“The 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?

The study of history and human science has been divided into separate disciplines, but in reality they each consist of shared knowledge, which is beneficial in both the study and practice of those fields. Human scientists are primarily concerned with understanding human experience and employ a large variety of methods and information in order to theorize about societies and make predictions about their future. However, human scientists cannot create laws about the actions of society without historical context and knowledge. Knowing how a culture or society has attached meaning to past experiences inevitably affects the prediction of their present and future thoughts, feelings, and actions. Both the historian and the human scientist have roles in explaining how people view themselves and their culture, which can change how those people address the future. Although historians focus on the past, their interpretations of it are often relevant to issues that people still face today and their conclusions reflect contemporary perceptions of events and people that have created the canon of human history. Human scientists often use historical evidence to validate their claims about the future and they rely on many of the same methodologies and logical reasoning that also governs historical writing. Although human scientists take a more direct approach to influencing the modern world and its future, it is difficult for them to make accurate predictions about human behavior because it is extremely subjective and there are many variables. Therefore they must seek out patterns from the past in order to recognize trends in modern society. In this way the human scientist must also understand the past before he can affect change in the future.

In order to determine the extent to which human scientists can affect future change, we must understand their methods as well as how they apply their research. According to Wilhelm Dilthey, a German historian, psychologist and philosopher of the nineteenth century, human science is, “intended to aid all those whose lifework is devoted to society”in coming to know how their guiding principles and rules relate to the encompassing reality of human society.” In his Introduction to the Human Sciences, Dilthey proposed that the task of human science is to understand human life and its” history. He believed this could be accomplished by self-reflection reliant upon life experiences as well as historical context, and that this alone was enough to generate both thought and action. Donald Polkinghorne pointed out that if researchers were to base their findings solely on the life in and around them, their work would be limited to that small scope. This is one reason that simply philosophizing about human experience cannot be the only method for understanding those experiences as they relate to the grander scheme of society and culture. In order to address this both Dilthey and Polkinghorne express the importance of history to the study and practices of the human scientist.

Polkinghorne also explains that the tools of human scientists must necessarily include, “observation, logical reasoning, comparison, classification, abstraction, hypothesis framing and testing, and analysis by means of statistical techniques.” However, the use of purely empirical knowledge can have too many disadvantages, which make it difficult for human scientists to propose laws in the same way that natural science does. Systems of measuring and experimenting with human experience or social phenomena are rife with fallacies and are often limited to specific groups, such as men or women, race, or ethnicity. There is no way to measure a person”s thoughts and we cannot observe what is in the mind of another human being. Questionnaires and polls often contain bias and can be misleading on their own. And as anthropologists often argue, simply observing people can alter the way they behave to the extent that accurate data cannot be collected.

Experiments can be performed to make broad assertions about behavior and the meanings attached to it, but when studying complex social or cultural issues there are many limitations due to moral qualms and legal concerns that constrain experimentation. Because of these problems and the subjective nature of explanations about human behavior”s meaning and purpose the human sciences lack the explicatory power of the natural sciences. This is not to say that the assertions made by human scientists are not logical or reliable, but certainly it places limitations on their scope of usefulness and allows others perceive them as fallible. According to The Norton History of the Human Sciences, human scientists have historically debated their approaches to examining human experience, stating, “There are deep divisions between those who take human nature to be given by biology and those who consider it to be the product of culture continually recreated through reflective language.” In Donald Polkinghorne”s book, Methodology for the Human Sciences: Systems of Inquiry, he explained that researchers are unable to obtain “purity of knowledge” because they inevitable assert their own “local organizing themes” onto their sources or the “expressions of life,” which might include art, literature, or any opinions about nature and life.

This means their analysis is never completely objective, no matter how much they strive to be, because they will always insert their own systems of thought and understanding unto their work. In order to separate their work from being simply philosophy, human scientists approach understanding of human phenomena by acknowledging both sensory and psychological experience as well as the use of empirical data or knowledge. To what extent is largely dependent upon the human scientist”s discretion and his approach to the human sciences. The variety through which human scientists” methodology operates allows for a less strict analysis, rather than merely explaining phenomena, as the natural sciences do, human scientists must explicate the meaning of phenomena that relates to human life and experience. In order to do this, human scientists must address the wealth of human experience and phenomena that the past provides as a supplement to empirical knowledge and other work from the humanities field, as well as mathematics and economics. This means that human scientists have a great wealth of information to use when they make assertions about human nature or social experiences, and their work can potentially reveal trends in cultures that were not formerly recognized. Everyone considers the meaning of life, but human scientists attempt to understand how that meaning has been understood through the generations and across different cultures.

Their work has the potential to greatly alter the way civilization views its beliefs, values, and traditions. However, it is not necessarily their aim to affect direct change to that society by altering the patterns that they recognize. They may provide an elevated sense of self-awareness about oneself and the human world around them, which as Dilthey believed, is enough to promote individual thought and action. But to what extent an individual will be moved by this knowledge is impossible to know. Therefore it is impossible to know the extent to which human scientists can alter the path to the future, but it is clear that their aims are to help people understand themselves and others and the human constructs that we all live in. Knowing the reality of society, past and present, is always beneficial to the practices of those like politicians, educators, and doctors, who will directly impact the lives of others and the culture that surrounds and defines our experiences. In this way the human scientist could certainly change the future, in the same way Karl Marx impacted the thoughts of middle class workers in industrial nations by theorizing that oppression of the laborer was inherent to capitalist culture and the greed of human nature. His theories impacted other philosophers, politicians, and a wide variety of social movements occurred in the wake of his writings. He is proof that pondering the human condition and phenomena and theorizing about its impacts on people”s lives can have profound effect on society and how people feel and act.

Historians are certainly concerned with the past, and they too utilize a wide variety of evidence to support their assertions and interpretations of the meaning of human actions and phenomena. They draw conclusions from careful examination of artifacts that range in variety from art to science and economics. Historians also address philosophical and psychological developments that have altered the perceptions of how people view themselves and the reality of the human world around them by explaining events and actions based on evidence for those systems of belief. Historians do not simply list chronological events. As Martha C. Howell and Walter Prevenier wrote in their book From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods, “history has no existence before it is written.” This is indicative of the subjective nature of historical theorizing, which cannot know the past but can only interpret the artifacts that contribute to our understanding of it. Much like the human scientist who must strive to remain objective, historians too must attempt to write about the past without placing their own bias or life constructs into their own interpretations. This is why historians have developed a strict method of relying upon logical reasoning and methodically representing the sources from which they draw conclusions. Because the sources from the past are often out of reach physically, historians cannot rely on sensory perceptions to draw conclusions. The use of logic and reason is paramount to determine significance and make connections between the varieties of evidences they possess. Historians often use systems of analysis concerned with causality and change, and how to explain their evolutions.

But rather than proposing laws about human nature and action that govern their interpretations, historians try to remain objective and consider the limitations of their sources” ability to inform them about distant and sometimes extinct cultures. Because historians do not deliberately define human experience does not mean they do not take into consideration the human condition when analyzing sources from the past, especially those sources that require such explication to justify the proposed feelings or motivations of actors in history. Dilthey claimed that history has “no philosophical foundation” because “its study and evaluation of historical phenomena remain unconnected with the analysis of facts of consciousness.” He further asserted that this was the reason history had no “explanatory method” and could not “exert any influence on life.” However, historians do make critiques based on the philosophical and scientific beliefs held by the people in question and they consider how those aspects of thought affected people, situations, and events. And many historians attempt to “look to the past for lessons about the present ” negative or positive.” If this is so then historians can influence thought and action just as easily as the human scientist, although without making certain assertions about what those changes may be. Nonetheless it seems that human sciences and history methods are quite similar and the human scientist is heavily reliant upon historical analysis. For this reason I believe that both the historian and human scientist can affect the future, if not directly.

Historians and human scientists each draw from historical analysis and sources, and they share the same reliance upon ethical consideration and logical reasoning. They must each extend their work to include other areas of the humanities as well as mathematics, statistics, and economics. This wide range of resources gives each extreme flexibility but also allows for doubt and scrutiny of their conclusions because they are not always provable and considerably probabilistic. Because both the historian and social scientist writes about human life, experience, and their constructions, they can each impact the thoughts and perceptions of others, to a degree. In this way they can each affect future change through their work. It is clear that in order to do so however, that the human scientist must consider the past and look to history in order to make conclusions about societies and their futures.