Truth is a really fraught concept. How do we define it? What is included in a completely truthful historical account and what is not? Obviously historians cannot recapture every possible point of view, all of which are important for historical inquiry. I'd be willing to be that most professional historians try to steer clear of the idea of historical truth.
On the other hand, I think all historians would say that working honestly with both the literature and the evidence is part and parcel to our discipline. History is, always has been, and always will be, an interpretation of the past using evidence and methods available at the time. Available methods and evidence change, and so do interpretations. But intellectual honesty is always striven for.
It is a historian's duty to be swayed by evidence and argument. History is both an evidence and an argument based field. What does that mean? On the one hand, historians are of course bound to the historical evidence they find or have available. The types of sources, ranging from traditional "documents" - archival material, letters, journals - to art, to oral accounts, to all the other kinds of sources that historians use, are very broad and how each of them constitutes evidence and of what exactly they constitute evidence is an ongoing discussion in the field of history.
That is why the second part is equally important to the first, in my opinion. It is not by any means self-evident exactly what historical sources mean. That meaning is very much up for debate. There is not an infinite set of possible meanings for a given source, but there are certainly potentially many. To use an analogy a professor of mine used to use - historians are both detectives and lawyers. We find the evidence, and we argue our case before the court. The evidence doesn't speak for itself, the historian, ultimately, speaks for the evidence.
E. H. Carr famously argued that history was a conversation between the past and the present. This is an important feature of the field of history that also captures the relevance of the analogy in the previous paragraph. Historians are not merely chronicling the past, that is to say creating some kind of comprehensive timeline that tells "the truth" of what happened in the past. Aside from the fact that defining the features and scope of such a timeline would be an impossible task, it also wouldn't tell us much about what that history meant, why it was important, or even, at a basic level, what the past was like.
So historians are certainly ethically and professionally obligated to base their history in verifiable sources. That's why, incidentally, footnoting and citing your sources is drilled into you when taking courses. Ultimately it is about being able to trace someone's evidence and arguments, which inevitably build on the work of other scholars as well. If you want to lose all credibility in the field of history (or any other academic field, frankly), fabricating evidence, failing to give credit to other scholars on whose work your own is based or by which your work is influenced, will quickly have you tossed out of professional life in academia.
Poor arguments might tarnish your reputation among those who disagree. Nonetheless, as long as it is a good faith argument, you are unlikely to face serious professional repercussions for simply not making a very convincing case for your analysis (unless this is a chronic problem).
Setting aside questions of the definition of truth (a point on which I think I'd disagree with a lot of the more usual answers on this sub, but that's an epistemological point), what exactly do you mean by "duty?" What duty does a historian, or any other academic, have? Duty to whom? I don't think many historians think of themselves as being duty-bound much at all--I know I don't, and I think depending on how you phrased it you'd get some raised eyebrows and puzzled looks in a lot of departments
I'd say its their duty not to out right lie. Actually telling objective truths is much harder than that
May i ask your reasoning for this question? I am kinda confused by it.
Of course it is. While they may not find the truth (in fact post modernist would argue, somewhat convincingly, that they never do), it is their duty to be truthful in their intention, to be intellectually honest and shape their argument around the sources they find instead of vice versa. Even if your methodology becomes outdated, and contradictory evidence later comes to light, what matters is that you acted in good faith.
That depends on who you owe the duty to. If it's a university or a research institute, then probably. If it's Stalin or Lysenko, perhaps not.
Not a historian as much as I would like to be (long story) but I do have a BA in world history. It is a historian's duty to do due diligence and cite our sources, to not claim opinion as truth, and thoroughly research before proclaiming a conclusion. I think of historical writing as persuasive writing where you have to back yourself up with real, verifiable sources. We need to convince you with primary sources not conjecture.
To add another angle I haven't seen discussed here yet: there's also something to be said for the value of conjecture and reading sources against the grain as methods to access different historical truths. Some historical truths have forever been lost to us due to circumstance, deliberate erasure, or systematic disenfranchisement.
Historically, the vast majority of people in the history of the world were not able to record their experiences in a permanent way that is still accessible to us. Women, slaves, children, prisoners. There were truths known and experienced by all of these people which we can't and will never know.
Is it historians' job to do our best to piece together these histories, even if it means departing from traditional methodologies? I would argue that it is. Gaps in documentary evidence don't have to mean gaps in history. The very definition of historical "truth" that most of us learn in elementary and undergraduate history is inflected with power and privilege, wealth and literacy being the most prominent factors.
Natalie Zemon Davis's work, particularly The Return of Martin Guerre, is fascinating in this regard. Many other feminist scholars have employed similar methods, especially analyzing court records in an attempt to reconstruct the agency and voice of people who were not able to leave written records. Others, like Monica Green, have made a study of manuscripts as physical objects, and deduced that women often had access to texts in unexpected ways, from the appropriation of their authorial voice to having texts read aloud to them to reading and annotating in the margins.
Does this stray from the strictest definition of "truth"? Certainly. Does it rely heavily on circumstantial evidence and educated conjecture? Of course. But any shred of documentary evidence, from a charter to a journal, has just as much chance of being biased or downright false. In this case, I think a generous definition of truth is worthwhile and necessary to the historical enterprise.
I suppose you could look back to the classical idea of history as example rather than truth, and the general pre-weberian views of history as a discipline but I'm not sure that really holds anywhere modern.
In the modern context historians are expected to base their opinions upon evidential research, but I think laymen underestimate how much theorising goes on in parts of history, particularly in classical history for example. It seems to often be a case of taking what you have and deciding how far you can reasonably stretch it.
Yes, but truth in the same sense that a work of fiction can provided truth. I will avoid the fact versus truth distinction because no one is suggesting that history should be deliberately untruthful and maliciously false. The problem is that people (historians, academics, graduate students) want history practiced in a specific way, usually practices established in the early twentieth century, which would have you believe that history is and can be a hard science. And if you don't subscribe to that notion of history, then somehow you subscribe to some sophistry, postmodernism or critical theory or some other heretical act. This kind of pedagogical coercion tends to lead people to write publishable essays, but essays that are less interesting that 2am infomercials, or a live feed of zoo animals jerking each other off. I define truth in history as the ability of the author to convince the reader their work has some element in it that deserves to be read, that tells them more than A, B, and C happened, distilled in a thesis statement that probably resembles thousands of other, and a section where the author engages in a lengthy masturbatory discussion of the underlying and evolving historiography for the topic and how they have reached a nuanced take that avoids the pitfalls of rival camps in the field. I think this is a low bar, but it seems like graduate students merely turn out a lot of uninspired, so-neutral-and-self-effacing pieces of history that it could be mistaken for a mild sedative likely written by a computer algorithm. Truth, in this sense is pragmatic, simply answering why this topic is worth the time to read and why it matter, or what Woody Allen might call the big so-what.