Given access to the same facts, how is it possible for

historians to disagree?
History, what exactly is, History? History is the study of the past through the
interpretation of written documents. Historians exist to draw logical conclusions
from those documents, and make inferences as to what exactly happened in the
past. There is a fundamental problem with the past, and that is that different
individual have differing interpretations of what happened in the past, even if they
are given access to the same knowledge. So, how should we use historical
documents to reliably decipher the past? In other words, which way of knowing is
most important when studying history?
For the purpose of this essay, the two main ways of knowing that are going to
be discussed are Reason and Imagination. These are the two ways of knowing that
are most commonly used in history. Let us first look at reason and why it is
important to the study of history. Reason allows us to build a picture using the
historical documents we have. Through inductive reasoning, we could reasonably
assume that patterns in human behavior, or language would be evident across all of
human history. Through deductive reasoning, we could take pieces of information
and create a new part of history that is still logical. Let us take the example of
Egyptian hieroglyphics. After the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, a stone upon which
the mysterious hieroglyphics were translated into the far more familiar Greek, the
deciphering of this ancient script was a lot easier, as historians had a basis on which
to base their reason. Patterns in the script allow inductive reasoning to work. And
the discovery of the logical basis upon which the language was founded allowed for
better use of deductive reasoning.
However, what would happen if the Rosetta Stone was never found? What
would happen to reason in a world where there is not enough data to support it?
This is where imagination comes in. Imagination is peoples ability to be creative
and come up with new ideas. Historians, with the use of imagination can create a
story and then use the relevant sources to show that it actually happened. The
whole study of history is based on the fact that there is not enough sufficient data
to fully support one view of it, which is where reason tends to fall apart. Returning to
Egyptian hieroglyphics, even after the Rosetta Stone was discovered, historians still
had to use their own imagination as to what each of them meant, reason was not
sufficient to do so.
In conclusion, we see that in history, the two ways of knowing, Reason and
Imagination, are intertwined. Without information, historians can only use
imagination, yet a history created by imagination needs to be supported with logical
reasoning using historical documents. Both ways of knowing are therefore crucial in
history. And as imagination is subjective depending on the person, a world is
created in which different individuals have different perspectives of history.