History and the Curriculum
John Hood
First published in REVIEW, the Journal of the Independent Scholars' Association of Australia, Vol 13, No. 1, 2014
The so-called 'History Wars' have occupied considerable public attention for some time now, and continue to delineate a 'war' that is both political and naïve. The term refers to a vigorous public debate on the truth of competing versions of history, particularly as it is taught in schools. In the USA and Japan, as well as in Australia, these 'wars' have represented a battle for possession of the past, for the right to teach the next generation a particular interpretation of the national story. This paper will argue that the issue stems from a simplistic view of the nature of history as an academic discipline, and the nature of learning itself, and that the solution to these 'wars' is to establish a clear consensus on the conceptual structure of history and its place in the school curriculum.
By 'conceptual structure' I mean the essential nature of history as a discipline. There seems to be somewhat of a gap between the philosophy of history and the actual teaching of history, enunciated for example in a 1978 report of the British Schools Council Project: History 13 – 16.
“In questioning the use of chronological structure as the basis of history.. the project reported: The Project could find no adequate conceptual structure to history which would either meet with general consensus or form a basis for the teaching of the subject... The list (of conceptual frameworks) could easily run into thousands, and consequently .. could not do for history what Jerome Bruner originally suggested was possible for all subjects, and base the teaching on its conceptual structure...” (1)
If we accept Bruner's suggestion that schools should teach the essential nature or conceptual structure of each discipline, we must ask what, then, is the conceptual structure of history?
Where better to start than the great epic poem on the siege of Troy, the Iliad. The opening paragraph draws us in like all great literature:
“Sing, Goddess, of the rage of Achilles, son of Peleus, that fateful rage which brought countless woes upon the Achaeans, and sent forth to Hades many valiant souls .. to be a spoil for dogs and all manner of birds; and thus the will of Zeus was brought to fulfillment..”. (2)
This is an interesting example to discuss, since it represents two opposing features of history. On the one hand, the Iliad seems to have served in the ancient world as an explanation of actual events, a vital memory of the interaction between gods and mankind. On the other hand, this interaction is precisely why we today regard it as literature rather than history, despite Heinrich Schliemann's excavations in the 19th century and his discovery of the actual city. This dichotomy between history as literature and history as factual record is an important one and we shall return to it in due course. It is sufficient at this point to note that, in general, all societies seem to possess a story about their people and their origins and that these stories are generally regarded as mythology rather than history.
In the fifth century BCE, however, Herodotus of Halicarnassus produced something special. In the words of Keith Windshuttle:
“Instead of the mythical tales which all human cultures had used to affirm their sense of self-worth and their place in the cosmos, the Greek historians decided to try and record the truth about the past.” (3)
Though regarded as history, perhaps the first true history, Herodotus is also characterised by a discursive, expansive style that includes a great deal of material incidental to his theme of the war between the Greeks and the Persians. Even so, Herodotus shows that he is well aware of the difference between truth and fantasy, and the need to be critical of sources: My business is to record what people say, but I am by no means bound to believe it. (4)
Thucydides, the second great historian of ancient Greece, produced a history of the war between Athens and Sparta, a work which stands in strong contrast to Herodotus. Confining himself mostly to events in living memory, Thucydides asserts:
“I have found it impossible, because of its remoteness in time, to acquire a really precise knowledge of the distant past, or even of the history preceding our own period”. ( 5)
This is quite an important statement. Thucydides implies that the past is largely unknowable, and, in doing so, anticipates the philosophising of some modern intellectuals.
The Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero states what is generally regarded as one of the basic qualities of history:
“For who does not know that history’s first law is that an author must not dare to tell anything but the truth? And as a second that he must...tell the whole truth?” (6)
Given the regard in which the Greek and Roman classics have always been held in later ages, we might expect this level of sophistication. It may surprise us, however, to realise that medieval scholars also show an awareness of what we regard as modern historical method.
The venerable Bede, seeking to assure his readers that the Historia Ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum is true, states:
“in order to avoid any doubts .. as to the accuracy of what I have written, allow me briefly to state the authorities upon whom I chiefly depend”. (7).
This statement of academic method is no more than what is expected of historians today, though Bede was writing in the early eighth century.
Even the 11th century Byzantine princess, Anna Comnena, writing a history of the career of her father, the emperor Alexius, makes it clear that she realises the importance of impartiality and the struggle to overcome bias:
“Whenever one assumes the role of historian, friendships and enmities have to be forgotten. Often one has to bestow on adversaries the highest commendation; often, too, one’s nearest relatives ... have to be censured”. (8)
This brief review of statements by ancient and medieval scholars allows us to observe a number of understandings about history that underpin debates about modern historiography. The most obvious, of course, is the notion that history differs from myth by its purpose – to uncover the truth of past events. Allied to this is the belief that the historian should be unbiased or impartial, that statements about the past should be based on the evidence of sources, and that this evidence should be questioned or examined. These ideas have been both developed and refined in the last two hundred years and they have also been challenged.
Perhaps the most common notion is the distinction between history and fiction. The German historian and philosopher Leopold Von Ranke stated in the introduction to his History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations, 1824, that, unlike historical fiction, history should endeavour to show “what actually happened” This statement was apparently inspired by his awareness of the popularity of the romantic works of Sir Walter Scott, which led him to claim for history the quality of truth not fiction.
Ranke's idea of history as a form of scientific literature inspired many other intellectuals. Lord Acton, professor of Modern History at Cambridge university, delivered an address in 1895 that asserted history as a science. John Bagnell Bury, who followed Acton at Cambridge in 1902, and more recently, Geoffrey Elton, President, Royal Historical Society and, like Acton and Bury before him, also Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, developed similar views of history.
Lord Acton, in his inaugural address at Cambridge in 1895, argued that history was more than simply a collection of facts, and pointed out: “the main thing to learn is not the art of accumulating material, but the sublimer art of investigating it, of discerning truth from falsehood and certainty from doubt”. (9) This 'sublime art' distinguished history from literature, even great literature. His opinion of the best-selling History of England, written by Lord Thomas Macaulay, was expressed in a letter he wrote to Mary Gladstone, in which, though finding Macaulay's work full of errors, he stated that even Macaulay's strongest critics had to admit that his writing was a pleasure to read.
J. B. Bury, the great English scholar of Greece and Rome, while accepting the importance of the literary nature of historical writing, nevertheless pointed out that:
“History is not a branch of literature. The facts of history, like the facts of geology or astronomy, can supply material for literary art; for manifest reasons they lend themselves to artistic representation far more readily than those of the natural sciences; but clothe the story of human society in a literary dress is no more the part of an historian as an historian, than it is the part of an astronomer as an astronomer to present in an artistic shape the story of the stars”. (10)
Geoffrey Elton, President of the Royal Historical Society and also Regius Professor of History at Cambridge in the period after WW2, stressed the difference between mythological beliefs and historical truth, accepting that all people “show the desire to know what went before... yet not all human societies have been concerned to write history as it really was”. (11) In other words, all societies construct myths like the Iliad, but only historians write history. History is defined, not by its subject, but by its method and by its purpose.
The idea that history differs from literature in this one fundamental, that history seeks to record the truth of the past, is perhaps the most generally held view of the nature of history. Indeed, most people would probably reject the idea that historians should be free to compose any alternative account. The common-sense view is surely that the task of the historian is to reconstruct a truthful account of past events.
Opposed to this 'common-sense' view, however, is a tradition inspired by the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce and developed by several generations of historians and philosophers. These included the American academic Carl Becker, Professor R. G. Collingwood, Hannah Arendt, who taught at both Princeton andYale, and the English academic Edward Hallett Carr.
In History and Chronicle (1917) Croce argued that the "science of history" was a farce, and drew a distinction between 'the past' and 'the history of the past'. According to Croce, the past only becomes history when we in the present care about it. “Only an interest in the life of the present can move one to investigate past fact....All history is contemporary history”. (12)
Carl Becker, who taught history at Cornell University from 1917 until 1941, developed Croce's ideas. In Everyman his own Historian, he wrote:
“when I use the term history I mean knowledge of history. No doubt throughout all past time there actually occurred a series of events which, whether we know what it was or not, constitutes history in some ultimate sense. Nevertheless, much the greater part of these events we can know nothing about, not even that they occurred; many of them we can know only imperfectly; and even the few events that we think we know for sure we can never be absolutely certain of, since we can never revive them, never observe or test them directly..” (13)
In an essay entitled “What Happened on Lexington Green” Becker developed the notion that historical 'facts' are really 'assertions of a fact'. In other words, the evidence with which historians work consists of statements about the past, not the actual past itself.
Becker also raised an interesting point concerning time. Rejecting the philosophical idea that only the present exists, both past and future being merely concepts, Becker argues that we conceive of time always as past event, that contemplating the past is the only way in which our minds behave. In other words, as soon as we contemplate the notion of 'now', it becomes the past.
“But the past―the word is both misleading and unnecessary - misleading, because the past, used in connection with history, seems to imply the distant past, as if history ceased before we were born; unnecessary, because after all everything said or done is already in the past as soon as it is said or done... Strictly speaking, the present doesn’t exist for us, or is at best no more than an infinitesimal point in time, gone before we can note it as present. Nevertheless, we must have a present; and so we create one by robbing the past, by holding on to the most recent events and pretending that they all belong to our immediate perceptions”. (14)
Becker's ideas have great significance for what we understand by the term 'history'. He defines history as the memory of things said and done and argues that the memory of things said and done is essential even to the simplest acts of daily life (hence the title Everyman His Own Historian). If this is so, thinking about the past is not a separate activity undertaken consciously but in fact the most fundamental way in which our minds operate. It means that even the evening news report is nothing more or less than an historical account of the past, that when we pause to think whether we paid the electricity bill we are engaging in historical research.
R.G. Collingwood, Professor of Philosophy at Oxford and a prominent historian/archaeologist of Roman Britain, was another advocate of the idea of history as contemporary thought. Collingwood rejected the idea of history as science. He pointed out that the evidence historians investigate is only evidence because it has survived into the present. By 1929, this had become his first principle of the philosophy of history - “The past which an historian studies is not a dead past, but a past which in some sense is still living in the present”. Later he was to write “all history is the history of thought”. His major work The Idea of History, published some years after his death in 1943, emphasised the importance of historical imagination:
“The historical imagination differs from these not in being a priori, but in having as its special task to imagine the past: not an object of possible perception, since it does not now exist, but able through this activity to become an object of our thought”. (15)
Collingwood built upon the idea of historical imagination, defining it not as some form of fantasy or invention but as a necessary condition of reflection.
“I have already remarked that, in addition to selecting from among his authorities statements those which he regards as important, the historian must in two ways go beyond what his authorities tell him. One is the critical way, and this is what Bradley has attempted to analyse. The other is the constructive way. Of this he has said nothing. I described earlier history as interpolating, between the statements borrowed from our authorities, other statements implied by them. Thus our authorities tell us that on one day Caesar was in Rome and on a later day in Gaul; they tell us nothing about his journey from one place to the other, but we interpolate this with a perfectly good conscience”. (16)
In other words, the imagination employed by an historian is a type of logical inference, imposed by the statements employed as evidence, going “beyond what his authorities tell him.”. Borrowing a term from logic, Collingwood describes this as a priori imagination.
Despite their emphasis on the interpretative nature of historical data and their assertion that history is not an objective science, neither Becker nor Collingwood rejected the notion that history was concerned with a search for the truth.
E.H.Carr, in “What is History?” (1961), expressed his now very well known statement that history is 'a dialogue between the past and the present'. Carr was particularly critical of the school that argued for the objective nature of history:
“The belief in a hard core of historical facts existing objectively and independently of the interpretation of the historian is a preposterous fallacy, but one which it is very hard to eradicate" (17)
Perhaps one of the most influential contributors to the debate on the nature of history in the second half of the twentieth century was the American historian Jack Hexter. In his long career at Yale and other American universities, Hexter stressed the literary nature of historical writing, arguing in The Rhetoric of History (1968) that all disciplines have their own distinctive 'rhetoric' or 'method of argument or presentation'. History differed from science, for example, in its necessary 'fictive' element and, for example, the fondness of historians for quotations from the sources.
“If physicists could not quote in the text, they would not feel that much was lost with respect to advancement of knowledge of the natural world. If historians could not quote, they would deem it a disastrous impediment to the communication of knowledge about the past. A luxury for physicists, quotation is a necessity for historians, indispensable to historiography.” (18)
Historians, said Hexter, happily sacrifice exactness in the interests of 'evocative force'. The writing of history involves a paradox, in which completeness and accuracy are not always essential or desirable in the task of telling 'what really happened'. Even so, Hexter recognised a major difference between historical narrative and fiction: the overwhelming commitment of historians to fidelity to the surviving records of the past.
Donald R.Kelley wrote of Hexter:“He was amused, too, at learning that his article on "The Rhetoric of History" (written for the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences) was a harbinger of the rhetorical turn taken a few years later signalled by the historiographical work of Hayden White and others.” (19)
Hayden White, professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz, reflects Hexter's influence, as well as the ideas of Becker and Collingwood on the interpretative nature of historical 'facts':
“The historian has to interpret his materials in order to construct the moving pattern of images in which the form of the historical process is to be mirrored. And this is because the historical record is both too full and too sparse. One the one hand there are always more facts in the record than the historian can possibly include in his narrative representation of a given segment of the historical process. And so the historian must 'interpret' his data by excluding certain facts from his account as irrelevant to his narrative purpose. On the other hand, in his efforts to reconstruct 'what happened' in any given period of history, the historian inevitably must include in his narrative an account of some event or complex of events for which the facts that would permit a plausible explanation of its occurrence are lacking. And this means the historian must “interpret” his materials by filling in the gaps in his information on inferential or speculative grounds. A historical narrative is thus....at once a representation that is an interpretation and an interpretation that passes for a representation..”(20)
Interestingly enough, however, neither White, nor any of the others, rejects the notion that the task of historical research is to establish a true account, or, at least, an account that conforms to the evidence produced by that research. Indeed, to imagine otherwise would seem to challenge the very idea of history. As Ann Curthoys writes:
“No one – including us – would do history, would pursue historical truth, unless she and he thought they could arrive, however provisionally, at some kind of truth about the past.” ( 21)
Sympathetic as we may well be to this viewpoint, however, it is hardly evidence. In the last few decades of the twentieth century a number of academics and literary critics have challenged the belief in the possibility of truth. In Re-thinking History the English academic Keith Jenkins writes:
“Truth is dependent on somebody having the power to make it true...Thus all history is theoretical and all theories are positioned and positioning” (22)
According to academics like Keith Jenkins, historical writing - the discourse of history - reveals history as no more than a form of literature. There is nothing scientific about it and nothing about it that is objective truth. It uses the same literary devices as fiction. The writings of the French philosophers Jaques Derrida and Roland Barthes emphasise discourse analysis, in which the text itself reveals meaning beyond the literal. Keith Jenkins even seems to deny that history has any relationship at all to the past, that “past and history float free of each other” and that historians “invent all the descriptive categories and meanings” of the past, so that any historical account of the past becomes “not much use having”. Historical writing, according to Jenkins, is valuable because it can give an insight into present day viewpoints rather than tell us anything real about the past. (23)
This claim that history is essentially a form of literature, and its accompanying view that historical truth is relative, has considerable relevance to scholarly work and to the place of history in popular culture. The enormous influence of mass media, particularly film and television drama, coupled with relativist approaches in academic research, help to mythologise the past, creating a national story that is accepted uncritically and leads, inevitably, both to a convergence between history and historical fiction, and to the conflict of beliefs at the heart of the 'history wars.' This is clearly a significant challenge to the whole idea of historical research, and it is not surprising that such ideas have provoked reaction from professional historians.
There does seem to be a logical flaw in the view that truth is relative. If the only standard by which a statement can be considered 'true' is the viewpoint of the writer, this would seem to apply even to that statement. The claim that all truth is relative thus denies itself the status of an objective truth. It is hardly able to be both things at once. This is certainly the argument of Richard Evans, professor of modern history at Cambridge, who points out: “Once postmodernism's principles are applied to itself, many of its arguments collapse under the weight of their own contradictions.”. (24)
It is important to resolve the issue of whether truth is an objective quality or relativist construct. Perhaps the answer lies in the notion of concept. We can readily accept the idea of 'justice' or 'beauty' as concepts, even though neither of these qualities exists independently of specific examples. It may well be that 'truth' is a concept that has no objective existence but is nevertheless an ideal that the human mind recognises. It seems quite logical to believe that historians are entitled to seek for a truthful account of the past, since we all know what we mean by the word 'truth' whilst at the same time acknowledging that 'truth' is a concept rather than a reality. The actual search for 'truth' then becomes a benchmark or touchstone for historical writing, a self-imposed task on which the historical account can be assessed by others. In essence, it is probably best to say that historians seek to establish the probability of truthful statements about the past.
In fact, this is what Keith Jenkins means when he writes:
“To work in this way is to adopt a method which deconstructs and historicises all those interpretations that have certaintist pretensions and which fail to call into question the conditions of their own making, which forget to indicate their subservience to unrevealed interests, which mis-recognise their own historical moment, and which mask those epistemological, methodological and idealogical pre-suppositions that... everywhere and everytime mediate the past into history.” (25)
Ann Curthoys expresses the same notion in a less opaque manner:
“.. bitter conflicts over history do not mean we must return to naïve ..positivism,... Historians can combine ..the relative nature of historical narration with a commitment to truth, extensive research, rigorous use of sources, and careful interpretation. Indeed, some historians .. have learned that it is all the more important to explain to readers their historical method and assumptions..” (26)
This is a most important notion, one which would seem to reconcile the debate over whether history is science or literature, and whether the historian can ever produce an objective version of the past. In recognising the interpretative nature of historical research and the problematic identification of evidence, we can still nevertheless stress the absolute requirement for the historian to pursue the notion of truth. Here, then, is an insight into the conceptual structure of history which we discussed at the beginning. If the nature of history conforms to these two seemingly irreconcilable notions, it follows that this is what ought to be taught. In simple terms, the conceptual structure of history is method not content. It is process rather than outcome. Teaching the formal processes of enquiry and critical thinking is teaching history.
This means that the “history wars” are a form of sitzkrieg, a phoney war. Controversy is the very stuff of history. The curriculum should not seek to present or impose a particular view of the past, but instead seek to promote lively student debate about those varying interpretations. I do not for one moment imagine this to be an easy task. The popular notion of history as a “story” is very well established, even amongst many educators themselves. A curriculum designed on the above guidelines would need to begin with an acceptance of this misconception. It would also have to deal with an answer the the problem of content, for method without content makes no sense.
This leads on to three important questions. First, what are the methods of historical enquiry? Second, what content should be used to teach these methods? Finally, how should classroom practice reflect a method-based approach to the content?
The content of history, as indicated above, is clearly the most controversial aspect of the school curriculum. The tendency for historians was once to focus on 'great men' and political events. The emergence of Marxist theories in the late 19th century, and then the movement for Women's rights, gave rise to another approach to the writing of history which emphasised the need for historical accounts to be more inclusive of class, gender and social movements. Charles Beard and E.P Thompson both drew attention to working class history. The American academic Mary Beard, in Woman as Force in History (1946) advocated an approach to writing history that took full account of women’s activity, their force, throughout history. More recently, Ann Curthoys from the University of Technology in Sydney, has pointed out that women have always been active in family history, local history and historical fiction. Only in the area of institutional academic history have they been excluded. (27)
Carl Becker, in pointing out the difference between 'the past' and the history of the past, makes an extremely important point touching upon the question of content: “Nevertheless, much the greater part of these events (the past) we can know nothing about, not even that they occurred”. (28)
Becker is not alone in making a distinction between the past and a history of the past. Even Jenkins, in a rare moment of clear writing, points out:
“The past has occurred. It has gone and can only be brought back again by historians .. for example in books, articles.. etc not as actual events.” (29)
The importance of this distinction has great relevance for the question of content. If we admit that our knowledge of the past is limited to the 'known past', it follows that justifications of content based on 'relevance' become problematic. It also calls into question the type of so-called historical concepts listed in the Australian Curriculum – that is, “Sources and Evidence; Continuity and change; Cause and effect; Perspectives; Empathy; Significance; Contestability.” (30)
The case for further exploration of the notion of historical content is best summarised by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, writing about Leon Tolstoy's view of history in War and Peace:
“Tolstoy could not justify to himself the apparently arbitrary selection of material and the no less arbitrary distribution of emphasis, to which all historical writing seemed to be doomed. He complains that while the factors which determine the life of man-kind are very various, historians select from them only some single aspect, say the political or the economic, and represent it as primary, as the efficient cause of social change; but then, what of religion, what of 'spiritual' factors, and the many other aspects―a literally countless multiplicity―with which all events are endowed? How can we escape the conclusion that the histories which exist represent what Tolstoy declares to be 'perhaps only 001 per cent of the elements which actually constitute the real history of peoples'.” (31)
There is therefore considerable challenge in determining an appropriate content in which to teach the methods of historical enquiry, the fundamental conceptual structure of history. This challenge, and the teaching practices needed to achieve it, will have to be the subject of further publication.
Et Veritas me – “Let truth be my guide.”
This is the second paper in the series “History and the Curriculum”.
It argues that critical enquiry is the fundamental conceptual structure of history and it is this process of thought that should be taught.
http://jcmhood.squarespace.com/publications-1#/history-and-curriculum
What is Critical Thinking?
In simple terms, the fundamental conceptual structure of history is method not content. It is process rather than outcome. Teaching history is teaching the formal processes of enquiry and critical thinking.
Critical thinking refers to the willingness and ability to criticise (ask questions about) information in order to determine the truth of it. The motto of critical thought is: ‘question everything.’
Being willing to examine information critically is the opposite of a willingness to accept information at face value, without examining the truth of it.
Critical Thinking is not a guide to winning arguments. It is a method for clarifying one’s own understandings and beliefs.
A willingness to critically examine all information, whether verbal, visual, or written, comes from a belief that the truth matters, that information that is false, misleading or partially true has no real value
Apart from information that is wholly and perhaps deliberately false, we can identify a whole range of fallacious arguments that fail to follow the patterns of logic and may therefore seem at first to be true, until the error in logic is recognised. Before examining the methods of critical thought, therefore, it is useful to study the ancient art of rhetoric, the art of presenting persuasive arguments.
RHETORIC. The art of persuasion.
Traditionally, rhetoric consists of three elements: ethos, pathos, logos, These three components are explained by Aristotle.
Of the modes of persuasion... there are three kinds.
The first kind depends on the personal character of the speaker (ethos)
The second on putting the audience into a certain frame of mind (pathos);
The third on the proof, or apparent proof, provided by the words of the speech itself. (logos
In other words, these three can be defined as:
Ethos – Information that is supplied by a trusted source. For example, a newsreader on the evening news, a special correspondent, an eyewitness, etc. These sources may contain errors or even bias (as well as the possibility they contain truth) but they have an extra level of persuasion because of their association with authority. This association may allow opinion to be presented as fact. The use of authority also occurs in popular history documentaries, where academics often provide commentaries without justifying their statements.
The art of rhetoric is one of the three ancient arts of discourse, first identified by the Greek philosophers.
The other two are grammar and logic/dialectic. As an academic discipline within the humanities, rhetoric
aims to study the techniques that speakers or writers use to inform, persuade, and motivate their audiences
Pathos An argument supported by, or consisting of, emotional content, such as outrage, pity, anger, or fear. Emotional content includes empathy, which, according to Aristotle, should be a component of all persuasive argument. An argument based on emotion is likely to present material focused on what happened without attempting to determine why it happened.
Logos or ‘argument’. The obvious power of a well presented and supported argument. In order for it to be so, it must adhere to the rules of logic. Arguments that are inconsistent with these rules of logic are identified as fallacious or false arguments.
What are some examples of false or misleading arguments?
A fallacy is the use of invalid or otherwise faulty reasoning in the construction of an argument. Here are some examples:
Perhaps the most obvious is argument based on a false or unverified premise. If the statement is based on false information, the final conclusion cannot be true. If it is based on a statement that contains some truth, but not the whole truth, its conclusion will be weak and open to criticism since it fails to recognise the many nuances of truth. If the statement is presented as fact but unsupported by evidence, it is an opinion.
In a similar way, an argument based on inadequate proof also has a weak base. The old saying “one swallow does not make a Spring” refers to the fallacy of using one example to justify a more general statement. For example, a statement such as this dog is black does not allow us to argue that all dogs are black. This is the fallacy of arguing from the particular to the general.
Appeal to the people. A statement is not made true merely because a large number of people believe it. Truth does not always reside in the majority. The information must be examined using the skills of critical thinking.
Argument from authority: In this form of argument, the opinion of an influential figure is used as evidence to support an argument. A statement may be true, or it may not, even though asserted by an authority or expert. The information must be examined using the skills of critical thinking.
Argument from appeal to emotion or loaded language (pathos) – In this example, the statement uses emotive words to express value judgements, without showing that such terms are applicable in the situation. This can include the use of unverifiable numbers. An argument based on hyperbole or exaggerated terminology is a weak argument and must be examined using the skills of critical thinking.
A variant form of argument to the above is sometimes called the straw man argument, where the opponent’s argument is misrepresented and simplified, then attacked.
A final example of false arguing is known by the Latin term argument ad hominem and refers to an argument that relies on denying the truth of a counter argument based on who is making it. In this example the substance of an argument is ignored and instead the character, motives or good faith of the person making the argument is attacked. It seems to be a negative version of ethos.
Information that confirms a belief already held is more likely to be accepted and believed than one that does not. This is known as ‘confirmation bias’. It is a sign that one has adopted some belief dogmatically and isn’t willing to disconfirm that belief or is too willing to interpret ambiguous evidence so that it conforms to what one already believes. While it may be that the information so readily accepted might still be true, without employing the process of critical thought means there is no way to be sure. The ability to critically examine information can help to make you more confident in the accuracy of the information as well as reveal where it is false. This is especially true in recognising the subtle nuances of truth, where something might be true in one regard but not true in the whole.
In summary, a study of rhetoric can enable one to analyse the veracity of an argument. CRITICAL THINKING.
Question Everything !
An argument may seem persuasive at first, but each of the statements that make up a point of view needs to be subjected to the process of critical thought. What are the Skills of Critical Thinking?
There are many models of critical thinking available online. They all have the common definition as: critical thinking is about not accepting what you read or hear at face value, but always questioning other people’s information, ideas and arguments.
Here is a good example of the process of critical thought. This is a model presented by Plymouth University in the UK.
According to the Plymouth model, there are three stages to the process of critical thought. These stages consist of, first, describing the information, second, analysing it, and, finally, evaluating it. Each of these stages contain the following questions:
Description - What When Who Where? How do I know this?
What are the key points of the information?
Who is the author/orginator and what is their expertise or bias? When was it written?
Where was it published?
Analysis. - Why and How?
Why is the author making this argument?
How is the argument constructed?
How does the author support their claims? (Do they provide evidence?) Have they made use of fallacious argument? (see above).
Evaluation - What if? So what? What next?
These questions can help you make your own conclusions. ‘What if’ helps to examine the limitations of the author’s argument. ‘So what?’ questions the significance of the conclusions, and “what next?’ helps to lead the inquiring into further investigation.
John Hood, March 2014
References
Dickinson,A.& Lee, P, History Teaching and Historical Understanding, HEB, London, 1978, p.43
The Iliad, Book 1.2
Windshuttle, Keith, The Killing of History, Macleay Press, Paddington,1996, p.ix
Herodotus, The Histories, Book 7, 153
Thucydides, The Peloponnesian Wars, Book 1.1
Cicero, De Orat, 2.6, in Mellor, Ronald, The Roman Historians, Routledge, Oxford, 1999, p.25
Bede, A History of the English Church and People, Penguin Classics, p. 33
Comnena, Anna, The Alexiad, Penguin Classics, preface, p.18.
Dalberg-Acton, Sir John, Inaugural address, 1895
Bury, John Bagnall, Inaugural address, University of Cambridge, 1902.
Elton, Geoffrey, The Practice of History, London: Fontana Press, 1967.
Croce, Benedetto, History and Chronicle, 1917.
Becker, Carl, Everyman His Own Historian, American Historical Review, 37, no.2, 1931
Ibid, p. 240
Collingwood, R.G., The Idea of History, 1946
ibid
Carr, E.H., What is History, 1961, p.12
Hexter, J, Historiography, 1968, p. 385
Kelly, D.R., Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 58, Number 2, April 1997.
White, Hayden, Interpretation in History, New Literary History, vol 4, John Hopkins University Press, 1973
Curthoys, Ann & Docker, John, Is history fiction?, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2006, p.5
Jenkins, Keith, Re-thinking History, Routledge, London, 1991, pp. 69,79
Ibid, p.5
Evans, Richard, In Defence of History, Granta Books, London, 1971, p. 219
Jenkins, op.cit., p. 68
Curthoys, op cit, p. 233
Ibid, p. 155
Becker, op cit,
Jenkins, op cit, p.6
Berlin, Isaiah, The Hedgehog and the Fox, Wiedenfeld and Nicholson, London, 1953, p.15