The job of the historian is to recover and portray what actually happened in the past. Simple as this sounds, this job is nuanced and difficult, and the intricacies of the job serve to further expound upon the endeavor of the historian.
First we must wonder if the events and causes in the past can be actuated. In one sense they can. If my wife wants to discover if, in the past, I ate the last of the funyuns, she can. We have surveillance in our home and it would be a simple matter of playing back the tape. Even this simple question, the answer to which is so amenable to the certain review of evidence, however, has staggering limitations. The angle of our surveillance is not wide enough to see inside of our pantry. Since I never removed the funyuns from the pantry the tape becomes less certain. The data available is that Dani knew there were funyuns in the pantry yesterday and on the tape I can be seen crossing the kitchen, entering the pantry, and leaving the pantry. No other event relevant to the consumption of the funyuns exists on the tape, and after my visit to the pantry the funyuns bag was empty. Probable as this case can be made to appear, there is an inaccessible gap in the data that precludes certainty. If the historian cannot produce certainty in this funyun case, how certain can one be about the legitimacy of the competing claims to the British monarchy that lead to the Battle of Hastings when we are separated from the relevant data by nearly than one-thousand years?
So is the job of the historian in fact to recover and portray what actually happened in the past if certainty is impossible in such an endeavor? Yes, it is, in much the same way that the job of the Point Guard is to make his team score every time they are in possession of the ball. This is all to say that while a historian cannot infallibly recover the past, the past is a specific thing of which specific things are true and untrue. The closer one is to the presentation of that truth, the better one is performing the task of the historian. Thus, though, the job of the historian is to recover and present the past as it actually was, the product of the historian will always be measured in terms of what probably happened.
The establishment of historical probability is also quite nuanced. To evaluate this one must immediately adopt a bias through which to filter probability. To demonstrate this I will explain my own epistemological approach to probability. The probability of a past event is established by the strength of the data that supports that event’s claimant, normalized by a comparison to the background knowledge of scientific consensus in one’s present day. This is a wordy way of saying that if an event is attested by a reliable source, and the occurrence of that event seems likely based empirical experience, it probably happened. If a claimed event meets neither criteria, or one criterion and not the other, it is less probable that it actually happened.
Trivial and non-controversial as this seems, consider it in light of the historical question as to whether or not Moses parted the Red Sea, or Muhammad cleft the moon in two, or Jesus rose from the dead. The dependence upon empirical background knowledge I am advocating would rate each event quite low on a probability scale. To adhere to these claims, then, a test other than common empirical experience must comprise the background knowledge through which one evaluates historical claims. I simply maintain that recourse to the data bank of verifiability in the medical field is analogous, and in that field, this recourse is the difference between blood-letting and transfusion. The specialty and skill in each are no doubt equal, but only one has served to better the state of humanity.
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