Exile, I won't debate the issue further, becase you and I just get too intense about what we believe, and I have offended too many here already. I think we are both right from different perspectives, but I am not as skilled as some in conveying the proper tone as I do in person. Anyhow here is a link as to why I am not as confident in peer-reviewed material as you are.
http://advan.physiology.org/cgi/content/full/31/2/145
Respects, and take care
Chief Master D.J. Eisenhart
But look,
of course peer review is no guarantee of infallibility—who could believe it was? In the same way that vaccination against flu is no guarantee that you won't get flu, or—maybe a better analogy—a screening test for a particular cancer does not guarantee that you don't have that type of cancer. The point is not that peer-review guarantees truth, but that it minimizes the chance of fallacy, misattribution, empirical errors and so on.
I spend many hours every academic year as a referee for a number of major publications in my own field. And most of my colleagues do as well. Our purpose in doing so is to try to make sure that what goes 'on the record' is as well-supported as it can be. But a much greater amount of stuff than I'd like that I think is dead wrong, or at least very questionable, still gets published. No process can guarantee truth, but peer review minimizes the chance that flagrant error will creep into the final product. Every time I read something in a top-level journal that I think has serious problems, my response is, just picture what it would be like without the vetting that peer review provides.
Now the people who have written on the subject, many of them both historical scholars and well-trained MAs with advanced rank (so please, let's not have any of this 'they may know history but they don't know TKD' kind of dismissal; Manuel Adrogué, who is has one of the strongest positions on the whole issue, is a fifth-dan TKD under a Korean Gm., and I very much doubt his next dan promotion will cause him to embrace a Three Kingdoms lineage for TKD) have produced translations of crucial documents—of which there are in fact very few bearing on the issue; there are, e.g., literally
no actual
descriptions of any KMA technical content, what people are actually doing, until the 14th century—and identified key players and ethnographic and historical sources contemporary with the various practices they refer to, as well as reviewing Chinese and Japanese sources, in the original language of these records, and bringing them to bear on the Korean-internal evidence. And they have professional knowledge of the background history of the Asian societies and cultures to which the MAs belong. Does this guarantee that they are correct? How could it
guarantee that, and who ever said it did?? What it does guarantee is that every submission is held up to scrutiny by a group of people who have professional competence in the area and are—if I and my colleagues are typical, which we are—happy to explain in detail just where the submission has gone wrong, why so-and-so is ignoring a crucial bit of evidence that invalidates his or her assumption in arguing such and such a point, and so on. Factual claims that are unsupported by demonstrable evidence proportional to the strength of those claims are red-circled and nixed: if you can't provide a ground of empirical support, you don't get the make the claim. That's what distinguishes scholarly history from, say, the approved Korean government line on the history of TKD. The submission will be corrected or revised to answer the objections raised; if that can't be done, the submission simply doesn't appear. (Editors are also charged with the task of correcting for biased refereeing, and the ones who last in their jobs do that task very well, so checks and balances are in place in the established journals which academic institutions agree are the 'A' list publications in each field, the ones that are make-or-break for tenure and promotion, in the normal course of things.) What does appear in print has been given a major acid test (based on the facts and reasoning presented, with the reputation or academic rank or whatever playing no role in the double-blind reviewing process), and no significant flaws have emerged. Anyone who wants to dispute the results had better be able to emerge unscathed from a pretty stern going-over at the same level of critical intensity.
That's the point of peer review.
Your heart surgery or lung biopsy reflects this same process of peer review in the medical profession (where it started, as I indicated in a prior post). It is state of the art, precisely because what comes out in medical research journals today, surviving the hardest vetting that can be brought to bear, is what determines how operations are conducted and diseases diagnosed tomorrow. Which would you prefer: subjecting yourself to a life/death medical situation where the procedure reflected the state of current knowledge based on peer reviewed research, or a procedure based on unattributed echoes of 'common knowledge' and preconceptions, without any effort to sort sound results from sloppiness, fraudulent data-creation, or the
idées fixes of people with agendas to push? The whole point of peer review is that it weeds out as much error as possible; it does not guarantee that no error remains.
The
Journal of Asian Martial Arts rejects 90% of its submissions. This in itself doesn't guarantee that the conclusions of the people who've published on this topic in
JAMA have to be right; what it does suggest, extremely strongly, is that no challenge to their conclusions that hasn't passed the same level of intense scrutiny can have remotely the same credibility that their conclusions do. That's the whole intention of peer review: get the strongest result possible, and thereby force the level of the argumentation and debate that undergirds all progress in any field to the highest level possible. We know vastly more than we knew a thousand years ago because, repeatedly, ideas competed (in spite of powerful organization's efforts to impose a 'party line' on the field of inquiry) and the ones which tested out best—which met the canon of evidence better than their competitors—were adopted as the threshold for further thinking. Peer review has come to play an indispensible part of that process in the contemporary era. In the case of the point at issue, and the historical scholars I've cited in presenting my case, the burden of proof is on anyone who wishes to challenge their conclusions to show support for an alternative story—based on either new data or a more plausible interpretation of old data (as vs. a series of
what if...? what if...? caveats that themselves have no independent motivation)—which passes the same level of scrutiny that their work has. So far, nothing that has been presented here on MT, or in the propaganda mills of the Korean TKD directorate or its American branch plants (the USA Taekwondo site I linked to earlier) has even begun to do that.
Anyone who wants to evaluate my last statement can simply go to the sources I've cited, and read them, and compare the work of people like Young, Capener, Burdick, Henning, Adrogué—and the others I've provided citations for—to the arguments that have been adduced in support of a generation-to-generation link between ancient KMAs (whose technical content, so far as empty-hand techs we still have no clue about, other than that, as Henning stresses, they were almost certainly heavily CMA-based) and modern TKD. Read the arguments on both sides, compare the strength, authenticity and explicitness of the evidence, the verifiability of the reasoning presented, and make up your own mind.
What is this 'history book', who is the author, what is the date, and whose interpolation is the name taekyon at that point in the text? Is it in the book? An editorial comment by the KKW publicist who wrote the cited piece? Who knows? And in either case, what is the KKW's story based on? The fact that a given source that you cite says X is not in itself any better evidence than you yourself citing it, if neither you nor your source can provide the evidence base. Here, one person is citing someing written by another person, who in turn is appealing to something allegedly written by someone else... and at no point do we actually have an evidence, based on either material culture, or earlier documentation based on the firsthand experience of someone who was eminently in a position to know, letters, or memoirs of participants in the events under consideration, or... any of the primary materials of well-supported history...
