Complete the account of historical evidence.
What survives is not a random sample but a biased ______. An argument from silence is legitimate only if evidence would likely have survived had the event occurred. And a partisan source is not worthless: it is weak on what happened and strong on what was ______ — which makes bias itself a kind of ______.
Word bank: survivor · believable · evidence · forgery · chronicle
Hints
- Traces survive selectively before they are ever assessed.
- Treating bias as data rather than contamination is the key move.
Show the answer
What survives is not a random sample but a biased survivor. An argument from silence is legitimate only if evidence would likely have survived had the event occurred. And a partisan source is not worthless: it is weak on what happened and strong on what was believable — which makes bias itself a kind of evidence.
Survivor, believable, evidence. Once bias becomes data rather than contamination, the archive stops being a flawed mirror and starts being a rich and answerable source.
Practise The Epistemology of History
The app has 5 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. History I is free to start.
More questions on The Epistemology of History
- A manuscript claiming to be a fifth-century charter mentions a fortress built in the ninth. What kind of…
- Sort each practice: does it belong to objectivity as procedure or to the impossible mirror?
- Because every historian selects and interprets, all historical accounts are equally valid.
- Why is incidental detail, a bill of lading listing the price of pepper, such strong evidence?
- Why does the archive tilt toward the wealthy, literate, and metropolitan?
- Put the three filters in the order they act on the past.