Action and Testimony: The Historical Fact between Truth and Representation

History is a broad and comprehensive scientific enterprise that is deeply connected to other disciplines, in particular the social sciences. An intertwined study of action, experience, and memory in their dialectic relation to social facts on one side and the study of human action in an analytical-critical and hermeneutical perspective on the other can shed light on the methodological issues concerning the structural explanatory and interpretative dimensions of the historical past. In this context, the notion of action can be seen as the contact point between history as an event and history as a (personal) experience. The modern formulations of action theory oriented toward the conceptual the matisation of strategies and models in empirical sciences seem to underlie a reconfiguration of the role of testimony in history according to scientific methodology.