Epistemological Status of Ideas About the Past: History Is Not a Science

Abstract

The paper is concerned with the idea that history is not a science, but a synthetic worldview, combining scientific rationality with mythological, religious, everyday and artistic worldviews. The task of historiography is not the search for truth, but the creation of concepts for the collective identity of imaginary communities and the ideological substantiation of their claims in the present. The methods of science are not applicable to historiography, and its narratives do not meet the criteria of truth and are not explanatory theories. The author emphasized ideas that from an epistemological point of view, history relates to opinion, instead of knowledge.