History and Science

[Urselius]

Interesting.

I can think of other authorities for all Roman soldiers being taught to ride, that part of the hypothesis is certainly verifiable. The hasta, spatha and clipeus are attested as being used by cavalry at earlier periods when the pilum, gladius and scutum were the (legionary) infantry equipment. This also supports the thesis. There are written references to an all-cavalry army in northern Italy at a slightly earlier time than Aurelian, under Gallienus, so this could also be used.

However, logic would suggest that causality is not shown. It is not necessary to be given specific types of weapons and shields in order to ride a horse, if the intention was to dismount to fight. There are also circumstances, independant of primary sources, which would mitigate against the production of an army composed wholly of dual purpose cavalry/infantry soldiers. The time of Aurelian was one of crisis in the Empire including severe military, social, political and fiscal dislocation, and inflationary pressures on state income were considerable. As mounted soldiery were, and always have been, far more expensive to raise and maintain and took far longer to train than foot soldiers it seems highly unlikely that a state in crisis could afford to mount all of its soldiery.

[Magnus]

You know, I really f**king hate when you type out a well thought out post...then go to use the spell check, then you get asked for your username and password, so you type it in, then your post is lost.

Computers suck crap. Here's my basic gist:

Scientists have more room for innovation because they are limited only by their imagination...historians are guided more by what the historical record has shown us. The rest is all interpretation, which one must be careful doing by looking closely at the existing evidence.

[Tarbicus]

You know, I really f**king hate when you type out a well thought out post...then go to use the spell check, then you get asked for your username and password, so you type it in, then your post is lost.

Computers suck crap.

ROFL!

[Gaius Julius Caesar]

Just out of curiosity, I am going to ask this question only once, because I can't actually believe anyone would confuse JC with Christ, just on a coincidental duplication of initials, the man in to god story, and the 'very vague' time coincidence. There were many other people who were also proclaimed sons of gods....or deified, just the initials are different, and one guy actually managed to have a longer lasting personality cult.....OK, this may border on blasphemy, and I will probably be stabbed to death at the AGM.....(more delusions of grandeur) but hey, lets get real, who is it who started that who theory off in the first place.....? hock: :? shock: :? roll: :?: :?:

[Comerus Gallus]

.....

All the God-King Xerxes requires is this -- A simple offering -- of earth & water -- a token of Sparta's submission to the will of Xerxes.

[Caius Fabius]

Science = Man's observations of the world created around him, and then trying to set limits and rules so he can understand it. LOL (Often these man-made rules later turn out to be incorrect, only a few decades or centuries later. ( see :history).) :roll: :lol: :lol: :lol:

[caiusbeerquitius]

"Science" comes from "scientia". So it is just a question of definition of a term, in the end. Maybe more people should read von Ranke.

Caius, I just love that.

So historians of Ancient History are parasites living off the research of scientists!

No. Many of the modern sciences in fact derive from historic sciences. They just pay the tenth for what was given to them. Take sociology as an example. Apart from that: With your argumentation: Is Archaeology a science? Linguistics? Ethnology?

[Gaius Julius Caesar]

Archeology is very much a science.......other wise I would be head of the world archaeological society...
I have shovel, bucket and sieve......and a nose for gold.......let me dig! :roll:

[Goffredo]

Einstein over his desk in Princeton had a sign with the words
"Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."

For those of you that are not english speakers, the word "count" does NOT literally mean "1, 2, 3..."


Although I enjoy and greatly value History, and feel that studying it we learn much about the past and might be able to comprehend things of the present and glimpse at things to come, I do NOT consider it a science in the same way any of the hard sciences such as physics, chemistry, biochemistry are... and not even like biology and the much more softer psychology.

Modern science moves on two legs, experiment and theory. Niether leg is more important than the other. There are moments when one leg is propels science forward while the other lags behind, then the later outstrips the former and the cycle repeats.

History is not scientific because there is no experimentation. The best a historical theory can do is to say that if one looks at certain facts in a new way then new meaning can be given to them and to other facts previoulsy unexplained. Maybe one might predict that certain types of evidence might turn up if one looks in new places. This is wonderful and exciting!

But there is no way to do experiments in the true sense of the word, that is the creation of an artificial situation to see how things evolves. There is no way to be precise enough to make predictions of how events of the future can evolve and certainly no way to run the movie backwards to see how things would have gone in the past had certain things be different.

As there is no tight way of confirming or trashing competing theories, these remain vague enough to survive most challenges and most die out gradually because the outlook of historians change gradually more from changes in ideology or fashion than from solid evidence. True ideologies and fashions are to be found in science too as scientists are all humans and humans can be swayed and blinded by ideology and fashions. But in history it is rare a beautiful theory be killed by an ugly fact. This instead happens everyday in science and the ideologies and fashions get rapidy swept away once word gets out that solid contrasty evidence has been found.

This is, of course, my opinion. I've thought about many times and feel that ultimately the disagreements are about what we mean by modern science and less by what we mean by History! But the heat of the discussion could be lowered if one realizes that there is nothing wrong with NOT being a science!

History is history is history!? Well Science is something else.

[caiusbeerquitius]

Modern science moves on two legs, experiment and theory.

Well Science is something else.

I agree, if you change "science" to "natural science".

See, here we differ simply between "Geisteswissenschaften" and "Naturwissenschaften" and "Rechtswissenschaften" and "Wirtschaftswissenschaften". History and most of it´s derivates are among the "Geisteswissenschaften". So I am used to simply accept that there are different approaches to "science", and that not the "Naturwissenschaften" can claim to be the only science existing. Look at "economical sciences". Experiments? No way. Not above the level of "peanuts". Only empiric valuation. So, as I said earlier, it rather seems to be a semantic problem. When I, with the background just explained, read that history is not a science, it is basically seen as an insult. Seeing how the semantic field for the term "science" changed in English, I can understand it somehow. But, regarding the origin of the term, and it´s original meaning, I think it is sad to lead it to such´a narrow-minded and narrow definition.
But then, Dexter´s Laboratory, that´s the picture. Science.
Again, it is so sad, that so few people are familiar with von Ranke.

[Goffredo]

PART 1:
I closed my previous post by saying that there is nothing wrong with not being a science and I started out paying my homage, deep interest and respect for History.

I will say that I am tempted to accept the suggestion and say I am speaking of "natural science" while you and others are speaking of "science" in a wider sense of the word. I am tempted to agree to avoid a steriless debate. But let me warn you that one that uses the word too loosely must be prepared to be in strange company.

In Italy (elsewhere?) it is fashionable to use "science of...":
"science of gastronomy"
"science of fashion tecnology"
"science of turism"
"science of liguistic mediation"
"science of multimedia comunications"
"science of internet"
"science of economic and financial security"
"science of the cultural industry"
"science of development"
"science of social relations"
"science of information: journalism and book editing"
"science of organization"
"science of musical and theatrical performance"
"science of ..."

PART 2:
I never did think economics was a science even though people do refer to it as such. Indeed the debate is open whether cosmology is a science! But to the credit of cosmologists, for a theory to be considered serious it must stick its neck out and predict something measurable that astrophycisists then go to out to look for. If a field can at least do that then many, and I too, are willing to relax the requirement that it be experimental in the admittedly harsh sense of the word, that is the creation of artificial phenomena in labs. The debate is open whether global ecology or climatology are sciences. But they too can be included if one relaxes the definition of what an experiment is. Are simulations experiments? Maybe, if you believe the simulation. But to believe a simulation you need to first check it on well understoond cases. How do you check a simulation without an experiment. Well one way is to see if it tracks well with past events! So cosmology, ecology and climatology, that all use simulations, may included if past events are documented well enough. Comology fairs very well as astronomy does a darn good job in observing the universe and, you all know, when looking thru a telescope you are actually looking backwards in time. So a cosmological theory has to account for how the universe eveloved. Climatology is becoming more and more solid as more and more evidence of what the climate of the earth was in the past. Climatology might even test itself by trying to account for climates on other planets (Venus, Mars). Ecology is the weakest but it is growing fast.

Economics? History? They could be "science" in my extended sense of the word if the data of past events of human history were more reliable. But they are not. Ecomomics of very recent past of modern societies is well documented and could be studied well enough to allow someone to test his simulation. But how do you know he has extracted a general law or model of economics and not just some effective law of globalized capitalism? I hope you agree that economics fairs better than history. Only since archeology have ancient historians had anything that could be considered evidence by a "natural scientist". Before that, cross checking the "sources" was the only thing a histoical scientist could do. History of the recent past fairs better as there are huge quantities of information that can help the creation of a coherent picture (private letters, birth documents, trash, ....).

go to go. Am sure no one read this far anyway

[Robert Vermaat]

Is History not a science because it's classified amongst the Arts? Why, that's purely semantics, based on university bureaucratic motives. Other universities classify it amongst the Humanities, does that make other scientific studies Inhuman? Of course not. Whether a study is a science is not defined but what university section it is in. :wink:

Modern science moves on two legs, experiment and theory. Niether leg is more important than the other.
[..]
History is not scientific because there is no experimentation. The best a historical theory can do is to say that if one looks at certain facts in a new way then new meaning can be given to them and to other facts previoulsy unexplained. Maybe one might predict that certain types of evidence might turn up if one looks in new places. This is wonderful and exciting!
[..]
But there is no way to do experiments in the true sense of the word, that is the creation of an artificial situation to see how things evolves. There is no way to be precise enough to make predictions of how events of the future can evolve and certainly no way to run the movie backwards to see how things would have gone in the past had certain things be different.

I think that you mix up a few things.

First of, your description fits not only history, but also linguistics, law, astronomy, archaeology, but also mathematics and fhysics, to name but a few.

There is expriments and reproducable experiments. A chemist can put 26 fluids in a bottle and predict what will happen.That is partly based on theory and partly on experiments.

A physicist can't. An astronomer / astrophysicist can only theorise about a black hole turning around a star, but since they have not actually been there, they can't prove a thing.
So is astronomy not a science? According to your description Goffredo, it isn't. Or archaeology. Or linguistics. Or law. Or.. well, I made my point. :wink:

Well Science is something else.

So, tell me then, what is it? Mumbo-jumbo? Magic? Fancy footwork?

My problem here is that a) people judge sciences without realising what they entail, and the conclusion.

I agree, if you change "science" to "natural science".
See, here we differ simply between "Geisteswissenschaften" and "Naturwissenschaften" and "Rechtswissenschaften" and "Wirtschaftswissenschaften". History and most of it´s derivates are among the "Geisteswissenschaften". So I am used to simply accept that there are different approaches to "science", and that not the "Naturwissenschaften" can claim to be the only science existing. Look at "economical sciences". Experiments? No way.

Indeed!

What most people here who want to strike History from the ranks of science fail to realise, is that the study of history is NOT primarily about presenting a theory about the past. History, AS A SCIENCE (I insist on that) is about the study of the sources available to us. And that is not done through interpretation (as many here keep saying) but through a methodology that has been scientifically developed over centuries. These include chronology, demography, historiography, genealogy, paleography, or cliometrics, to name a few. Historians not only simply rely on these, the development of these fields is an integral part of History as a science.

Some part of the field of History actually apply experiments, btw, such as social history. Not my cup of tea, but I thought I'd mention it.

Summing up, the view of the Science of History as 'some people writing a subjective view of what they thought happened in the past' is not only hopelessly limited, it's also unjust.

I usually compare this to a description of Michael Schumacher as 'a man who gets into a car and drives in a circle while applying the breaks at times.'

[caiusbeerquitius]

Thanks. Saved me a lot of writing.

My problem here is that a) people judge sciences without realising what they entail, and the conclusion.

But Robert, where is b) ???


To all of those who want to argue that history is not a science I suggest you to read the following author´s works:

Ranke, Leopold von: Die großen Mächte (1833)
Droysen, Johann Gustav: Historik (1857/1882)
Burckhardt, Jacob: Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, hg. von Jacob Oeri, Berlin/Stuttgart 1905

[Robert Vermaat]

My problem here is that a) people judge sciences without realising what they entail, and the conclusion.

But Robert, where is b) ???

Oops, that should have been: "and b), the conclusion that follows from the deduction that something isn't science, without failing to specify.

[Urselius]

Science was once "Natural Philosophy," does this make science identical to the study of Plato and John Stuart Mill or Descartes? An etymological roundabout doesn't really get us anywhere.

History is not a science, in the accepted modern meaning of the term, because it is fundamentally not amenable to experimental proof.

A hypothesis in history can be supported by written or other evidence, but it cannot be proven by it. Written evidence is particularly debatable due to the possiblilty of bias or mendacity in the writer.