ABSTRACT
The visual, sensory and emotional dimensions of human experience have become much more prominent in the humanities and social sciences. The human science disciplines, while attentive to the advances of the natural sciences, have sought to establish their own field of study. In the historical, social and cultural sciences, human beings are both the subject and object of enquiry. Historians have at various times had to defend the integrity of their discipline against positivist arguments about its supposed lack of scientific rigour. The natural sciences were seen as concerned with universal laws governing the physical universe. The law-like or nomothetic characteristics of the natural sciences were contrasted with the particularizing or idiographic character of the historical and cultural sciences concerned with specific historical events, social actions or cultural practices. Despite their twentieth-century flirtation with notions of scientific method, historians are ultimately storytellers and perhaps closer to film-makers than scientists.
