HISTORY AND SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE
I invite you to join me in reflecting on the role of history in the promotion of scientific knowledge, particularly about man and society. This is an issue about which there is considerable confusion. But I believe that we can cut through some of the confusion and see that history is in fact social science or, at any rate, the future of the social sciences.
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Like the natural sciences, the social sciences are concerned with making possible a systematic explanation of the social world by showing the empirical and logical relations between social "events". However, the social sciences cannot accomplish this task unless they operate with the frame work of historical analysis.
Man, the subject matter of the social sciences, is highly susceptible to change.
Even as a physical object, he changes constantly. But his susceptibility to change is greatly compounded by his psychological and social character. As he feels and thinks, so he adjust his behavior. In his constant interaction with others he recreate himself constantly.
The study of man, social man, must have a temporal dimension. If social man is to be understood at all, he must be understood as a phenomenon in process through time, in short, historically. Again, because because of the constraint on experimentation arising from the peculiar nature of their subject matter, the social sciences rely heavily on trying to find explanatory principles through precise comparisons. Here again, historical time enters as a decisive factor.
since human beings and society are susceptible to change and appear to lack the uniformity of physical objects and to develop in an autonomous manner, our options for 'generalising them are severely limited.
We are largely confined to comparing them at different points in time and stage of evolution; we cannot afford anchoring social science scholarship on historical and developmental analysis.
As a matter of fact, they need to situate scientific investigation in the developmental and historical context arises for the natural sciences also, although it is admittedly less compelling. We do not really fully understand something without knowing it 'natural history', without knowing how it has come be what it is. In world in which change is ubiquitous, we cannot accept experience merely in its immediacy, or as a determination which is fully formed and not referable to any process of development. that will be the very negation of the idea of science.
When science predicts, it does not have knowledge of the future as such, but only of a present that has already passed.
Our scientific knowledge is the knowledge of this passing present from which we are also able to derive knowledge of the 'natural history' of phenomena.
in a world of change and flux, we are obliged to try to understand phenomena in process, and ultimately in terms of their laws of motion.
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