Theory of Knowledge

TOK History - Summarized

Hey Everyone!

     We are all IBDP Year 2's now, and the deadline for the Theory of Knowledge essay is creeping up on us. Some of the prescribed titles for our essay are great prompts to talk about History as a Ways of Knowing, so I thought I'd share some of the key points with you. Even if you're not in IBDP Year 2, read over these notes and impress your teachers when you see them next ;) We hope this helps:

 → Three important features of history:

• History is the study of the present traces of the past
• History is only concerned with significant events (ex. JFK assassination vs. What I ate for dinner on 06/19/02)
• History is concerned with explaining and understanding the past

→ Why do we study history since it has no immediate practical value? History can be justified on the grounds that it:

1. Gives us a sense of identity
2. Is a defense against propaganda
3. Enriches our understanding of human nature

1. History gives us a sense of identity:

• If you don’t know where you come from, you can’t make any sense of the present or what you should do in the future
• You must have a good background knowledge about a situation to have an informed opinion about it

2.            History is a defense against propaganda:

• Governments often exploit history to dictate a one-sided interpretation of the past to highlight achievements and overlook mistakes
• We know that the Stalinist era had mass propaganda so it is frowned upon today
• George Orwell: “Who controls the past controls the future, who controls the present controls the past”

3.            History enriches our understanding of human nature:

• History shows us what human beings have thought and done in a wide variety of circumstances
• History focuses on the concrete and particular and reminds us that human behaviour can never be fully explained in terms of neat and tidy models
• History causes beliefs to become self-realizing expectations - if you think something cannot be changed, you won’t even bother changing it (ex. War is inevitable)

    → How can the past be known?

• Things that happened long ago seem unrealistic, makes it hard to believe it really happened
• It can be argued that since the past no longer exists, it cannot be changed and is therefore completely objective
• Clear distinction between the past and our knowledge of the past
• the past is objective
• We cannot abandon objectivity or ele we cannot distinguish history and fiction/propaganda
• our knowledge of the past is subjective because memory is fallible, evidence is ambiguous, and prejudice is common

→ The nature of historical evidence

• Primary source - “the bedrock of history”
• Written by someone who was there at the time
• Secondary source
• Written at a later time, second-hand account of what happened
• Primary sources are already contaminated:
• Fallible eyewitness - no two individuals see an event the same way
• Perjury = crime defined as knowingly making a false statement
• Memory bias - Memory is affected by retelling stories, which causes bias to creep in (to exaggerate certain events, etc)
• Social bias - reflects the interests of one particular social group rather than society as a whole
• Deliberate manipulation - photo on page 304 where Trotsky was photoshopped out of picture of Stalin

→ History is a selection of a selection

• Historians make a selection from available evidence
• Knowledge is already filtered through the eyes of those who witnessed/experienced it
• Surveying all secondary sources of an event is impossible - historians must select what they think is most important (ex. History textbooks in Texas only select the information they want to teach students/Amount of words in textbooks reflect importance)
• Heroification - removes unfavorable characteristics of historical figures of the past (ex. Woodrow Wilson - not much mention of segregating government, vetoing equality clauses, etc.)
• Proselytizing - making people believe

→ The advantages of hindsight

• Historian holds an advantage because he knows how things turned out
• Terms like “the Renaissance” are retrospective ways of trying to capture the spirit of a particular historical era (ie. people during the Renaissance period did not call it that)
• Writing of history is influenced by era in which it is written
• As an event recedes into the past, it is usually easier to see it in historical context

→ The disadvantages of hindsight

• Distorts our understanding of the past
• When you look back on an event that you lived through, you tend to feel that it was inevitable and could not have turned out any other way
• It is easy to be wise after an event (ie. It is easy to see Hitler as being bound to lose WWII from the beginning, because we know what happened)

→ The problem of bias

• History is more prone to bias than natural sciences
• Topic choice bias
• Historians choice of topic may be influenced by current preoccupations
• Questions he asks and doesn’t ask may influence what he finds

• Confirmation Bias
• Historian might be tempted to appeal only to evidence that supports his own case and to ignore counter-evidence
• National Bias
• Since people come to history with a range of pre-existing cultural and political prejudices, they may find it difficult to deal objectively with sensitive issues

→ The pluralistic approach

• History should reflect all perspectives (women, poor, ethnic minorities, etc)
• Cubist history:
• Speak of history as a plural ( histories) in order to look at multiple perspectives

→ The theories of history

• There is rarely one cause of an event
• “The human universe is so enormously complicated that to speak of the cause of any event is absurdity”
• Multiple factors make the difference:
• Geographical conditions
• Social/economic conditions
• Individual motives
• Chance occurrences

→ The ‘great person’ theory of history

• If a certain great individual had not existed, the course of history would be different

→ The history of thought

• All history is the history of thought
• We can understand one’s actions only be delving in to their minds and trying to make a sense of their motives
• Important to be empathetic when viewing history

→ Economic determinism

• History is determined by economic factors
• Karl Marx:
• Technological and economic factors are the engines of historical change
• Changes in technology determine how society is organized, thus determining how individuals think
• By analyzing these changes, you could predict future events
• Karl Popper:
• If you could predict the details of such events/discoveries, you would have discovered them by now and not in the future

→ The role of chance

• No meaning in history; it is all controlled by chance
• ie. What if Hitler died in a car accident in the 1930s

• Historian without facts is rootless and futile
• Facts without historia are dead and meaningless
• History = continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, and unending dialogue between the past and the present

- Sophie F.