217;s parents thrive so much of the historical knowledge Mark offers because these “facts” sharpen their stories and add an element of realness and truth to their memories. At one particular point in the book Baker uses the archives to fill in his fathers prayers regarding Leib Bikiermaszyn’s details. The archives give details regarding his full name, place and date of birth and the date of his death. Such documented details offer a sense of unambiguous truth to history, as they do not allow for any interpretation, thus suggesting that certain documentations to some extent are objective. Although much of history is partially subjective due to its basis on subjective evidence, if a historical statement is well supported by abundant evidence, and much better supported than any alternative account, then the statement can be reasonably accepted as very probably true. For instance, it is by and large undisputed that in 1933 the Nazi party took power in Germany and Adolf Hitler became the chancellor, or prime minister of Germany. Such statements as this, although to a certain extent open to elements of subjectivity, due to the abundance of well supported evidence surrounding them they are generally seen to be objective.No description of the world can be completely independent of its’ authors point of view, however this does not mean that descriptions of the world can not tell us anything objective about it. The historian C.B. McCallagh has developed what he calls the ‘correlation theory’. The correlation theory says that, “a description of the world is true if there is something in the world that resembles one of the conventional truth conditions of the description.” For example it is true and objective to say that a river runs through Melbourne if there really is something in the world that resembles a-river-running-through-Melbourne. There are a number of problems with the correlation theory...
