Could history be a science?
To me, i personally feel no history is not a science. This is because:-
When scientists conduct their research, they are governed by laws of
the scientific method. Progress in science rests on systematic testing,
observation, and measurement of phenomena, normally requiring that
results can be repeated if experiments are carried out with the same
conditions. This allows new knowledge to be integrated into scientific
scholarship once the validity of testing has been accepted.
Historians, by contrast, are always, dealing with information that is incomplete. Indeed, we lose more
of the raw material we need to understand the past the further away we
get from it. When we talk about new research on the past, very
frequently what we mean is a reinterpretation of the materials that
formed the evidentiary basis of older monographs.
There isn’t such a thing as “the historical method.” The reason that
popular histories don’t necessarily keep tracking developments in
scholarship the way popular sciences do, is simple. History is not
science!
Indeed, there is no defined 'historical method', but could a scientific method be applied to history?
ReplyDeletei think scientific method is more of finding errors, instead of the truth, for example if you roll a dice and you sneeze and the dice gives you a six and u do the experiment over and over again the scientists are looking for errors to prove the experiment wrong, in history this could be applied to history as they could look for clue to prove what history tells us may not be true so to an extent yes
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