H2 Knowledge and Inquiry — Learning from History (24/30)

1 Charitably, not quite a part of the main conclusion. 2 Ok, but reading the main conclusion as such is not as charitable as if you had read the sub- conclusion as the main conclusion. Long Passage [RI Y6 TP 2023] The author’s main conclusion is that we are unable to avoid the mistakes of the past because our understanding of history itself is problematic.1 He uses three key premises to jointly support his intermediate conclusion that our understanding of history itself is problematic: (1) that historians have to speculate and select historical sources, leading to bias, (2) that conventional categories preclude us from knowing the reality of the past, and (3) that history is always written by the victors, rendering all of history a collection of “fables”. While the last premise takes too extreme of a position in dismissing the possibility of truth in history altogether, the criticisms of historical knowledge construction he raises sufficiently prove his intermediate conclusion that our understanding of history is problematic. However, he does not sufficiently demonstrate that these problems completely prevent us from learning from the past to avoid its mistakes, making his eventual conclusion an under-substantiated one.2 The first problem the author raises pertains to speculation and selection — he presents a dichotomy, arguing that the historian must speculate when sources are lacking and select subjectively which sources to include when they are abundant. These are both astute criticisms: historical records are often scarce when we are studying ancient civilisations, since artefacts and oral accounts often fail to stand the test of time. Hence, historians are forced to fill in the gaps of evidence using their own imagination or speculation—our understanding of the Indus Valley civilisation, for instance, is largely built on such historical guesswork given the paucity of historical records. Hence, uncertainty and subjectivity inevitably percolate into historical knowledge construction. When records are abundant, historians also have to select which sources to use based on their own subjective biases. Given the thousands of accounts of the Cuban Missile Crisis that pin the blame variously on Khrushchev, Kennedy and Castro, a historian inevitably needs to pick accounts to tell a coherent account of the crisis. Biases enter historical knowledge as a result: a Western-educated historian might

3 Ok. Relevant and well-supported. 4 Because African history is predominantly undocumented and knowledge is transmitted orally… 5 Good. 6 Ok. No challenge though? Can categories be avoided? subconsciously select more Western sources that blame Khrushchev since this aligns with his understanding of the crisis as he was taught in school. Therefore, bias inevitably infiltrates historical knowledge regardless of whether records are abundant or scarce; the author’s accounting for both possibilities makes his criticism particularly well-founded.3 The author’s second