How can we know that whatever was written by someone in history is actually by him and not by someone else?

Question

I was having a conversation with my friend about a historian who wrote about a certain period in my country, but then my friend said “how do you he isnt lying and how do you it is really written by him?” i still cant find a counter argument to this

In: Other

Answer 1

Because of context. Historians studying that author or piece of text can collect a wide range of evidence such as:

– Other sources from different people that corroborate authorship. So if Plato wrote something, and then Aristotle later was like “yeah Plato wrote that,” that’s more evidence that Plato indeed wrote that.

– Consistency in the author’s works. If the writing style is the same, and if the author frequently references ideas/themes from that text in their later works, that’s more evidence that they indeed wrote that text.

– They found the original document in the author’s house/tomb/place they lived/place associated with them. If I open your casket and your skeleton is clutching a “A Treatise on the Human Condition, by /u/PresentationGold9081” then yeah you probably wrote that.

Answer 2

Some documents have more evidence of their validity than others, but at the end of the day, everything you’ve ever read could be false.

Answer 3

You don’t, and there are many disputed documents. In some cases there are accounts from the time that give additional evidence, but some cheating took place in the past.