In earlier posts, I wrote on the distionction between objectivity and subjectivity and I also wrote about intersubjectivity as mutually understood subjectivity.  In this post, I’ll explain this new notion of transjectivity, which can be understood as the interplay between subjectivity and objectivity.  This term “transjective” might have been coined roughly simultaneously by both Cory David Barker of Achitectonics and John Vervaeke of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis.

We can say that the objective mode of understanding is focused on our outer world and that the subjective and intersubjective modes of understanding are focused on our inner world, but sometimes there is a complex interdependence between these worlds that is not easy to sort out.  There must be many points of knowledge that are clearly objective, such as that which is seen and/or heard, and it seems reasonable that there are also many points of knowledge that are intersubjective, such as what pain feels like, and there are probably also points of knowledge that might be somewhere in between.  And so the difference between objectivity and intersubjectivity is better understood as a spectrum rather than a fine line.

There would need to be aspects of first-person experience that are similar among different people in order to develop anything beyond each person’s own pure subjectivity for any degree of mutual understanding to be possible.  Now, it is likely that each knowing subject has unique structures of consciousness such that it would be impossible for anyone to fully understand how things are from another’s point of view, but it is reasonable to conclude that there are some aspects of experience that are common to any population of beings in which mutual communication occurs.  Objective understanding is formed as the members of a population communicate with each other through one or more shared medium and are able to understand a neutral point of view with regards to objects that are external to them.  Intersubjective knowledge is formed as the members of a population are able to communicate and come to understand the ideas and/or the structures of consciousness that are shared amongst the group, or at least that are similar enough such that members of the community can relate to the inner experiences of the other who is trying to convey what they are thinking and feeling.  Inner experiences are unique to each person, and this differs significantly from person to person, but there is also the potential for a certain amount of relatability between people such that one person can envision the perspective of another, despite not personally having those experiences.

There are some phenomena in life that are somewhere between objective and intersubjective.  These are phenomena that can be observed and measured within our shared outer world but where only considering the objective factors would not give a full picture of the dynamics of the situation because they also depend on certain socio-cultural contextual factors.  For this, we can consider probably any social situations in which people often find themselves, such as going with one’s family to a restaurant or giving a presentation at work or being stopped for questioning by a police officer.  In each situation, there are objective factors, such as where and when the events occur, what specific people were involved, what each person says, how they move their arms and legs, etc.  These are the factors that can be measured and quantified and mutually understood by people with minimal personal bias, but the socio-cultural meaning behind these acts is often disputable by the people who were on different sides of these social encounters.  This is because the objectively verifiable facts in these situations do not tell the whole story.  There are also related subjective and intersubjective factors, such as what each person is thinking and feeling and what each person thinks and feels about each other person and what each person’s motives were for acting as they did towards each other.  Thus, we can see that there would be inherent limitations to our knowledge if we were to insist on only ever considering the objective facts of these situations.  Sometimes if we failed to take into account people’s individual perspectives, conscious interactions, personal identity, and their social standing in relation to each other, then we are missing important nuances.

We can then identify a fourth mode of understanding called transjective, which depends on the interplay and interaction between the objective and intersubjective factors.  This depends on a mixture of direct and indirect communicative tactics, both intra-medium and extra-medium social verification, in order for people to develop mutual understanding of these situations.  This is mutual understanding that is based not only on the refinement of mental models of the public access information (the outer world) but also how this is interdependent on private access information (the inner world).  Transjectivity usually doesn’t rise to the same level of mutual understanding as objectivity.  However, there is more potential for mutual understanding than intersubjectivity because these scenarios do involve a lot of public access knowledge in the outer world, which means that there are usually significant facts that are not disputable by anyone witnessing the events in some manner.  Despite this, we do need to keep in mind that they are also partially dependent on each person’s inner world and how they relate to the outer world.  The mere fact that someone witnesses social interactions and understands the objective aspects of the phenomenon might give them a false sense of fully understanding the associated intersubjective aspects as well.  If a person doesn’t work to envision each person’s unique perspective on the situation, then they are likely to subconsciously assume that their own individual perspective is universal.

It should be possible to develop higher levels of mutual understanding of the transjective than the intersubjective, but this does require more mental effort, so this mode of understanding is unfortunately ignored by many people when analyzing social situations.  Transjectivity is probably the most difficult mode of understanding to identify and to fully conceptualize because it does involve a mixture of direct and indirect tactics to achieve mutual understanding.  Phenomena of this sort are neither objective nor intersubjective, and it is probably easier to think of anything we can identify or talk about would clearly fall into one or the other of these categories.  Transjective phenomena are often more difficult to conceptualize because they involve an interplay of other people’s perspective on things that differ slightly from one’s one and that are simultaneously dependent on some things in people’s minds and also on states of affairs in the shared physical space.

The difference between the four modes of understanding (subjective, intersubjective, objective, and transjective) can be visualized as a triangle, where purely subjective is at the bottom, intersubjective is at the upper left corner, and objective is at the upper right.  Any phenomenon that would be plotted closer or further away from any of the three edges would represent the degree of pure subjectivity vs. intersubjectivity vs. objectivity.  The transjective lies at the top of the triangle, between objective and intersubjective.  This triangle can be situated on a graph of rectangular coordinates wherein any possible phenomenon, whether it might be mutually understandable or not, can be plotted within the triangle.  All knowledge, beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and perceptions are within the triangle, which means that the shaded area represents the total space of possible understanding and any conceivable experience, whether they are in one person’s own mind shared by multiple people.

We can draw a vertical line going through this triangle, which is the Y axis that represents degrees of mutual understanding.  Everything that one might experience starts off as purely subjective, and thus is at the bottom center (zero on the X and Y axes).  This is where any phenomenon begins because they always start as private access and then mutual understanding can be developed from there through communication.  Thus, the process of social verification is what leads to an idea being plotted higher up from this starting point.  In other words, when a phenomenon has a higher degree of mutual understanding, it is plotted higher on the Y axis.

There are tactics that can be employed to develop mutual understanding, but some of these involve direct reference and some involve indirect reference.  In order to develop mutual understanding of some phenomenon, usually a sequence of communicative tactics need to be employed and this can sometimes be a mixture of direct and indirect.  The ratio of direct vs. indirect is what determines the X coordinate.  When more direct intra-medium tactics are used, those would fall on the right (positive +X) side and when more indirect extra-medium tactics are used, those would fall on the left (negative -X) side.  This triangle is not symmetrical.  The shape of this triangle extends up and to the right more than to the left because a higher degree of mutual understanding is possible with objectivity and a lower level of this is possible with transjectivity and intersubjectivity.

With the highest level of objectivity, there is a clearly understood process for social verification.  For example, if we want to know how to navigate through roads to reach a destination, we can describe what paths to follow and what turns to make at what points and what landmarks one would see along the way and also what one will observe at the endpoint so that they will know that they have reached the intended destination.  If we want to evaluate things that we can see or hear, we can use instruments to measure them, we can have an objective process for doing this, and the results can be socially verified because we are all hearing and seeing the same thing.

If a phenomenon is purely subjective then there is no way to do this, but we should maintain open mindedness, since many subjective phenomena can rise to the level of intersubjectivity through persistent interpersonal communication.  If we want to evaluate things like art or the effect our possible actions might have on people, then what we want to measure would be emotional power.  There is no objective way to measure that.  Despite that, we might be able to come to reasonable social verification processes for this sort of evaluation, and thus to create a certain degree of mutual understanding of such phenomena.  This would be a level that, admittedly, would fall short of objectivity, but where there would still be a meaningful degree of mutual understanding.

Sometimes, depending on the phenomenon in question, we have to settle for lower levels of mutual understanding offered by transjective or intersubjective.  An unbiased, quantified, and mind-independent description of reality is something we should aim for whenever we can, but that is not always possible for all phenomena.  For aspects of life that cannot be fully understood objectively because of the partial or full dependence on the inner world, it makes more sense to accept a slightly lower level of mutual understanding, if that is the consequence for conceptualizing the phenomenon properly.  We do need to be able to talk with each other about our inner worlds and how this relates to the outer world and we need to find the most effective and reliable way of accomplishing this.

This post is a continuation of an earlier one “Intersubjectivity as Mutually Understood Subjectivity“.

If the intersubjective mode of understanding includes experiences that multiple people can talk about and use social verification methods to refine their mutual understanding, then one might wonder whether intersubjectivity is nothing more than agreed upon myths and other things that can be called our “collective imaginary”.  That is part of it, but it would be false to assume that anything objective is real and anything intersubjective has no basis in ground reality.

Notably, the dichotomy between objectivity and intersubjectivity relates to the distinction between so-called primary and secondary qualities.  This was most explicitly articulated by John Locke in his Essay concerning Human Understanding, but earlier thinkers such as Galileo and Descartes made similar distinctions.  Primary qualities are thought to be properties of objects that are independent of any observer, such as solidity, extension, motion, number, and figure.  Secondary qualities are thought to be properties that partially rely on sensations within observers, such as color, taste, smell, and sound.  They can be described as the effect things have on certain people.  Knowledge that comes from secondary qualities does not provide objective facts about things.  Primary qualities are measurable aspects of physical reality.  Secondary qualities are subjective but can become intersubjective, such as when people discuss colors and come to a mutual understanding of this phenomenon.  Both primary and secondary qualities can be studied and measured objectively in certain ways, but in the case of secondary qualities this often relies on advanced neurological scanning devices.  We know that while humans usually perceive 3 primary colors, these do not exist objectively.  Each of these merely corresponds to a spectrum of light.  It is possible to correlate a range of wavelengths to the neurological patterns in the brain when someone observes this wavelength, but this is not the same thing as the firsthand experience of seeing color.  When people discuss colors, they are forming intersubjective understandings of their experiences.

For more clarity on this distinction, consider the following thought experiment: suppose a scientist enters a recently discovered underground cave that nobody else has ever seen.  While in the cave this scientist communicates his observations via radio to his fellow scientists on the surface.  In this situation, the scientist’s reports to the others drives the social verification and it is possible that these reports can be considered objective knowledge even to those on the surface, but only if there is already an objective understanding of the kinds of things that the one in the cave is reporting on.  If, for example, he says “I see various rock formations, some of which seem to have quartz and some of which seem to have shiny metals” then this account can be easily understood by those on the surface because they can evaluate his claims based on their understanding and previous observations of similar caves (and also use the criteria for justifying claims outlined in a previous post).

Anyone who has ever been in a cave with someone else or who has seen pictures or video of a cave in the presence of others probably has an objective understanding of the typical features of caves.  Such people can talk about caves with each other and can easily have a mutual understanding of what a cave is and what kinds of things one can expect to find in them.  Imagine, though, as a counterexample that there are certain caves that can be found in many places but where only one person can go inside at a time.  Anyone who goes into the cave sees and hears unique things that they do not see or hear anywhere else.  Imagine that most people have had experiences of going into these special caves by themselves (and never with anyone else) and that no cave of this kind has ever been documented visually or auditorily.  In this case it would be very difficult for someone to talk about this kind of cave with anyone else.  Although it would be difficult for people to explain their experiences of exploring these caves to others, the fact that others have had similar experiences makes mutual understanding possible.  People would find ways of communicating and from this they should be able to get a pretty good idea that others have had cave experiences similar to their own.  In this situation, there is no objective understanding of what these caves look like or sound like, but people can nonetheless work towards a certain degree of mutual understanding of these phenomena and this can be considered intersubjective.

To take another example, let’s say that several people each have a crazy dream that is unlike anything they have ever experienced in their lives and that each person’s dreams are remarkably similar.  Consider the possibility that several people could have similar dreams and that each involve seeing objects and hearing sounds that are quite unlike anything else that one can ever see or hear in their waking life.  If these people were to be in the same room the day after having these dreams and were then to try to explain their dreams to each other, how much mutual understanding might be possible?  It would likely be quite difficult for them to explain their dreams to each other and to get an idea of the other people’s dreams, but eventually they would probably be able to use language to symbolically communicate with each other the details of their dreams and from this they would be able to socially verify that they each had similar crazy dreams.  These people would then have intersubjective knowledge of these dreams.

It is usually easier to develop mutual understanding for the objective than for the intersubjective.  It is important to note that the most significant criterion that determines whether a certain point of common understanding is objective or intersubjective is how this phenomenon would become socially verified.  If the phenomenon in question is both observed and socially verified within a communications medium, we can call it intra-medium.  If it cannot be observed within any medium, it can be called extra-medium.  In the latter case, everyone would still have to use a medium to communicate anything about the phenomenon and any social verification would have to rely on that, but the means of observation for each person would be separate from the medium they would use for any communication about this phenomenon.

Since we rely on communications media for all mutual understanding, intra-medium social verification is a more direct process.  There is a variety of ways that one can communicate through a medium while simultaneously giving indication of things observed through this medium.  There is a variety of communicative tactics that one can employ to indicate the quality and quantity of things, including interacting with something, grasping it, moving around it, making facial features, gesturing with one’s hands, and speaking with tonal inflections to convey nuances.  When things can be seen and heard among multiple conscious beings while they also use these sorts of tactics to convey to each other that they are having these perceptions, this can serve as social verification and can build higher levels of mutual understanding.

The extra-medium social verification process is indirect and relies on analogies and correlations to phenomena that cannot be seen nor heard.  This would include senses that are not connected to a communicative medium, including touch, smell, and taste.  For these, we can build mutual understanding by perceiving them ourselves and then making correlative judgments to other phenomena that occur within the auditory and visual media.  For example, one can smell something awful and make a certain facial grimace and then later see someone from a distance making a similar facial expression and conclude that person likely smelled something awful as well.  We could similarly develop mutual understanding of any felt emotions and also other types of inner experiences are not connected to any medium.  For those, we would still have to use a medium as a means of communicating any details about such experiences.  This might be possible by noticing the patterns of correlations of felt inner experiences and your own behaviors and then noticing other beings behaving similarly.  This would indicate to you that they are having similar inner experiences.  For example, you might feel happy and then you smile and speak in a higher intonation and you see and hear someone else doing the same thing, which would then indicate that they are happy.

However, it is inevitable that in most cases you would be less certain of the mutual understanding of someone else’s inner experiences than you are of things that can be directly seen and heard.  For this reason, the intra-medium social verification process has the potential to lead to an overall higher degree of mutual understanding than the extra-medium.  This means that we can develop detailed mutual understanding of objective things quite a lot easier than we can anything that is intersubjective.  This should not be taken to entail, however, that intersubjective things are necessarily always imaginary and invented human constructions.

In general, things that are objective are those which are external to consciousness such that their existence does not depend on anyone’s belief in it.  For example, the chemical and molecular realities of the rocks and minerals and plant and animal life in the world do not owe their existence to any conscious person’s belief.  When someone has a particular belief about something imaginary then this is subjective.  In another one of Harari’s books called Sapiens, he sought to understand the factors that led homo sapiens to develop complex societies and he argued that one vital element is having masses of people with similar legends, myths, and beliefs about the social structure in which they live.  He recognized that these are all examples of intersubjectivity because they are beliefs that are shared throughout a community and their continued existence does not depend on any specific person believing them.  These beliefs inevitably evolve, but they can stay rather constant throughout a person’s lifetime, as determined by common beliefs of the people of the society in which one lives.  Harari pointed out that these beliefs can include, for example, the notion that people are naturally organized into hierarchical castes, as the ancient Babylonians believed, or that people are naturally equal and naturally have human rights, as a significant percent of people in the world today tend to believe.  He argued that these two examples are equally fictitious because they have no basis in objective reality, but he assumes that any belief that does not have a basis in physical/material reality must necessarily be fictional.

The flaw in Harari’s reasoning is that he does not realize that the objective/intersubjective distinction is largely differentiated by how one comes to believe things and is not necessarily based on whether the topic of our mutual understanding is real or imaginary.  If there is any aspect of consciousness that could potentially be shared among a community of individuals but that can only be understood from first person experience (members of the community having similar conscious experiences) then such beliefs would be intersubjective.  These areas of mutual understanding could be shared among a community and they certainly would not be objective since their existence would depend on the experience of a conscious being.  Their existence, however, would not depend on anyone’s belief in them.  The value of money depends on people’s belief in it, and thus we can say that money’s existence depends on this belief, but there might be aspects of our inner worlds that can be mutually understood and that would exist just the same even if they were not mutually understood.  The essential aspects of consciousness, if there are any, could conceivably be true whether or not any conscious person chooses to acknowledge their existence.

Harari argues that human rights have no more basis in reality than myths that were invented by humans and that have been propagated across many people within a certain culture.  But if it is actually conceivable that human rights might have some sort of a basis in fact because it might be the case that they were ultimately derived from certain essential aspects of lived conscious experience that would be universal to all humans.  For example, consider both a rock and a building.  The rock existed before any humans came onto the scene.  The building was planned, designed, and built by humans.  These can both be measured and studied and understood objectively.  The intersubjective realm similarly includes things that were invented by people (like the building was) and this mode of understanding might also include things that existed before anyone thought about them or talked about them.  Money, governments, legal systems, fictional stories, and cultural norms were conceived of and invented by people.  It our shared values are intersubjective and there might possibly be some shared core values that are a part of base reality.

We don’t want to presume this to be the case, since at this point, we don’t even have the epistemological tools to make such a judgment.  This is, however, conceivable, and it is conceivable that this could be the case even if nobody believed in human rights.  These could be things that were discovered by mankind in recent centuries in a way somewhat similar to how electromagnetism was discovered over a century ago and how some people now understand this fact about reality but not everybody does.  Centuries ago, when nobody believed in electromagnetism, that did not have any bearing on this fundamental force’s factual existence.

Nonprofit organizations do a lot of good, but it’s not always easy to get started. Whatever your calling, it’s worth the effort to launch and manage your nonprofit the right way. Take note of these tips for structuring your organization and serving your cause, courtesy of The Enlightened Worldview Project.

Approach Funding Creatively

Business loans are an option, and specialized financing is available for many nonprofits. But finances are often the toughest part of organizing a nonprofit, so prepare to get creative.

• Outline your financial needs and goals with a business budget — a nonprofit is a company.
• Seek support within your community and personal and professional networks.
• Engage with potential investors to generate interest and support.

Organize and Focus for Progress

Having a long-term vision in place for your nonprofit is a must. Even as you’re just getting off the ground, maintaining that forward-thinking approach is crucial.

• Establish specific goals that you can quantify and measure as you make progress.
• Structure your nonprofit for accountability and growth.
• Find ways to gauge and publicize your successes.

Recognize Reporting Requirements

As a nonprofit, your organization is held to a specific standard. That means tax responsibilities, legal documents, and other details.

• Select a business structure — like LLC formation — that protects and enhances your nonprofit (click here to learn more).
• Track your tax needs and obligations when it comes to donations and exemptions.
• Release annual reports to promote investor relations and community engagement.

From finding the cash to get your nonprofit going to navigating the inevitable piles of paperwork, running a nonprofit can be a true test of your business prowess. With these resources, you’ll be that much more prepared to do great things with your charitable organization.

This was written by Brittany Fisher of Financially Well.

Photo via Unsplash

Sometimes people speak of “objective reality”, but objectivity is actually just the most unbiased treatment of things that we can mentally construct through the gathering and scrutiny of evidence.  Everything that we can speak of is a mental model, even the objective.  Sure, there is a truth out there whether we know about it or not, but we’re probably never going to have a 100% perfect understanding of it.  The models that we use to speak of things are still within consciousness, and that is the only thing that anyone has integrated within their consciousness.  But the objective is the subset of the mental models where we have gained the highest possible mutual understanding through social verification tactics.  The outer world is still a mental model, but one where multiple people have gone through processes of refining and synching their models and have attained high levels of confidence that they have pretty accurate models of things that have persistent existence outside of their own and any other person’s consciousness.

Can our inner world also be mutually understood, to some extent?  Every conscious being has their own inner world, and this is private-access knowledge, but there might be similarities among our inner worlds such that we can develop some degree of mutual understanding.  It certainly would not be possible for anyone to enter the consciousness of another and to experience their thoughts and feelings firsthand, but there might be indirect tactics through which we can socially verify certain common features of our inner worlds.  It is, indeed, conceivable that multiple people could be internally observing similar phenomena these people could potentially find ways to communicate details about their experiences with each other and could then develop mutual understanding.

To consider another example that is similar to the one from the previous section but different in an important way, let’s say that two or more people not only looked at a rock, but each dropped it on their own foot.  Each of them therefore has an experience of pain from this, but this pain is not a perception of the rock.  The experience of pain is real to each person, but this kind of experience is different from seeing and hearing in that it does not perceive a medium.  This means that one can focus on their own experience of pain, but this experience of pain itself does not give them any understanding of other people’s pain.  On the one hand, one is able to get a good idea of other people’s experience of sight and hearing by seeing and hearing, but one is not able to get a good idea of other people’s pain through their own experience of pain.  They are able to conclude that other people have the experience of pain through seeing and hearing other people react to the rock hitting their foot.  Since the other people’s reaction is similar to their own, each person can therefore conclude that the others have similar experiences.  There can also be processes through which these people can further refine their mutual understanding of each other’s pain, which would rely on further observations of the outer world, which is understood through the communications medium, and then comparing these findings to their own inner world, which are subjective experiences that nobody else can directly understand, but might indirectly understand through these processes.  We can by analogy say that these people have mentally come onto the “same page” or that something is “resonating” within each of their minds because they are all “tuned into a common wavelength”.

There is an important difference between the first example (involving sight and sound of the rock) and the second example (involving the experience of pain inflicted by the rock) in that in the first example the social verification of the experience occurred through the same medium that the experience is the subject of, while in the second example the social verification of the experience occurred through a medium that is different than the subject of the experience.  In the first example, it is the fact that social verification occurred in a way that is so closely related to the experience itself that allowed each person to eliminate (or at least minimize) personal biases and to develop more accurate conceptions of an object in the outer world.  In the second example, the fact that the social verification requires another level of analogy ends up making it much more difficult to eliminate personal biases.  In the first example, each person was able to understand the rock without personal biases, perhaps aided by a tape measure or a scale.  In the second example, each person’s experience of pain is still colored by their own inner world, even though they developed this mutual understanding of the experience of pain.  Therefore, it is unlikely that an experience such as pain can become objective.

This does not mean that pain is any less real than seeing or hearing.  But it does mean that it is more difficult to understand other people’s experience of pain and other experiences that are not the subject of a communicative medium.  It is probably impossible that such knowledge can become objective, but there is a certain reality of these experiences that can still permeate the outer world, in a sense, because it can be mutually understood.  In situations where such subjective knowledge has been socially verified amongst multiple sentient beings, this knowledge becomes intersubjective. 

We can talk about anything we can see or hear or physically touch as objective, provided we have gone through the necessary processes to try to understand the object as closely as possible to how it actually is.  If we have any subjective knowledge that cannot be made objective but where we have gone through the process of communicating details about this knowledge with others, which in turn allows us to reasonably conclude that others have similar subjective knowledge, then this can be called intersubjective.

We can consider that which is intersubjective to be a subset of the subjective that is socially verifiable to some extent.  Aspects of our inner world that can never be mutually understood because social verification is impossible can be called purely subjective.  One’s particular thoughts, perceptions, and emotions that they alone will experience and that nobody else could ever fully grasp would fall into this category.  We can figure that categorization would include subjective experiences that are quite unique to an individual and are simply impossible to fully relate.  However, by the very nature of the concept, there is nothing specific that we could identify and speak about that would fall within this category.  If we could speak about some particular experience and develop some mutual understanding of this subjective phenomenon then it would not be in this category.  By definition, any such phenomenon would not be purely subjective and would instead be intersubjective.  For example, let’s say that Mary says to her friend Sarah “I have been having this unique feeling recently and I don’t think anyone would ever understand…” but then after explaining her feelings for a while, Sarah starts to relate and empathize because Mary’s description seems similar to her own past experiences.  Thus, they can discuss their feelings and come to refine their understanding of each other’s experiences.

For any person who can communicate, we can figure that some of their thoughts, emotions, and perceptions can be relatable to other people, but it still makes sense that there are aspects of each person’s particular experiences that could never be mutually understood.  It does intuitively make sense that most of our experiences are purely subjective, even if there is nothing in particular that multiple people could possibly identify as being in this category.  The distinction between the intersubjective and the purely subjective would have to be a spectrum rather than a fine line because some things are barely mutually understood by people and some things are only mutually understood by a select few.  People sometimes talk for hours about abstractions and then think they have some mutual understanding, but they can’t really be sure.  Such things would probably fall into the gray area between purely subjective and intersubjective.

Since understanding history is so important, there has to be a certain kind of science to help sort out fact from fiction.  We need to be able to compare and contrast historical situations and developments within time periods, cultures, countries, nations, and civilizations in order to extract lessons and this should not be an arbitrary and unscientific process.  If done methodically, this can be reasonably reliable.  The hypothetico-deductive model (HDM) cannot possibly be the only scientific method.  It has to work in conjunction with historical science methods that study evidence relating to how things came together, how things transpired, how things unfolded, and how they are continuing to unfold into the future.

This is not to say that people necessarily should look to times from generations ago or from ancient history for their personal and group identity nor necessarily for their guidance and purpose in life, but that is how people typically think and that is why we need to have more reliable and evidence-based processes for investigating, tracing, evaluating, and coming to reasonable conclusions on this stuff.  Essentially, the study of history needs to be scientific in the general sense.

Despite the fact that unique past events cannot be reproduced, we can analyze evidence that we do have access to that was produced by past events, such as relics, artifacts, and fossil remains, to give explanatory power to phenomena in the present and we can also in many cases observe phenomena in our world so as to better explain the past.  As we develop a clearer, deeper, and richer understanding of the past, this can provide us with better and more reliable explanatory and predictive power for our replicable experiments in the natural and human sciences.

Our studies of recurring and replicable phenomena can aid in our studies of past and non-replicable phenomena, and vice versa.  This goes for fields such as evolutionary biology and astrophysics, which often study physical and biological events in the distant past, and also for studies of particular historical figures and ancient civilizations.  Our understanding of these phenomena from ages ago can add depth to our understanding of the present.  For historical people, we can try to understand their psychology and their motives by studying current people and we can in some cases also get a better understanding of living people by studying the details of the lives of people who are no longer living.  For social science, we often have to rely heavily on the interpretation of large scale phenomena of the past, including cultural trends, political regimes, legal systems, institutions, and economic policies in order to understand the present and to try to predict the future of social phenomena.

This relies on several principles, including the recognition of areas of similarity between present and past phenomena and the acknowledgement that the natural laws that govern phenomena are, at their most fundamental, the same in all times.  The fact that past unique events cannot be reproduced should not entail that they are inaccessible to experimental science, since that would be incoherent.  Certainly, the HDM relies on the ability to reproduce phenomena and to control for a variety of variables in order to discern cause and effect.  This method can be very effective and has given the ability to explain and to control a wide range of phenomena, but this should not cover the fact that this process still relies on interpretation.  The truth is that the same exact events never recur.  If we consider all factors for any experiment, there is always something distinct about each one.  Even when we have the most highly controlled experiments, there will inevitably be certain factors that are unique each time it is conducted.  Certainly, either the time or place of the experiment would have to be different.  In addition, science makes progress in part through reliance on the accounts of scientists who conducted controlled experiments in the (perhaps recent) past to help explain and interpret our results in our current experiments.  Science cannot occur without interpretation of the past.  Thus, this notion that the interpretation of the past is not scientific is quite wrongheaded.

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