On Sources and Narratives in Historical Social Science: a Realist Critique of Positivist and Postmodernist Epistemologies (original) (raw)

THE 'COMPLEMENTARITY' REALITIES BETWEEN HISTORY AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

SOPHIA: An African Journal of Philosophy , 2006

In the past three or four decades, History and the Social Sciences have worked so closely together; especially with the rise of theoretical issues in history and the need for historical context in the Social Sciences. The Social Sciences which operate with theoretical generalizations inevitably require historical temporal dimension in its practice; while history needs the theories and generalizations (supplied by the Social Sciences) about the operations of society and process of change, which are the subject matter of history. This paper highlights the crucial nature of the relationship between History as a distinct discipline and the Social Sciences, especially in the areas of commonality of objectives and inter-dependence in sources and concepts required by both disciplines for effective practice. The need, therefore, is stressed for more intellectual harmony among historians and scholars in the Social Sciences as a result of the realities of interdependence (complementarity) and the inter-relatedness of History and Social Sciences' practice

Relocating the Epistemological Position of New Historical Sociology

Middle East Critique, 2005

Relocating the Epistemological Position of New Historical Sociology Abstract: this paper deals with new developments in the methodology and theoretical concerns over the question of the nature of reality. The term “new historical sociology” in this article refers to a developing discipline that theoretically as well as methodologically is different from both sociology and history. For this reason the position of this discipline needs to be relocated epistemologically to enable scholars of both sociology and history to deal with problems they might encounter while doing historical sociological research. As far as the arguments for this relocation are concerned, this epistemological relocation needs to be done before scholars engage in research. At the outset, it is necessary to consider particular problems, and these include dealing with the question of evidence vis-à-vis historical fact, the notion of reality (objectivity versus subjectivity), the notion of science and multiple rationalities, the shortcomings of universal explanation, the notion of scientific contribution, the notion of scientific intersubjectivity, etc. I have tried to offer the arguments relevant to these problems in one simple package starting with the question of knowledge and its relation to socio-historical data. Keywords: new historical sociology, intersubjectivity, subjectivity, objectivity, evidence.

Placing History Within the Social Sciences

Historyka, 2016

The article deals with the problem of whether history can be treated as a part of the social sciences. It focuses on the relation between the questioned scientific character of history and the philosophical problems regarding the foundation of scientific knowledge in general.

History in the Humanities and Social Sciences

History in the Humanities and Social Sciences, 2022

This interdisciplinary volume explores the relationship between history and a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences: economics, political science, political theory, international relations, sociology, philosophy, law, literature and anthropology. The relevance of historical approaches within these disciplines has shifted over the centuries. Many of them, like law and economics, originally depended on self-consciously historical procedures. These included the marshalling of evidence from past experience, philological techniques and source criticism. Between the late nineteenth and the middle of the twentieth centuries, the influence of new methods of research, many indebted to models favoured by the natural sciences, such as statistical, analytical or empirical approaches, secured an expanding intellectual authority while the hegemony of historical methods declined in relative terms. In the aftermath of this change, the essays collected in History in the Humanities and Social Sciences reflect from a variety of angles on the relevance of historical concerns to representative disciplines as they are configured today.