Future historians looking back to 2010 will undoubtedly have an accurate picture of everything from here on in. But what about us, right now? How far back can we go with absolute certainty? The 20th century? Yeah, pretty much. We have extensive print and video records. However, before the advent of photography most everything we know is hearsay. And the farther back we go, the more innacurate it gets. So, just how far back can we go with absolute certainty?
How accurate?
Accuracy is a continuum, not a binary.
I’m pretty sure that yesterday was a Sunday. Beyond that it’s anyone’s guess.
Aww shit! That’s what I get for posting at 4:00 AM. Hey, I’m full of cheap wine too, but I’m feeling philosophical. 
A better question would be whether history can be accurate, but I imagine that one would go in GD…
There was a program on TV last night, a documentary about the reporting during the Second Gulf War; the manipulation of the media by governments and vice versa were mentioned, as were instances where “something would come in on the teletype, we’d swallow it hook, line and sinker and later find out it was untrue, or mistranslated, we should never have reported it.”
I’ve spent so many hours, between college and professional jobs, being badgered on the importance of accurate records and badgering others on it, it may amount to months of my life. And yet, we keep running into inaccurate records; sometimes by mistake, sometimes on purpose. This is for science, engineering, finance, where people know their records are going to be checked and that faking it can kill (I have found that getting people to realize the corpses in question may be their loved ones is one of the best methods to curtail the manipulation of records).
The existence of records, the existence/availability of accurate records, and the accurate interpretation of any records available are three different animals: history (whether capital-H or not) can go awry at either of them.
Thanks, Nava. You broke it down for me. One, two, three. Existence, Availability, and Accuracy. How far back can we go with absolute confidence in all three areas?
Well, existence and availability are not independent variables. Things that don’t exist today aren’t available to us. In fact, at a guess I’d say that this is the largest single reason for unavailability of first-hand evidence.
Plus, it’s not simply a matter of how far back you are looking. The Great Pyramids exist, and we can infer from them some history of the civilisation that produced them. There would be many more recent civilisations about which we know less.
Maybe not. Consider how much of our information is stored digitally on mediums that will be grossly outdated within our lifetimes let alone several hundred years from now.
Absolute confidence? Are you serious? I don’t have absolute confidence in this morning’s newspaper; do you?
(I don’t mean to be insulting. My point is that – as previous posters tried to say – confidence is relative. There’s very little that one can be absolutely confident in.)
What I’m trying to do is determine the accuracy of history. I’m thinking that we now have the technology to document the present for future historians. At what point do we separate fact from speculation?
Or to put it in the converse, How far forward to Archeologists have to come before their job is done?
The closest you can get to accurate is the immediate present. Anything before that is already colored by perception, interpretation, misunderstanding and agenda.
I don’t think it will ever be possible to have 100% accurate history. All of the videos, photos, news accounts, etc. that we have are filtered to some extent, either intentionally or unitentionally by reporters, photographers, editors, news directors, government agencies and others.
If you have 5 people who witness an automobile accident, and interview all of them within minutes of the occurence, you are going to get 5 different stories.
There are many things happening all over the world at any given time. Maybe something that happens in some obscure corner of Montana with no photographers present may turn out in future years to have had a great impact on history, but no one was there to record it.
The only way to get a 100% accurate history would be to have unedited camera footage running 24/7 on every square inch of the planet, and that’s not going to happen anytime soon.
History, even of something that happened last week, involves not simply a recital of facts, but an interpretation of those facts. Even a relatively straightforward decision, such as which facts are historically interesting and which are not, involves interpretation. There is always some degree of speculation involved.
I’m not sure of the vernacular for this, but isn’t there also the concept of how the modern mind looks at history which changes its perspective?
Example: I have a book called The Pantropheon, or A History of Food and its Preparation in Ancient Times. The thing is, it was written by Alexis Soyer in 1853.
Now archeology aside, there is no doubt that modern scholars are going to be able to figure out more about the culinary achievements of ancient Romans, Greeks, Assyrians, Egyptians and Jews just because of our scientific capabilities, but because Soyer was writing at the onset of the Industrial Revoluation, there is an entirely different sentiment and frame of reference about the subject matter.
I think this is such a broad question that it’s better handled in GD than GQ.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Weather contemporary accounts before the printing press became widespread have survived to our time, are subject to extreme chance. Many central historical episodes as recent as the Middle Ages are only documented by a few or a single account (or none), although many more must have existed at the time.
I think, for what the OP really wants, he needs to give a lower accuracy percentage. Even if I see something that just happened, I do not have 100% accuracy, not only because I am biased and didn’t see all of it, but also because I can’t even necessarily trust my own memory.
If you looked at a graph, only t=0 would be 100% accurate, and the rest would necessarily fall. Knowing what that graph looks like would probably help answer the OP’s question.
Well, once you are able to get two sides of the story, the accuracy rating seems to go up. Written history is modestly complete about the time of the Renaissance. Before that, records are poor and likely very biased.
It is very uneven depending on what you are looking at. We know very precisely what kind of pottery most civilizations we know of used. Not so much what they thought about the inflation.
Printing press is the most important milestone coming to mind. The number of sources explodes.
Yesterday was a Monday. Already the historical revisionism begins.