HSH1000 Chap.11 Sources of Information and How to Weigh Them
Sources of Information and How to Weigh Them
The label belongs to the question
The guide for this week introduces primary, secondary and tertiary sources, and the meeting topic asks how sources of information feature in our reasoning. The phrasing matters: the point is not to file documents into three drawers but to know what a given document can support in a given argument.
A memoir of a revolution is a primary source about its author's account and his position, and a much weaker later source about a meeting he did not attend. Nothing about the document changed between those two sentences; the question did.
The second mistake is treating primary as a synonym for reliable. Primary means close to what is being asked about, not accurate.
A participant can be mistaken, self serving or writing decades later, while a careful scholar with access to many accounts may be closer to the truth. Distance and reliability are two separate axes, and collapsing them produces the confident wrong answer.
Four questions that do the real work
Who produced it and when, which fixes position, access and the gap since the events.
For whom and why, which shapes what was included. What could they actually know, since presence at a war is not access to every part of it. And who else says it, which is where most analyses go wrong, because corroboration only adds weight when the sources are independent.
Three later books resting on the same participant account are one source wearing three covers, and unusually exact agreement is more often a sign of copying than of accuracy.
Positioned does not mean disqualified
Every source is positioned, and a reader who discards positioned sources is left with nothing.
The productive move is to make the position part of the analysis: say what it gives access to that no outside observer could have, and say what it makes invisible. A participant who later felt betrayed has unmatched access to what was promised and expected, and a systematic reason to reconstruct earlier ambiguity as clearer commitment than it was. Both halves of that sentence are usable.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Primary, secondary and tertiary as relations to a question
- 02
Distance and reliability as separate axes
- 03
Provenance: who, when, for whom and why
- 04
What a source was placed to know
- 05
Independence, and why corroboration is often illusory
- 06
Using a position instead of discounting it
One question, four sources, four different jobs
- 1Classify the first memoir against this question and state its limit.
- 1Say what the second memoir adds, and on what condition.
- 1Say what only the scholarly history can answer.
- 1State what the encyclopaedia entry may and may not be used for.
Key terms
- Primary Source
- A source standing in direct relation to the question asked, produced by a participant, at the time, or as part of the thing itself.
- Secondary Source
- Scholarship that interprets primary material, whose value lies in the range it can survey rather than in proximity.
- Tertiary Source
- A compression of secondary work into an overview, excellent for orientation and unusable as support for a contested claim.
- Provenance
- Who produced a source, when, for whom and why, all of which shape what it includes and what it can carry.
- Source Independence
- The condition under which two accounts genuinely corroborate each other, namely that neither derives from the other or from a shared origin.
- Positionality
- The location from which a source speaks, which grants particular access and creates particular blind spots, and which belongs in the analysis rather than outside it.
Sources of Information and How to Weigh Them FAQ
Can the same document be primary and secondary?
Yes, for different questions. A contemporary review is primary evidence about how a work was received and secondary interpretation of the work itself. That is why classification has to be redone for each claim rather than settled once when you find the document.
Does primary mean more trustworthy?
No. It means closer to what you are asking about. A participant can be mistaken or self serving, and a later scholar with many accounts may be closer to the truth. Keeping distance and reliability separate is the single most useful habit in this chapter.
When do three agreeing accounts count as three?
Only when each got the claim independently. Check what each cites: if all three rest on one participant, or two cite the third, you have one source. Be extra suspicious when they agree in unusual detail, because independent recollections of a number normally vary.
Is it fair to use a source I think is biased?
It is usually the right thing to do, provided you say what the position grants and what it hides. Discarding positioned sources leaves nothing, and a stated position turns an apparent weakness into a precise statement about which claims the source can carry.
How does this help with the final project?
The project asks for critical engagement using the course's skills, and saying exactly what a source can and cannot establish demonstrates that in one sentence rather than a paragraph. It is among the cheapest ways to show the skill inside a tight word budget.
Exam move
Build the habit of writing the question above the source list. For any claim you plan to make, write the four provenance questions and answer them in one line each, then a final line naming what the source cannot establish. Practise the reclassification drill too: take one document and find two questions for which it lands in different categories.
That drill is the fastest way to stop thinking of the labels as properties of documents.
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