Posted: May 08, 2015 12:10 am
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.
That is interesting, because I do see historical research as building knowledge, but I definitely don't see it as science, precisely because I don't see that historical hypotheses can be tested by repeatable experiments ( which I understand to be a defining feature of science). So when you say history is science are you defining science in a different way? And if so, what is your definition?