TOK Unit

The idea of history, for me, has always been supported by the notion that it is based on factual evidence. As someone who has been studying history for years in school, and believes I am surrounded by the repercussions of past events, it has never been negotiable in my mind that all the history we know had to have happened the way it is told to us. For this reason, when we read Carl Becker’s What are Historical Facts?, there was a shift in what I had always known to be true: perhaps the entire subject area of history was not as legitimate as I had once believed. It reminded me of something we had discussed in ToK a few weeks earlier, the question of why the physical sciences such as chemistry, biology, etc. seemed more noteworthy than the human sciences. In my case, I am (or was) one of the people who gave an elevated sense of respect to claims from a natural scientist rather than, for example, a psychological study. For whatever reason, the theories from a human scientist did not have the same effect on what I believed in. With this being said, history was never something I had questioned before reading Becker’s article. In his piece, he states that the historical fact comes from within the historian’s mind, for he is the one who has chosen to make the connection between two events that took place when he was not present. So, what is the truth? Does a fact become historical when it is in the mind of a historian? And, if so, how can we evaluate its legitimacy?

In the Alpha Beta simulation we did in class, we had to analyze some primary documents we had written in our roles after the simulation ended as impartial historians. This proved somewhat challenging for us, because if something was not mentioned in the documents, we could not include it in our discussion. This showed me how much historians rely on the evidence they are given, but how this can also be a flawed system for analyzing a certain event. In both primary and secondary documents, there are often limitations, which is why in history class when we analyze a document we must be aware of this barrier. It is impossible for all information to be included in a single document, and there can often be biases and aspects that leave out important details due to the time in which it was written in. I experienced these limitations in historical facts in the research I am doing for my history IA, which is on the Vietnam War. Something I have struggled with is analyzing certain speeches from American politicians during the time of the war, because a large limitation within these documents is that they do not reflect what was actually happening, but what they wanted the public to believe was happening. A question that arose for me while looking at these documents was; does this make them less credible? Due to my prior knowledge about the subject matter, I already knew that what the politicians said in some of their speeches were not accurate portrayals of what was happening in the war, but if I did not have this knowledge already, would I have believed the document to be true?There is also the factor of historiography. 

To further prove Becker’s claim that the historical fact exists in the mind of the historian, it is notable to mention that historians often have different ideas of cause and effect in major historical events. In my own research, I have found that some historians indicted government policy during that time quite harshly, whereas others say that the war could have been avoided altogether. Even though the group of historians have the same information to look at, they do not necessarily come to the same conclusion, just like in our Alpha Beta discussion.