Skepticism And Historical Revisionism

Even if all the historical documentation in the world agreed perfectly and was without any ambiguity in terms of what the evidence itself points to in all cases, no one would be justified in believing that a single war, ruler, or other part of the historical information truly corresponds to past events.  This unity is not the state of the evidence, however, making it even more fallacious when people believe they know not just evidences but the events themselves.  Claims of historicity and historical revisionism are even largely irrelevant to matters of true importance, such as what can be proven, how one should live, and the foundations of epistemology and metaphysics.

This still leaves us with a plethora of historical information in the form of documents, excavations, and oral traditions that can be examined rationalistically so that willing people can see what the evidence does and does not suggest about the past.  When a person insists on an alternate stance on what has probably happened in history, if that alternate stance conflicts with the evidence, it could be legitimately called historical revisionism.  Oftentimes, though, the charge of historical revisionism is thrown around when someone truly believes that an event did not happen with what seems to be absolute certainty, something that historical documentation does not come anywhere near providing.

If a person makes a claim about history that contradicts the evidence or has nothing to do with what the evidence addresses, they are guilty of misrepresenting the evidence, yes.  It is also true that anyone standing in opposition to this who goes beyond believing that the evidence points away from their stance to belief that the exact events can be known is guilty or misrepresenting the nature of the evidence.  Both have committed inverse errors, but both have fallen for ideas that do not logically follow from any conceptual truth or sensory evidences.  Even though both might object, they care more about random assumptions and preferences than they do about historical truth.

One simply cannot prove that a claim truly distorts a historical event itself just because the claim is contrary to the historical evidence.  One can prove that certain ideas about historical events differ from what actual evidence (and I mean primary sources as opposed to the secondary sources that sometimes follow them) supports, but there is still an insurmountable epistemological gap between evidence that a certain figure existed or that a certain war happened and actual proof.  Historical revisionism, then, is only a non-hypocritical charge when the accuser is not assuming anything one way or another about the historicity of a particular person or chain of occurrences.

Knowing alleged information about historical events as stated in documents or suggested by archeological remnants and knowing whether or not entire events like wars ever took place are not the same matter.  As such, the rationalistic skepticism of historical documents--a skepticism that does not insist the events did not happen, but that they cannot be known to have happened with absolute certainty--has ramifications for how historical revisionism is understood.  The belief would not be "look at how history is being denied," but "the evidences for certain historical events are being distorted."  There is actually an enormous difference between these two stances on historical revisionism.  In fact, only the latter is valid as an epistemological position because it is all that can be proven.