Posted: May 08, 2015 1:29 pm
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.
Like Clive pointed out, science =/= repeating experiments.
It's based on falsification and verification.
In history this means, not repeating experiments, but to analyse the available historical evidence and see whether it supports or contradicts your theory.