History And Human Sciences

Author: Vesna Bertoncelj

Supervisor: Will Tomford

Session number: 006494-0002

Session: May 2014

Date: March, 2014

Word count: 1.322

History and human sciences are in the title of the essay stated as being contrary. Their tasks are different – history is dealing with past and human sciences are dealing with future. Is differentiation of those two different areas of knowledge really that simple? Or does historian also contribute to future like human sciences? Both areas of knowledge deal with human nature. To what extent do therefore parallel lines between those two areas of knowledge exist? Since there is in every step of the observation of both history and human sciences found bias out of both researcher and objects of observation, how can we extrapolate which knowledge is reliable enough to be used for knowing the past, understanding the present and looking for a change in the future?

A historian provides descriptions of the facts and concepts of the past events and circumstances. His main job is also to interpret the past. He does that through the methodology, for example analysing evidence from multiple sources, evaluating it, eliminating bias sources, filling the gaps with reason and having the ability to make conclusions, but can we even apply our contemporary way of reasoning to past events that we want to understand? Historians tend to be as objective as they can be. And since the past no longer exists, it cannot be changed and is therefore a fixed sense of events, but truthfully it cannot be understood that way. A historian is the one that chooses which event from the past is significant and can therefore choose the object of observation. He often chooses an event according to his emotions which

d. This is just the f...

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...ample artificiality of laboratory environment and ethical considerations, because of which a lot of interesting ideas of conducting an experiment cannot be obtained. Sometimes is also a problem with fallacies like hasty generalization. Can we therefore with reason reliably extrapolate the knowledge obtained in the human sciences into the future?

I may conclude my discussion by saying that both historian’s and human scientist’s tasks are to some extent similar because they all try to understand its area of knowledge. They also wish for the changes in the future, but however, historian does not concretely do this but he only provides the knowledge. The person that obtains the knowledge is the one that may conclude to change the future. History and human sciences also both deal with bias when providing knowledge and may therefore not be as reliable as they should be.