igorfrankensteen wrote:As one of the few resident Historians, I'll point out that your opening post is disorganized, and strongly suggests that you made no effort at all to even so much as look up the various definitions of the term 'History.'

You seem to be leaning heavily towards dismissing all Historical research as mere conjecture out of hand, on the grounds that people have to interpret events, in order to describe what happened.

Your lack of consideration of the consequences of blindly discarding all references to the study of the past, is...amusing.

Sendraks wrote:My experience with historians is that information gets broken down into two sections when being disseminated.

1 - what the evidence tells us.
2 - what we might conjecture from that to fill in any blanks in the evidence.

It's usually pretty clear where the line between 1 and 2 is.

Clive Durdle wrote:Francis Prior in his book Home discusses how very careful archaeology enables a very real picture of what happened.

The problem is more that people like Herodotus, whilst discussing the motives of Helen of Troy and the actions of various gods seems to mix story with his story, possibly an attempt to create a lineage, a patina.

So I formally propose history is a science

but it is badly befogged by for example gods, Arthurs and Allied views attempting to assert their truthinesses.

Ideas like orientalism have also caused huge damage to quite legitimate areas of work.

MS2 wrote:
It seems to me to get less clear the further you go back in time. That is, almost inevitably, there is less and more ambiguous evidence with ancient history, and so quite often conjecture is needed to conclude almost anything. But maybe I'm thinking here of those TV programmes that 'fill in the blanks' almost to the exclusion of everything else in order to tell us startling new conclusions. Perhaps the academic papers are far more circumspect?

Clive Durdle wrote:Science does not mean only experimental science!

Sendraks wrote:My experience with historians is that information gets broken down into two sections when being disseminated.

1 - what the evidence tells us.
2 - what we might conjecture from that to fill in any blanks in the evidence.

It's usually pretty clear where the line between 1 and 2 is.

MS2 wrote:

Sendraks wrote:My experience with historians is that information gets broken down into two sections when being disseminated.

1 - what the evidence tells us.
2 - what we might conjecture from that to fill in any blanks in the evidence.

It's usually pretty clear where the line between 1 and 2 is.

It's interesting how you phrase 1. To my mind, evidence doesn't speak for itself. It has to be interpreted. Interpretation suffers the problem of subjectivity. I gave the example earlier of an archaeologist having to decide a pot fits a particular style. Do you not think this is an issue?

Scientists look to overcome subjectivity by repeating experiments, but historians can't do that.

Ironclad wrote:

MS2 wrote:

Sendraks wrote:My experience with historians is that information gets broken down into two sections when being disseminated.

1 - what the evidence tells us.
2 - what we might conjecture from that to fill in any blanks in the evidence.

It's usually pretty clear where the line between 1 and 2 is.

It's interesting how you phrase 1. To my mind, evidence doesn't speak for itself. It has to be interpreted. Interpretation suffers the problem of subjectivity. I gave the example earlier of an archaeologist having to decide a pot fits a particular style. Do you not think this is an issue?

Scientists look to overcome subjectivity by repeating experiments, but historians can't do that.

Yes they can. Egyptian history has been catalogued and studied, as you know, and if I wanted more 'organisation' of a particular time-period somewhere I felt was lacking, Exodus say, I can go and try. I can take earlier works and try to revise them.

The Antikythera mechanism waited seventy years from its discovery for the science to be able to examine it fully. While the historians may have 'only' inferred why it was on the ship at in the first place - heading to Julius Caesar's party- it would be them, not the lab-jackets, who could read the language on the device, Alexandrian (IIRC), and likely constructed in Corinth. It'll be the divers and the archaeologists who will narrow down the location, destination and use.

It's all science, they are all building knowledge.

MS2 wrote:

igorfrankensteen wrote:As one of the few resident Historians, I'll point out that your opening post is disorganized, and strongly suggests that you made no effort at all to even so much as look up the various definitions of the term 'History.'

Pretty quick on to the attack. 'Disorganized', 'made no effort at all': obviously, I will take to heart the telling critique of a 'resident Historian' (with a capital H, no less)

If I had wanted to look definitions up, that is what I would have done.

If you had wanted to ask a cogent question,instead of stating a prejudice and requesting comment, it would have helped you tremendously to do at least a tiny amount of research into the words you used in your question.

You seem to be leaning heavily towards dismissing all Historical research as mere conjecture out of hand, on the grounds that people have to interpret events, in order to describe what happened.

And you reach this conclusion because I asked people here what their opinion was?

No, I reached that deduction, because (as you have repeated since) you said

So what are we doing? Just offering personal interpretations? I tend to think we at least want it to be more than that, because people talk a lot about 'evidence', and evidence is something that is used to try and make some sort of objective case. And if it isn't anything more than personal interpretation, does that mean we can't say anything meaningful about the past?

and

There no doubt followed a lot of hard work, a lot of tests, comparisons with other finds, etc etc. But at every stage along the way there will also have been subjective interpretation, guesswork and so on, involved.

...thereby indicating that you are starting from the firm conviction that attempts to describe the past, all require subjective guesswork "at every stage."

Hardly an unbiased starting point for you.