The Historian's Task Is To Understand The Past; The Human Scientist, By Contrast, Is Looking To Change The Future - Essay Example

The Historians 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? INTRODUCTION This discussion mainly aims at elaborating the extent of a factual truth that both historians and human scientists play significant role towards shaping the future irrespective of their differences underlying their areas of knowledge. In simple terms, without having a proper understanding of the past, there cannot be a proceeding towards the present and future, which in turn depicts the interlinkage of these two areas of knowledge. Knowledge of the historical context helps in providing a mean, which must be taken into consideration by the human scientists for making the present and future more comprehensive. This includes various rational, systematic and verification activities used by human scientists for validating the data obtained through objective specific and subjective phenomena. As human science not only remains confined towards the study of humanities and social sciences but also covers the areas of sociology, history, economics and anthropology, it often overlaps the dimensions of historians. Hence, the area of knowledge of human scientists cannot be firmly polarized from that of learning the past like in the case of historians. On the other hand, the Historian’s task can be quite delicate, which includes understanding the implications of various analytical categories for filling up the historical gaps and framing a proper picture of the past. This way, the area of knowledge relevant to historians tends to be polarized from that of the human scientists who learn the past in pursuit to make the future better. DISCUSSION The role of historians, since decades, has been focused to provide conceptualized and factual descriptions about various events and circumstances that had occurred in the past and develop an understanding of the same in order to unveil the past origins of the human society. The area of knowledge relevant to historians can be considered significant to a large extent. They play an important role in reconstructing complex stories from scattered historical sources. Human curiosity about their origin and evolution has always strongly motivated the historians in their efforts of understanding past events that had transformed human civilization or embarks on a secretive paradigm of ancient human society. Historians examine the past in a very broad perspective and facilitate the readers in adding up the historical events as well as actions, triggering their thoughts, motives, and adventurous states of mind (Barton, 2009). They study and extract data from old artifacts, recorded writings, past stories and eyewitness subjects as well. The use of modern techniques of history evaluation and technological advancements also contribute towards the better understanding and knowledge accumulation process amid the historians. Such as the use of carbon dating technique helps archaeologists determine how old the fossilized remains are and what their significances values. The historians also perform basic rational tasks like discovering and structuring up the archival data that describes about a given event in the past (Barton, 2009). Their findings are required to be stranded based on the proof of existing historical recordings and their explanations and interpretations to arrive at a hypothesis regarding social causes (Barton, 2009). Their work on history reconstructing is quite delicate as most of the time, they need to make judgments based on lost evidences and fill in the historically recorded gaps with their own understanding and knowledge, which may sometimes result in being relevant but at majority instances, proving irrelevant. The efficiency of a historian’s task depends on how perfect are his archives. Correspondingly, historians often show their interest in linking up human intentions and meanings that lie beneath a given series of composite historical events (Cap, “The historian’s task is to understand the past; the human”).  Depending on the areas of research, the task of historians in the context of understanding the past can be seen both from an advantageous and from a disadvantageous concern to their individual knowledge attainment process. From the advantageous viewpoint, a historians’ task can reveal astonishing past facts based on which, further researches can be made to help reveal the truthfulness of the hypotheses drawn such as “what was the causes of the demise or rise of an particular civilization and the lifestyles choices of the then people. Past or ancient knowledge acquired by historians can also help in providing a solid foundation platform for conducting a new research, thus adding to knowledge acquirement as well. Historians’ works also contribute towards constructing new theories and predictions. Historical data, incomplete archives do not give proper information and may sometimes result in creating ambiguity and confusion. Thus, it becomes necessary for the historians to interpret scattered pieces of data and evidences to frame them out into a coherent and meaningful story (Cap, “The historian’s task is to understand the past; the human”). Focusing on the detrimental perspective, although historians’ tasks contribute a great deal towards understanding of history and adding up to the knowledge warehouse, it faces many obligations being concentrated on the past series of events. These types of tasks require loads of funding and time for being accurate. Majority of these tasks are funded by either the government or investors. Thus, inadequate flow of funds may affect the task at every step thus forming a barrier. Moreover, it becomes very complicated to determine which historical finding is of more value. It also becomes a necessity to determine what would have been the significance of that historical finding during its own past time. In many cases, the historical findings like artifacts and monuments may result in excessive preservation costs, which ultimately become a liability to move with (Spiegel, 2008). As per the required areas of knowledge, human scientists can be described as individuals with two viewings, one at the past and other at the unpredictable future. Their curiosity about finding out answers to inconceivable problems results in various new creations. They always look around for obtaining a scope of modifications, which they refer to as ‘change’. They are imaginative, strategic and well structured. In accordance, human scientists follow a wide variety of methods for bringing about futuristic changes, which can be innovative, observative, assumptive, quantitative or a combination of all these. Human scientists always have a tendency of being occupied by systematic activities for knowledge acquirement. They continuously focus towards modifying human existence and bringing up futuristic changes through various scientific processes. Visualizing the future raises curiosity about how interesting will the actual face of the future be. Subsequently, the preliminary step every human scientist needs to follow is a close observation of the past in order to understand and find evidences about the gap persisting and structuring each event of the puzzle appropriately based on which, a change for a better solution can be planned (Spiegel, 2008). The Human scientists’ vision with the intension of bringing about a change in future can have both upsides and downsides, which need to be kept under constant observation. This is the stage where focus needs to be rendered on the past findings to determine the position of our stand. From the past decades, human scientists have been coming up with spectacular forecasts about the human life characteristics of the coming generation and overcoming the past errors and faults to make future better. Some of these changes turn out to be successful while many fail. In simple wordings, the upsides of the areas of knowledge focused by human scientists include making human life easier and more comfortable (Susman 275-285). Although human scientists mainly intend on making both the present human life and the upcoming future better, there are certain downsides as well, adjacent to this particular area of knowledge. In one way, visualizing about bringing changes in our future helps us in preparing ourselves for a better world but also gives us a hint that what could go wrong and what will be its consequences (Susman 275-285). Illustratively, describing the case of “black death” plague shall be beneficial in understanding the issue, which came to notice in London when skeletons of victims were found. Historians depicted that this disease existed during the middle age period, which resulted in the numerous deaths, causing an epidemic in the city spread through a vast population of rats. They also came to know that there still occurs a possibility that this disease can spread if no preventive measure is taken. The human scientists understood the issue from the collected data and acted accordingly in solving the problem. Proper sanitization and vaccine preparation steps were taken to prevent the spreading process and finally eradicate this disease. This example describes how both historians and human scientists played their part in dealing with this issue and contributed to the knowledge areas as well (Susman 275-285). Another instance, which can be described, is the invention of “cloud technology”. Through this technique, human scientists visualize the need for storing all forms of digital data into a sort of virtual cloud storage so that it could be retrieved from the cloud storage at any place or time even if the actual data on their device gets erased providing better access and back-up facilities to the data storage system. In bringing about such changes in our present and future way of living, the role of human scientists can be witnessed apparently, while the influence of historians remains limited (Susman 275-285). With reference to this understanding it can be stated that although the area of knowledge used by human scientists refer to a versatile platform, historians have their limited to the study of the past. CONCLUSION From the above discussion it can be concluded that the task of a historian in understanding the past events and the task of a human scientist in visioning the future and bringing about changes has their own significance. Knowledge about the past will play significant role in shaping the future. Historians provide a significant description about the past and in some cases the reasons of past failure and human scientist focus towards finding the amending points to secure a better future. Works Cited Barton, G. A. (2009). Editorial Introduction. The Historian’s Task, pp. 1-3. Spiegel, G. M. (2008). The Task of the Historian. AHA Presidential Addresses, pp. 1-17. Cap, Anita. The historian’s task is to understand the past; the human. 2013. Web. 05 Feb 2014. Susman, W. The Historian’s Task. Appendix 1: 275-284. Print. Read More