Saturday, October 27, 2007

Pick a subject; What sorts of knowledge and or truths does this subject convey

For this area of discussion, i have chosen the subject; History

Practically since the dawn of time, mankind has been trying to document experiences whether through carvings on a cave wall, or by passing via word of mouth. History transcends culture and time and is a thoroughly "enriching" subject.

However, how much of this history is believable? Such is the cruelty of mother nature that all humans will inevitably die. This means events witnessed or experienced by individuals cannot be recounted to a perfect degree of accuracy. Yes some may argue there are videos and photographs but these offer limited dimensions from only one perspective. But then undoubtedly, there would be another set of people that experience the same event. As a result, what we now have will be several, subtly different accounts leading to an argument as to what really happened.

Now here is what i think a problem when it comes to the subject of history. Historical accounts you read from a textbook or see from a video will only give you a one-dimensional, slightly warped perspective of the event. This is by no means a wrong perspective, but just the experiences of someone with a different way of re-telling or recreating an occurence. The next generation of historians will take these already slightly altered accounts and distort them a little more, for not wanting to be accused of plagiarism. The cycle then repeats with more people reading this, by now, relatively inaccurate re-telling and alter it a bit more.

So, if technology somehow allows us in the future to go back and revisit an event when it actually happen; i'm afraid History will always be fraught with a degree of inaccuracy.

1 comment:

Steve Burnett said...

Thanks Justin. Interesting and picks up, to a certain extent, on what we have just been talking about - sense perception and its reliability. Could do with you analysing the sorts of knowledge that History conveys - experiential, propositional and/or practical