Source criticism


Source criticism is the process of evaluating an information source, i.e.: a document, a person, a speech, a fingerprint, a photo, an observation, or anything used in order to obtain knowledge. In relation to a given purpose, a given information source may be more or less valid, reliable or relevant. Broadly, "source criticism" is the interdisciplinary study of how information sources are evaluated for given tasks.

Meaning

Problems in translation: The Danish word kildekritik, like the Norwegian word kildekritikk and the Swedish word källkritik, derived from the German Quellenkritik and is closely associated with the German historian Leopold von Ranke. Historian wrote:

His first work Geschichte der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494-1514 was a great success. It already showed some of the basic characteristics of his conception of Europe, and was of historiographical importance particularly because Ranke made an exemplary critical analysis of his sources in a separate volume, Zur Kritik neuerer Geschichtsschreiber. In this work he raised the method of textual criticism used in the late eighteenth century, particularly in classical philology to the standard method of scientific historical writing.

Historical theorist Chris Lorenz wrote:

The larger part of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would be dominated by the research-oriented conception of historical method of the so-called Historical School in Germany, led by historians as Leopold Ranke and Berthold Niebuhr. Their conception of history, long been regarded as the beginning of modern, 'scientific' history, harked back to the 'narrow' conception of historical method, limiting the methodical character of history to source criticism.

In the early 21st century, source criticism is a growing field in, among other fields, library and information science. In this context source criticism is studied from a broader perspective than just, for example, history, classical philology, or biblical studies.

Principles

The following principles are from two Scandinavian textbooks on source criticism, written by the historians Olden-Jørgensen and Thurén :
  • Human sources may be relics or narratives. Relics are more credible sources than narratives.
  • A given source may be forged or corrupted; strong indications of the originality of the source increases its reliability.
  • The closer a source is to the event which it purports to describe, the more one can trust it to give an accurate description of what really happened
  • A primary source is more reliable than a secondary source, which in turn is more reliable than a tertiary source and so on.
  • If a number of independent sources contain the same message, the credibility of the message is strongly increased.
  • The tendency of a source is its motivation for providing some kind of bias. Tendencies should be minimized or supplemented with opposite motivations.
  • If it can be demonstrated that the witness has no direct interest in creating bias, the credibility of the message is increased.
Two other principles are:
  • Knowledge of source criticism cannot substitute for subject knowledge:

"Because each source teaches you more and more about your subject, you will be able to judge with ever-increasing precision the usefulness and value of any prospective source. In other words, the more you know about the subject, the more precisely you can identify what you must still find out"..

  • The reliability of a given source is relative to the questions put to it.
"The empirical case study showed that most people find it difficult to assess questions of cognitive authority and media credibility in a general sense, for example, by comparing the overall credibility of newspapers and the Internet. Thus these assessments tend to be situationally sensitive. Newspapers, television and the Internet were frequently used as sources of orienting information, but their credibility varied depending on the actual topic at hand".

The following questions are often good ones to ask about any source according to the American Library Association and Engeldinger :
  1. How was the source located?
  2. What type of source is it?
  3. Who is the author and what are the qualifications of the author in regard to the topic that is discussed?
  4. When was the information published?
  5. In which country was it published?
  6. What is the reputation of the publisher?
  7. Does the source show a particular cultural or political bias?
For literary sources complementing criteria are:
  1. Does the source contain a bibliography?
  2. Has the material been reviewed by a group of peers, or has it been edited?
  3. How does the article/book compare with similar articles/books?

    Levels of generality

Some principles of source criticism are universal, other principles are specific for certain kinds of information sources.
There is today no consensus about the similarities and differences between source criticism in the natural science and humanities. Logical positivism claimed that all fields of knowledge were based on the same principles. Much of the criticism of logical positivism claimed that positivism is the basis of the sciences, whereas hermeneutics is the basis of the humanities. This was, for example, the position of Jürgen Habermas. A newer position, in accordance with, among others, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Thomas Kuhn, understands both science and humanities as determined by researchers' preunderstanding and paradigms. Hermeneutics is thus a universal theory. The difference is, however, that the sources of the humanities are themselves products of human interests and preunderstanding, whereas the sources of the natural sciences are not. Humanities are thus "doubly hermeneutic".
Natural scientists, however, are also using human products which are products of preunderstanding.

Contributing fields

Epistemology

Epistemological theories are the basic theories about how knowledge is obtained and are thus the most general theories about how to evaluate information sources.
  • Empiricism evaluates sources by considering the observations on which they are based. Sources without basis in experience are not seen as valid.
  • Rationalism provides low priority to sources based on observations. In order to be meaningful, observations must be explained by clear ideas or concepts. It is the logical structure and the well definedness that is in focus in evaluating information sources from the rationalist point of view.
  • Historicism evaluates information sources on the basis of their reflection of their sociocultural context and their theoretical development.
  • Pragmatism evaluate sources on the basis of how their values and usefulness to accomplish certain outcomes. Pragmatism is skeptical about claimed neutral information sources.
The evaluation of knowledge or information sources cannot be more certain than is the construction of knowledge. If one accepts the principle of fallibilism then one also has to accept that source criticism can never 100% verify knowledge claims. As discussed in the next section, source criticism is intimately linked to scientific methods.
The presence of fallacies of argument in sources is another kind of philosophical criterion for evaluating sources. Fallacies are presented by Walton. Among the fallacies are the ad hominem fallacy and the straw man fallacy

Research methodology

Research methods are methods used to produce scholarly knowledge. The methods that are relevant for producing knowledge are also relevant for evaluating knowledge. An example of a book that turns methodology upside-down and uses it to evaluate produced knowledge is Katzer; Cook & Crouch.

Science studies

Studies of quality evaluation processes such as peer review, book reviews and of the normative criteria used in evaluation of scientific and scholarly research. Another field is the study of scientific misconduct.
Harris provides a case study of how a famous experiment in psychology, Little Albert, has been distorted throughout the history of psychology, starting with the author himself, general textbook authors, behavior therapists, and a prominent learning theorist. Harris proposes possible causes for these distortions and analyzes the Albert study as an example of myth making in the history of psychology. Studies of this kind may be regarded a special kind of reception history. It may also be regarded as a kind of critical history. Such studies are important for source criticism in revealing the bias introduced by referring to classical studies.

Textual criticism

Textual criticism is a part of philology, which is not just devoted to the study of texts, but also to edit and produce "scientific editions", "scholarly editions", "standard editions", "historical editions", "reliable editions", "reliable texts", "text editions" or "critical editions", which are editions in which careful scholarship has been employed to ensure that the information contained within is as close to the author's/composer's original intentions as possible. The relation between these kinds of works and the concept "source criticism" is evident in Danish, where they may be termed "kildekritisk udgave".
In other words, it is assumed that most editions of a given works is filled with noise and errors provided by publishers, why it is important to produce "scholarly editions". The work provided by text philology is an important part of source criticism in the humanities.

Psychology

The study of eyewitness testimony is an important field of study used, among other purposes, to evaluate testimony in courts. The basics of eyewitness fallibility includes factors such as poor viewing conditions, brief exposure, and stress. More subtle factors, such as expectations, biases, and personal stereotypes can intervene to create erroneous reports. Loftus discuss all such factors and also shows that eyewitness memory is chronically inaccurate in surprising ways. An ingenious series of experiments reveals that memory can be radically altered by the way an eyewitness is questioned after the fact. New memories can be implanted and old ones unconsciously altered under interrogation.
Anderson and Anderson & Pichert reported an elegant experiment demonstrating how change in perspective affected people's ability to recall information that was unrecallable from another perspective.
In psychoanalysis the concept of defence mechanism is important and may be considered a contribution to the theory of source criticism because it explains psychological mechanisms, which distort the reliability of human information sources.