H2 Knowledge and Inquiry — Truth in History (26/30)

Critically assess the view that the possibility of manipulating historical facts should lead us to conclude that there is no truth in history. [RI Prelim 2023] We live in what many scholars call the ‘post-truth’ era, where scepticism of the possibility of truth abounds in many fields. A similar criticism has emerged of historical inquiry, with some arguing that the possibility of manipulating historical facts — both intentionally and unintentionally — renders historical truth elusive and unachievable. While the possibility for the historian to introduce bias into historical accounts does perhaps eliminate the possibility of historical accounts perfectly ‘corresponding’ to the events of the past, it would be hasty to dismiss the possibility of truth in history altogether: coherentist truth can still exist in history, as the historical method allows for an intersubjective understanding of the past. Ultimately, this coherent truth is more than sufficient for history — it is not by perfectly representing the past but rather by offering a narrative of history within the bounds of facts that we manage to learn from the mistakes of the past. Sceptics often claim that truth is dead in history, because historians often manipulate facts to suit their agendas in historical accounts. Of course, this does unfortunately happen in history: political constraints often induce historians to omit details from their records or fabricate facts altogether. In the USSR, mention of the Holodomor was wiped from the historical record for over half a century, with historians citing fabricated statistics about the availability of grain and the death toll in Ukraine during the early 1930s. Similarly, in China, the Tiananmen Square Massacre remains excluded from official records today — the CCP’s account of the events of June 4, 1989 omits any mention of the use of tanks to disperse the crowd of student protestors in Beijing. This has justifiably led to critics questioning the possibility of attaining historical truth altogether — if historians are given the licence to fabricate facts, it seems that historical accounts will not correspond to the events of the past. Of course, these cases of outright fabrication are few and far between. However, it remains true that historians can often unintentionally yet inevitably manipulate historical

facts in a number of ways to suit their biases and agendas, threatening the possibility of objective truth in history. First, historians will have to select the historical facts to include in their accounts, introducing subjectivity that distorts the ‘truth’ of what happened. This can occur when they make subjective decisions about which facts are ‘relevant’ to their account — as Carr notes, just as a fisherman will select different fishing spots to catch different types of fish, a historian will select different historical facts to suit the account they wish to tell. For instance, a revisionist historian of the Cold War might — for the sak