1. Why study History?

14.Historical interpretation:After collecting the source material and establishing its credibility for purposes of historical writing, the researcher has to arrange and rearrange this material in different ways for bringing about some order and meaning in it. At this stage he has to exercise his thinking faculty. He has to correlate various facts, establish causal relations between them and make them meaningful. In other words he has to breathe life into the dead bones of historical material. For doing this, he has to interpret facts, and interpretation is the life-breath of history, or history in its essence is nothing but interpretation, as E.H. Carr would have us believe.There is no history without interpretation. When a history work is written we find in it a narration of facts together with their interpretation. Facts may be sometimes descriptive.They are simply narrated, without any interpretation or explanation, for the simple reason that they cannot be interpreted and any attempt. The narration of facts itself should, however, be based on reliable sources, and must be rational and coherent.For writing such a work of history, for properly utilizing the source material to write such a narrative interwoven with interpretations, one has to perform certain essential operations which synthesize the facts meaningfully.These processes of logical thinking include: 1.Generalization, 2.the argument from statistics, 3.analogy, 4.hypothesis, 5. Conjecture, 6. the argument from silence, and 7. the argument a priori.
Generalization is a very important logical process which can weave the fabric of history with warps and wools of facts. Generalization is an inductive process in which one goes from the particular to the general, infers the unknown from the known One common danger every researcher has to guard against is to generalize on insufficient data, sometimes even on one or two facts only. If, for example, one or two convicts were punished severely, one cannot generalize that the punishments meted out to the culprits were very severe. The process of generalization is greatly facilitated by the statistical information about various facts. The quantification of data provides a solid basis for generalization. It gives a greater degree of probability to the conclusions which are shaky, turning finally the probabilities into certainties. It must not be forgotten, however, that the quantification is just an aid to the researcher, and ultimately it is for the researcher to generalize properly and intelligently. The third logical process is analogy. In this method two facts of history – they may be events or doings of persons – are compared in respect of similar features that are already record and on this basis conclusions are drawn about other possible similar features that are not recorded. As in the first method, here also there is induction, but this is confined to only two or a few facts.. This method is essentially based on the logical principle of inference from similarities. Hypothesis can be of two types, explanatory and descriptive. In both the cases, it is a tentative conclusion. In explanatory hypothesis we try to account for a given fact and the explanation is provisional because it is based on inconclusive proof. This method is especially used in finding out laws or formulas acting in history. Unless the historian has intellectual integrity he is likely to fall a prey to the deliberate error of omission. He would omit such of the facts as would go against his favourite hypothesis. This is the error of omission which is often committed by a number of writers. The error of omission leads to the error of commission in which the author commits himself, even on the basis of flimsy evidence, to a particular view. The best course to follow in such cases is to find out enough historical evidence for a hypothesis framed and if the hypothesis cannot stand on such evidence, then it should be bold set aside, and another hypothesis be framed. And, secondly, if such a hypothesis is included in a book, it should be clearly mentioned as a tentative conclusion, and not as an established fact, for there is often the temptation of presenting it as an accepted conclusion