Humanities

===Truth and meaning===

The divide between humanistic study and natural sciences informs arguments of meaning in humanities as well. What distinguishes the humanities from the [[natural science]]s is not a certain subject matter, but rather the mode of approach to any question. Humanities focuses on understanding meaning, purpose, and goals and furthers the appreciation of singular historical and social phenomena—an interpretive method of finding "truth"—rather than explaining the causality of events or uncovering the truth of the natural world.<ref>[[Wilhelm Dilthey|Dilthey, Wilhelm]]. ''The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences'', 103.</ref> Apart from its societal application, narrative imagination is an important tool in the (re)production of understood meaning in history, culture and literature.

Imagination, as part of the tool kit of artists or scholars, helps create meaning that invokes a response from an audience. Since a humanities scholar is always within the [[wikt:nexus|nexus]] of lived experiences, no "absolute" knowledge is theoretically possible; knowledge is instead a ceaseless procedure of inventing and reinventing the context a text is read in. [[Poststructuralism]] has problematized an approach to the humanistic study based on questions of meaning, intentionality, and authorship.{{Dubious|date=February 2010}} In the wake of [[Death of the author|the death of the author]] proclaimed by [[Barthes|Roland Barthes]], various theoretical currents such as [[deconstruction]] and [[discourse]] analysis seek to expose the ideologies and rhetoric operative in producing both the purportedly meaningful objects and the [[hermeneutic]] subjects of humanistic study. This exposure has opened up the interpretive structures of the humanities to criticism that humanities scholarship is "unscientific" and therefore unfit for inclusion in modern university curricula because of the very nature of its changing contextual meaning.{{Dubious|date=February 2010}}