The problem of demarcation of historical science and historical myth in modernism and postmodernism

The problem of demarcation of historical science and historical myth has received coverage in the tradition of modernism and postmodernism. The modernist approach to this problem is based on the search of static criteria of scientific and non-scientific knowledge. Its representatives emanate from the availability for a researcher of historical reality which exists irrespective of anything, outside of and apart from historical sources. Historical reality in most cases assumes the past of society. The aim of the historian in this case is to create a "copy" of reality. For this, s/he has to withdraw from the research, because it can be a means to penetrate a myth. The warrant of the truth of historical knowledge is sources subjected to objective criticism. But sources are not a copy of historical reality, and a myth can also penetrate through them, since the credibility of the eyewitness historian cannot be complete. Attempts to resolve the contradictions was the transfer of historical reality to the area of the spiritual and the idea of "total" history, which involved a great creative autonomy of the subject. But this leads to the transformation of the historian's ideas in the research results. A valid criterion of demarcation is only the temporal aspect of history, as it should be excluded in the myth: the myth tends to be eternal. Thus, researchers failed in the differentiation of scientific and non-scientific knowledge, and the criteria for the demarcation of historical science and historical myth were considered weak. This resulted in a qualitatively new attempt that proponents of postmodernism made to solve this problem: instead of allocating the differences of historical science and historical myth, they drew attention to the basis of historical science. The ideas of society are revised: society is no longer recognized as an integral formation with a hierarchical structure. The new image suggests pluralism and equivalence of all forms of life. The past, representing itself as historical reality, is criticized, it loses its positions and is viewed only as part of the present. The role of historical sources is revised: they are superseded by out-of-source knowledge. The subject of knowledge becomes the main prerequisite for the existence of historical reality and constructs it. As solutions to the problem of demarcation, postmodernists offered, firstly, the presence of multiple interpretations and ways of understanding of a historical event. This prevents the allocation of "key" events used by modern myth-makers. Secondly, they offered a transformation of historical events in which events are displaced by subsequent ones to the past, and find their place in the timeline. Furthermore, time (a criterion arising from the logic of modernists) is not excluded from the structure of the object of historical knowledge, and is a specific feature of historical research and narrative. Therefore, in the modernist and postmodernist tradition, the problem of demarcation of historical myth and historical science is solved by fundamentally different approaches.

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