I'll be happy to explain it to you.
First off, it's interesting to note that the man's profession is History teacher because there is an important point to be made about the nature of facts and historical knowledge that no one in the movie addresses (and I would think that the Archeology and Anthropology guys would at least bring it up but they didn't).
History is the shakiest subject when it comes to truth because we really have no means of absolutely verifying whether anything actually happened. We have some writers who said stuff happened that we can corroborate with real evidence ie: writer says a battle took place at certain place and time, we go and look and find evidence proving the writer's claims, but other than that we really have no objective means of truly evaluating most history.
This is compounded by the fact that history wasn't really considered an investigative science in the past, but rather a form of literature or drama (the classical genres of theatre are comedies, tragedies and histories). The Romans, for instance, weren't interested in the facts, they were interested in the best story, so their writers were encouraged to dress up their histories with as much sensationalism as possible that would make their accounts more evocative. It was these accounts that usually passed into history as truth (which is why nearly every Roman writer was pro-Senate and often depicted the Imperial Family as a bunch of backstabbing, duplicitous spoiled powermongers, which they probably were, but not to the soap opera extent that every writer portrayed them as).
This is what we have to accept today: That every surviving record is very likely the Fox News equivalent of Roman history. In other words, partially based on truth, but probably not even close to being accurate. Imagine future historians 1000 years from now relying on Fox News archives to learn about Obama's Presidency and you start to see the problem.
History wasn't really regarded as an investigative science until the Enlightenment.
In the context of the movie, what the History teacher should've done as a final argument is present the nature of "truth" and how we can't really know anything true for certain, revealing the whole discussion as a demonstration of the futility of truth claims. He can do this by introducing the problem of Munchausen's Trilemma: How to solve the age-old philosophical riddle of "How do you know it's true?" There are three ways to approach this question and neither of them are logically sound:
1) The circular argument: We know it's true because it's true.
2) The regressive argument: We know it's true because of evidence A, and we know that's true because of evidence B, and we know that's true because of evidence C, etc... ad infinitum turtles all the way down.
3) The Axiomatic argument: We know it's true based on bedrock assumptions that aren't wrong.
Now, nobody likes the circular argument because it's a tautalogy that allows for bad reasoning. And everyone finds the regressive argument unsatisfactory because it can't reach any definite conclusions. But the axiomatic argument is the worst: It fails to critically analyze its own assumptions which is just lazy. If something is true based on certain axioms, then where did THEY come from?
This trilemma is not solvable and philosophers have been arguing about it for centuries. No, don't even try. Down a lonely road of solipsism this thinking lies.
Because of the problem of verifying truth, the History teacher's claims themselves aren't solvable. It would have been more fair if it was left ambiguous whether he was telling the truth or not. But the movie kept feeding the audience evidence that confirmed his story and it didn't need to do that. It would've been much more creepy and thought-provoking if the characters -- and the audience -- were forced to rely on his testimony alone.
Alas, the movie took the angle of "this is all true" when what it should've done is advance the angle of "how do you know this is true?"
And that's the point of the discussion, both during the movie and after.
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anthonymarshall
10 years ago
Thanks for explaining this.
So, the message that this movie is trying to convey is, we cannot truly verify anything that happened prior to around two hundred years ago as being historically absolutely accurate, because humans didn't have the adequate means to document these events accurately. e.g We didn't have video recording technology back then.
We should always leave room for doubt.
It always bugs me how historians, anthropologists, and even to some extent, scientists, that they talk about an historic event as if there is no shadow of doubt that it's true. Instead of saying 'this IS what happened' they should always say 'this is what possibly happened'
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me-1523
10 years ago
The past only exists to us in two locations: Memories and records.
Memories only go back about 50 years or so. As soon as a generation dies off, there is no means of finding a living witness to any given event.
To go back further, we rely on records. It doesn't matter whether the records are books, scrolls, papyrus, parchment, stone, magnetic tape, digital hard drives, microfiche, film, radio, television or any format you can think of -- they are all mutable. They can be changed, altered, edited, distorted, faked or destroyed altogether.
And we know this HAS been done throughout history, from the Ancient Egyptians' attempt to annihilate the reign of Hetshepsut (obviously they didn't succeed otherwise we wouldn't have known about her) to the political purges of Stalin's Russia that vaporized whole classes of peoples.
We have names of iron age tribes that we never would have known existed if the Romans hadn't told us they existed until they didn't. But since the only source we have are the Romans, who knows how much they embellished their conquests.
So yeah: History is extremely fragile and it is infinitely mutable. It's one of the themes of Orwell's 1984, that if you control the memories and create the records, then you ARE the de facto history. You can make it be whatever you want and no one in the future can dispute you.
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WhoToTrust
10 years ago
by me-1523 - ...First off, it's interesting to note that the man's profession is History teacher because there is an important point to be made about the nature of facts and historical knowledge that no one in the movie addresses (and I would think that the Archeology and Anthropology guys would at least bring it up but they didn't)...
...In the context of the movie, what the History teacher should've done as a final argument is present the nature of "truth" and how we can't really know anything true for certain, revealing the whole discussion as a demonstration of the futility of truth claims...
But the archaeology and anthropology guys DID bring it up, or at least make a quick reference along those lines.
It happens after the psychologist arrives in the following exchange:
Dan/Anthropologist: "Our friend is either a caveman, a liar, or a nut, so while we're thinking about that, why don't we just go with it. I mean hell, who knows, he might jolt us into believing him, or we might jolt him back to reality."
Edith/Art Historian: "Believe him?"
Art/Archaeologist: "Whose reality?"
Admittedly, it WAS a quick exchange, but the question was at least posed.
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srj-elmi
9 years ago
Great replies, really enjoyed reading this post and thankful that you delivered the Orwell's 1984 reference.
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EuropeanMoviesFan
9 years ago
Good post, mate. Thank you for taking the time to explain. Excellent movie by the way, in my opinion.
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