The Necessity of Interdisciplinary Interaction between Epistemology and History in Examining the Philosophical Bases of Historical Knowledge

Abstract

History as a science has different functions in its individual, social and cultural senses that epistemologically support other paradigms in different fields of the humanities. This is a fact that by its turn poses serious challenges to the validity of history’s factual bases and its professional functions. Most philosophers and humanists have acknowledged the importance of history in its essential sense as the past, and historical knowledge as a unique instrument for knowing this past. Meanwhile, they have raised several basic questions that have challenged the very possibility of historical knowledge as a scientific discipline and the reliability of its results and findings. Since the time of Aristotle, these had been the main questions with which the minds of philosophers and historians have been concerned. This paper tries to examine this problem from a rather different point of view: it attempts to show that most of the historians who tried to give an answer to these questions suffered from a conceptual and theoretical deficiency. In other words, most historians failed to prepare an adequate theoretical framework that makes their answers scientifically acceptable. It also tries to shed new light on this matter by showing the possibilities which new developments in the field of humanities can offer historians to find new answers for these basic questions. Interdisciplinary interactions are among of these possibilities by which the historians can use the facts given in the field of epistemology to challenge the opponents of the scientificity of history. Using this option, historians will have the opportunity to show that their knowledge satisfies the criterion of validity in a contextual account of knowledge.

Keywords

• historical knowledge
• interdisciplinary interaction
• validity of knowledge
• epistemic contextualism