Tok Presentation

Why did we choose this base? We gestate that bashing the other(prenominal) is an important thing to understand what is happening and to prevent the same mistakes from the ult. However, in that location is a slight problem in our realizeledge of past. And thats why we asked this question .. Real-life situation You business leader be meaningwhy did they choose this topic? Isnt it frank that what we sleep with existingly happened? be they trying to show us some stupid conspiracy theories or what? So here comes the real life situation. It is no made-up situation because, unfortunately, it happened to me recently.I was geting sources for my EE. The fall source I read basically overthrew/contradicted my whole research question. I am writing about a ruler in medieval Japan who brought peace which lasted 250 years and how he accomplished this peace. As I read the second source, it stated that the nonpargonil that actually established the peace was non this ruler, but the o ne before him. With this newfound information my whole EE practically fell apart. So, I had both contradictory sources and a level of questions How it could be possible for such a contradicting sources to exist?And how do we know which one is true and which one isnt? Sources Okay, now lets get keister to our fellowship of past. Where do we get it from? Well, thither be different sources that together help us gather our historical knowledge. We enkindle categorize them into two groups first and secondary. Well, I hope you all know what prime and secondary sources are, but if you take upt let me say it really briefly. Primary sources are those that were created by people who witnessed the events that are under use up and secondary are sources, which are build upon (analyze and turn in) special ones.Now, lets try to knead a list of the sources so that we can demonstrate how some of them can become unreliable. PrimarySecondary Diaries Journal/magazine member Pottery (physi cal stuff)History textbook for schools LettersBook about history InterviewsEncyclopedias SpeechesReviews Documents Photographs Now that we birth a list of sources, we need to think about what could possibly affect them. Those can be all four of our tools of knowledge perception, emotion, reason and language. use these, we? ll show you how the sources can reflect the past non very accurately.Lets start with primary sources. What can affect them? Lets start with written account statements and diaries. First, the writer must perceive the event. What can go wrong in perception? Well, each person perceives things selectively, according to what they expect to see, according to their emotions, culture, traditions and so on. Lets imagine a soldier named Joe. After surviving a date he writes a letter to his married woman. I believe I do not capture to mention that this letter will later become a primary source for us.It consists of many emotional sentences about the demolition of Jo hn, Joes friend, who died during the battle and there is only when little information about the battle itself and its outcomes. This shows us already, that Joe perceived very little from the battle, but instead concentrated on what was happening to his friend (which is natural, but for historians that are studying the battle rather unfortunate. However, Joe describes something from the battle. He says that their enemys ranks consisted of thousands of soldiers compared to their barely thousand.However, other sources from the same battle state, that the armies were equal in numbers. So, obviously, Joe exaggerated as people tend to under stress situations. But his wife will never know this bit of information Furthermore Joe writes that it was the enemy who actually provoked the battle, age source written by someone from the other side states that is was the exact opposite. So obviously cipher wants to admit to be the aggressor. This was just an example of how perception and reason c an influence the depictn account of an event from the past. Now lets watch a little video.I hope you know the guy that will be show in it So, what can we say about some speeches of politicians or propagandistic films or pictures? These in any case count as primary sources, however I think it is obvious why they cannot be very reliable. Their purpose is to manipulate and distort the truth. For us, and for historians, sometimes it might be very hard to signal whether something is a propaganda and manipulation of facts or whether it is not. It is essential for the historians and us to be able to distinguish what is propaganda or manipulation and what is not.Even though such sources contain manipulated information which is useless for historians who want to know the truth, they are still blue-chip since they help us understand the historical context of that time. Furthermore entropy and authorised documents can also contain manipulated information and that is even harder for us t o see, because we tend to believe official things. To get back to our knowledge issue, knowledge of the past that we gain from primary sources can be inaccurate, since primary sources tend to be very subjective.But there are plenty of orimary sources, which give us an quarry and therefore probably accurate account of the past, such as photographs, data and official documents (if they are not manipulated). Excluding the fact that they can be misleading, without primary sources, we would be practically lost, since it is thanks to them that we have got at to the lowest degree some information about the past. Secondary sources Now lets move to secondary sources. The most widely used secondary source are historians and textbooks they write. Historians are very important for us, receivers of the knowledge.Why? If we only had primary sources, we would be lost. First, they are sometimes very hard to understand ( in particular if they are in a language you dont speak and also there can be overwhelming number of them and we then might not be able to distinguish the important ones from the ones that contain no valuable information. Thats where historians come in handy. They gather the information, read through as many sources as possible, interpret the information included and then write books that should be understandable for us. But, there are several problems.The first, whitethornbe not the obvious one, is that historians do not always get all the information they need to give an account of a particular event. Its like a puzzle. They have many pieces, but sometimes the pieces dont fit together or there are some pieces are missing. therefore they have to throw the odd ones out and they might find out that even more pieces are missing. Then they have to fill in the gaps themselves. This filling in the gaps can be very dangerous, especially if the historians are biased. Quite often historians are nationally biased.They have been raised in one orbit along with its t raditions and culture and therefore, even if they are trying their best, they are going to write the history from their plains point of view. Another problem comes in understanding the primary sources. The main obstacle in this case is language, which might have been rather different at that time. As much as historians may try, the translation can almost never be perfect. Sometimes those are just minor mistakes that dont matter, but in some cases, the translation might be fatal.However, we will never know whether the translation was wrong or not. Furthermore, these sources can be further translated, so we basically get a translation of translation and the source can altogether lose its original meaning. To conclude and get back to our question, even though (we hope) they are trying to be as objective as they can, historians can make mistakes in filling the gaps, in being nationally biased and in the translation of the sources. However, their role in our knowledge of past is essent ial, since they put all the pieces of information into a meaningful whole.Now lets look at us. We are the receivers of knowledge. Since our own knowledge of past is way more limited than the knowledge of historians, we are more prone to making wrong conclusions from primary sources. Because of this same factor, we might also shed some vital points. Also, have you ever thought about checking whether a plastered historian is tell the truth? Or did you just blindly believed everything he said, just because he has the title of historian? This is a typical ad hominem fallacy that we all can make.Lastly, we, similarly as historians, are nationally biased, which also clouds our reasoning. Final Conclusion To conclude our presentation, we should now see that we know our past only to a certain extent. It depends on the reliability and amount of the primary and secondary sources that we have. We also need to be aware of the biases or drawbacks of the primary and secondary sources in order to distinguish the biased or manipulated sources. In the future, we might have a better knowledge of past, since new and new sources are discovered every day.And, what do you think Jarka did with her EE sources? She was kinda hopeless at first, but then she decided to read the remaining sources. The rest, back up her research question (thankfully), so she could conclude (with almost 100 % certainty) which one was the one that was not true. ? Also, primary sources serve the purpose of the writer and were not written to become parts of textbooks in the future. P. S. do not have to reflect truth, but rather a personal truth. Often we do not have written accounts from peasants and lower classes, simply because they didn? know how to write, didn? t consider it necessary, useful CONCLUSION =our knowledge of past is in many cases not the same as the past itself, because it is based on human commentary of why and how certain events happen = also, new evidence is constantly being found and it might completely change our view of what and why happened = also new technologies are invented =thus we can say that past is still alive and changing = try to gather as much different sources as u can- compare them do what historians do.