Responses 009 (2010-2011)

Question 9 in the recent list was a shocker in its blandness — or at least, its perceived simplicity. "Discuss the roles of language and reason in history." That was all, and of course, to students who think that history is just another discipline, this would look easy.

The problem is that history, like art, is one of the BIG core disciplines of knowledge. History is one of the two parents of science; as late as the 19th century, science was either called 'natural history' or 'natural philosophy'. As I've mentioned before, in the posts of the 'Drawing Lines' series back in May 2009 in this blog, there is a very very thin line between history and science, and they are much more alike than people seem to think.

Consider this scenario. A community of professionals obtains and accumulates data. Then they select the most reliable data points by a mixture of methodologies such as critical comparison, cross-referencing, and context. Then they collate these data points and synthesize a body of data which is converted by analysis into a body of information and then knowledge. A critical appraisal follows, and then a conclusion is reached. While all this is going on, elements of the same community keep testing the analysis and conclusions by obtaining new data. Regular publishing and peer review keep the discussion alive and healthy.

Question: is this community composed of historians or scientists? Answer: you can't tell.

But wait, some will say, where is the hypothesis, where is the experiment, where is the inductive or deductive process? They must be historians!

Ha, I would have to say that if your idea of science is purely Baconian (i.e. stolen from Arab and Indian science) or Aristotelian (i.e. stolen from misinterpreted Greek texts) or Popperian (i.e. a negative definition of reality), then Newton and Hawking and Feynman would have harsh words with you. The fact is that there are many areas of science not susceptible to conventional hypothesis or experiment; and all areas of historical research use induction or deduction in various phases.

The thing about history is that its final output, the historical narrative, is a synthesis of historical data points. The most important data points are accounts (oral or written) and artifacts. With Aristotle (who claimed that all things consist of substance given structure), one can argue that these are the substance of history; the process which forms the narrative is the structural principle of history.

By direct comparison, a large part of the substance of history is therefore language, and it is the form in which the narrative is delivered as well. Since language is subject to the classical communication model (i.e. something is put into code, the code is transmitted, the transmission is received, the receipt is decoded, the decoding should give the original something) it is subject to the usual errors (bad coding, bad transmission and/or bad decoding), made worse by time and cultural bias. This is most true of cultural history and least true of scientific history, although there may be localised exceptions. Because historical narratives are in danger of being seen as narratives first and history second, extra pains must be taken to evaluate whether the style and presentation of content are being manipulated (consciously or not) so as to bias the receiver's perception of what the narrative means.

By the same comparison, the structural principle of history is a kind of reason that is mainly to do with chronological sequencing, cause-and-effect, evidence for conjectures about social phenomena, and deduction from empirical findings. Since historical reason may suffer from the problems (in this case) of incomplete data and error from data sources (i.e. the data are there but may be compromised in some way), there may be gaps filled in by plausible conjecture. This kind of reasoning is found in evaluations, for example, of the King Arthur legend — we know somebody (or some bodies) balked the Saxon colonization of Britain for a time, and we can deduce a lot from the accounts and artifacts, but we'll never know the real Arthur. When examining historical narratives, pains must be taken to identify the gaps and evaluate how much is conjecture and how well supported such conjectures may be.

It's interesting to evaluate Samuel Huntington's 1993 book The Clash of Civilisations along these lines. It's not a good historical narrative, although it's a brilliant conceptual trick. He's wrong about some key things, because his historical underpinnings are very shaky. It's an example of how linguistic manipulation can lead to false reasoning and be used to create an iffy narrative. (That book was published 16 years ago, so any IB student who wants to clobber Huntington in a History extended essay can do it now.)

So... what are the roles of language and reason in History? Ha, I think there's enough here to act as a starting-point.