Humanities and Social Sciences: Epistemological Foundations

Scientific natural science, which had been established in European culture since the mid-17th century, began to transmit samples of scientific knowledge into the field of studying social reality. Until the 19th century, the only mental form of reflecting this reality was “primary history,” as Hegel defined it, i.e. tradition of historiography coming from Herodotus. This tradition received its design, oriented towards the field of scientific rationality, from the German historian Leopold von Ranke: to show “how it really was” (wie es eigentlich gewesen). Its social function is the formation of national historical memory. But methodological reflection at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries revealed, as it seemed to it, two radical differences between “primary history” and other “sciences of culture” from natural science. In this regard, the categories of “values” and “understanding” were emphasized. The presence of these categories in the foundations of any science determines its specification as a humanitarian science. The first attempts to transfer certain aspects of the disciplinary matrices of natural science to the sphere of social science are associated with the names of Kant and Marx. Both attempts were unsuccessful. But, unlike Kant’s, the “materialist understanding of history” found its supporters and successors. Its main error is the unlawful direct transfer of the semantic content of the category “matter”, as it developed in natural science (the relationships of things), to the relationships between people endowed with consciousness. The addressee of social sciences are cultural forms, the existence of which has an objective status of existence, but relative to the individual consciousness of acting people. These are, for example, social institutions. The humanities deal with meanings, the existence of which is determined by systems of social communications.