Tok Essay

Submitted By Jorge Alberto-Villar
Words: 1249
Pages: 5
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"There historian's task is to understand the past; the human scientist, by contrast, is looking to change the future." To what extent is this true in these areas of knowledge?

(Words: 1235)

Throughout the evolution of mankind, there have been events that don't favor progress, but instead, it tends to destroy the things we construct such as the wars that occurred in different points in time. The development of fixing these mistakes has been evolved and improved through time in complex ways for the sole purpose to create a better future. People who pay more attention on the past events are the historians, which their main purpose is to analyze and understand the past taking into account the written evidence. History considers truth to be the evidence of events that occurred in a past time, which serves as a base to understand mistakes that can be improved later. History is a type of knowledge that is based on the theoretical, which means that in order for a good historian to understand the past must join all of the pieces so he can create a good memory (the past can only be studied through documents); however, the human scientist is looking to change the future in a more pragmatic way, because in order to solve human issues, he must use the imagination to create new ways so that these problems get solved easily.

The main method a historian needs to perform in order to recreate this memory, he must verify that this information is true. For example: In the analysis of the second world war, since Russia was the one that placed the flag in Germany when it was defeated, they had the right to write the story; however, Russia wrote it as their point of view that implicated lots of hidden information. Historians must search different archives in order to verify if this information given was true or false. The same thing happened to me when I’m researching to do my Extended Essay, when a certain topic is Googled, we tend to always search for the top three pages. There must be verification, because to state important facts, there has to be a use of minimum of six different sites so that this information can be declared as something legitimate.

If we take a look at truth on both of these areas, there is a large difference between what is right by a historian or by a human scientist. For a historian, the truth is to recover the patterns of belief that prevailed in past societies, while the human scientist must analyze the beliefs of the past so in the future, there could be explanations that serve as a solution for this mystery. Let’s state again the second world war, an approach of a historian towards this event would be that there was a lot of advantages, thanks to the evolution of technology that this war brought, another advantage would be that there was a boost in the economy trying to get more resources; however, the human scientist would be against these wars, because it only brings harm to other human beings which tends to divide the civilization. If we take a look at anthropology for example, it would have hated this event, because even though it studies the nature of human kind and why we establish differences in cultures, there is not a justification for a war to occur just because of an economical advantage. The general problems that history has is that by looking at truth, it is based on the past evidence, which can be subject to change over time that makes the truth previously known turn into a lie. This creates a never ending loop between truth and lie since it’s subject to change. On the other hand, human science also presents a problem that is since its discussed by a large group of people, the result tends to be different for every person (different points of view), creating a large source of unreliability.

In the areas of human science, the main interest is to develop the imagination in a very pragmatic way. Any topic that a human scientist studies, must have an application in order to be used as an
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