The Uncertain Sciences

This is an important book not only for the students of social sciences and humanities but also for anyone interested in the different ways human nature and human culture can be studied and conceived. The author succeeds in illustrating the peculiar nature of the human sciences, which aspire to be scientific and yet lack most of the preconditions of (natural) scientific inquiry.Mazlish manages to cross existing boundary lines in a way that makes his study an interdisciplinary work in the profound sense of the word. As a philosophy -oriented historian, I can easily sympathise with the author's general approach and with his specific claim that we must avoid the Scylla of `scientistic' positivism without succumbing to the Charybdis of extreme relativism and `interpretative nihilism' of the postmodernists. He himself holds an intermediate position between positivistic inquiry and hermeneutical interpretation. Ideally, the human sciences would combine the valuable elements of positivism (such as some form of public verification) and hermeneutics (such as the narrative element and the question of meaning. As the author correctly points out, to the extent the human sciences try to imitate natural scientific methodology (and even vocabulary), they exclude the question of meaning from their work, and by so doing they exclude the most relevant element from their inquiry. Still, it is of no use either to totally reject the scientific method inhering in positivism. Mazlish has a fine grasp not only of different fields of the human sciences (sociology, history, economics, etc.) but also of such natural scientific disciplines as evolutionary biology, which he sees as the counterpart in the human sciences to evolutionary theory in the natural sciences. His explication of `emergent phenomena' in the context of cultural evolution is brilliant and helps us to understand the latter as a sort of acceleration of emergent phenomena. Furthermore, Mazlish illustrates a number of issues that are usually difficult to find in academic studies of the human sciences, such as the Other, madness, development of consciousness, the idea of `truth community', and man as `animal symbolicum'.Mazlish brings forward the intriguing idea that development of consciousness must be embodied in a scientific community. What I particularly liked about his conception of consciousness is that he emphasises the practical implications of changed consciousness: our human predicament is not that we don't `know' with sufficient scientific guarantees; the problem is that we have not readily incorporated such knowledge into our behavior and beliefs. The perennial question of how to put knowledge into action is the problem that Mazlish forcefully address in his book. In his account the Other appears as an essential element in the human sciences and not as some strange psychological phenomenon, and this is a very fruitful way to look at the issue. To interpret the