from parts of it, in order to have a docile, obedient citizenry…
This reminds me of the work of the 17th century mathematician John Craig, *Theologiae Christianae Principia Mathematica *. He worked out a complicated formula which stated that “the probability of a historical event depends on the number of primary witnesses, on the chain of transmission through secondary witnesses, on the elapsed time and on the spatial distance.” Thus for instance if you were standing next to Julius Caesar when he was assassinated the probability of that event being true would be 100. If you were, say, 5000 years in the future and living on Alpha Centauri (OK, I exaggerate) the probability would be 0. In other words the assassination never happened. (I didn’t say this stuff made sense!)
It’s also known as the decay of moral evidence. Sure, batshit crazy but, rather worryingly, I can see where the guy’s coming from.
I don’t even know for sure what happened yesterday! What’s going on The Ukraine depends entirely on which reports you read. Recent history depends a lot on newspaper reports. As an example, most Civil War histories written in the first half the 20th were written from the point of view of the South. For instance, they depicted slavery as relatively benign with contented slaves. Since then, a “revisionist” version has given a very different picture of the lot of the slaves.
Who are those people who claim that the last 2000 years of history were actually just a few hundred years and the chroniclers have just been lying to us? I think they’re nuts, but how could I actually prove it?
This is where I am as curious as the OP. It’s one thing to cross-reference the written records of varying sources, but it is quite another to go through the garbage and conjecture about it. A favorite example of mine - mostly because it is so extremely common that I expect no one will challenge me and ask for a cite - is the many pre-historical artifacts which are presumed to be religious idols and such. Maybe they’re just artwork?
If you go through an area and find hundred of containers, and they are of two distinctly different styles, and all of these contain feces while all of those contain chicken bones, then it’s a pretty good bet that you’ve figured out the difference between a chamberpot and a cooking pot. But it’s rarely that clear. Please tell me how the archeologists can tell the difference between religious artifacts and plain art. Why assume that all the art had a religious function? Is it just guesswork and personal biases, or is there something more?
Hey now! We stole Hawai’i through legitimate channels, all fair and square!
Read Proving History by Richard Carrier PhD
Long story short, most historians who write history books use feel-good wishy-washy methods to arrive at questionable conclusions about what’s true and what’s false. But there actually do exist methods for determining truth by applying Baye’s Theorem. BT in a nutshell says “when you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras” (assuming that, like me, you live in a place where horses are much more common than zebras).
If you don’t have time to read his book, find Richard Carrier on youtube. Brilliant.
Wow! Nice sweeping generalisation about historians and their methods - though I’m not sure what “feel-good wishy-washy methods” are. Must have missed the module on them. Would you like to give us some examples?
Just curious, who is keeping history from us? 'Cos whoever it is is not doing a very good job. A quick search turned up any number of scholarly articles on the annexation of Hawaii and public transport in American cities not to mention the articles in wiki.
If you find the containers among a bunch of bones, it’s likely that’s a burial site. Since humans (or animals, for that matter) don’t normally live among their dead, the containers probably weren’t located there for practical, everyday, use, or even really for the sake of “art.” On the other hand, if you find the containers next to tools and bits of charcoal from a fire, it’s more likely they WERE valued for their functionality.
Of course, that’s not just history. You also have to combine the disciplines of archeology and anthropology and perhaps even geology (Wait a minute. Those artifacts were made from marble that isn’t even found around here!)