Importance Of A Historian's Task To Understand The Past

“A historian’s task is to understand the past; the human scientist, by contrast, is looking to change the future”. To what extent is this true in these areas of knowledge?

A historian is a person, who studies about the past through analyzing events using material written down at the time of a particular event, through archeology and through witnesses of past events. Then by, analyzing the past events, a historian is looking to make us know what, when, why and how that event occurred and what where the implications.

While on the other hand, human scientists are individuals who study human behavior in relation to his/her environment through scientific research and try to device ways through which human well-being can be advanced. To human scientists the present is more important compared to historians who consider the past as their major concern.

A historian is tasked to understand the past in the sense that they want to make us know what really took place at the time of a particular event, so they go to archives, to study the objects left behind. They want us to know what these objects mean and the implications of these objects for example when they come across a human bone which has been dug up by archeologists, they study such evidences to know the origin of the object, how it came about, when and the reasons behind its existence. However, they are faced with limitations of interpreting such evidence due to individual understanding, which might contradict to the real evidence and sometimes such evidence may contradict the written down material from other historians. There is a big gap to fill when such evidence cannot be conclusive to a story a historian wants to tell, so can we really understand the past given such loopholes? ...

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...he past to get answers about the future. This contradicts the above title that a human scientists concern is only about the future because without past knowledge on for example the geography, the economy and human behavior, a human scientist is not able to empirically understand human sciences.

All in all to state that historians are only concerned with the past is not completely true, they not only study the past for us to understand what happened in the past but they are looking to make us understand our history while at the same time know what the future will hold. But again to state that human scientists are only concerned with understanding the future is also a misleading statement because the future cannot be understood till we have actually witnessed it. However it helps to assume what the future might hold rather than leave it to chance.

By yash Dawda

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