Discuss the Role of Language and Reason in History

Authors Avatar

         

TOK Essay Title Number 9: Discuss the Role of Language and Reason in History

        

“A nation without an idea of history is like a person without a memory. A victim of

amnesia who is lost the remembrance of things past is incapable of acting in the present

or of planning for the future” (Fischer on heroesinamerica.org). This quote by David Hackett Fischer is very accurate because it proves that without history nothing has an identity because history defines how a person or place came into existence. It is not only a record of past events and times but it also a way of understanding the present and foreseeing what will happen in the future as it is generally said that history often repeats itself. In this essay, I will be exploring three knowledge issues which are: in what ways do reason and language contribute to the certainty of historical explanations, how far can we talk coherently about a historical method, and to what extent is history an objective discipline?  

Language is one of the main ways in which we acquire knowledge about the world. It is extremely important in history as the only thing all historical documents have in common is that they are written in a particular language. According to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, language determines our experience of reality, and we can see and think only what our language allows us to see and think. Language is very creative and open-ended and therefore a historian’s knowledge of a historical document depends largely on their knowledge of that language (Lagemaat, 68). Language and reason are inseparably linked with one another because without language it is not possible to reason. This is because reason is composed of words and sentences which can only be created by language (Stewart, 503)

 Many times historians have different views on same events only because their knowledge of that particular language is different which causes their reasoning to be different. Also some have argued that it is possible to reason without language as one can express themselves through pictures. However, this has also been proven wrong using the image theory. ‘According to the image theory, the meaning of a word is the mental image it stands for in your mind.’ A mental picture of two people for a particular word can never be the same as so many characteristics such as color, background, people and objects are taken into consideration (Lagemaat, 54). As a result of this someone else cannot understand the meaning of a word in the same way another person does or even understand it at all. And even if they do, one can never be sure because one cannot get into the mind of another person. Translation can also play a very important role in a historian’s viewpoint of a document. There are about 3,000 different languages in the world and many languages have different context for the words, untranslatable words, or sometimes a language does not even have a word that another language contains (Lagemaat, 60). This creates a problem because historians around the world interpreting the same document have many different viewpoints and people usually get confused as to who is right and who is wrong.

Join now!

An example of different countries interpreting the same event in dissimilar manner is the Boston Tea Party. The Boston Tea Party still remains an iconic event in American History as many political protests still refer to it to date. Since this incident is what is believed to have triggered the American Revolution, the Americans view this event as a fight for freedom and equality as they were charged higher prices for the same tea than the British. The British however did not feel that they were treating the Americans unfairly and merely wanted the colonies to bear the expense of ...

This is a preview of the whole essay