History and Science

[Urselius]

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.

Martin,

You haven't read a single word I wrote about what History entails. or you have ignored it.

Anyway, History is not about hypotheses about the past. Nor has it only to do with judging the value of written evidence.

I read what you wrote, I don't think I ignored it, I also don't see its relevance to my comment about proof by experiment.

You said that History is written through the synthesis of information from many sources, epigraphic, dendrochronological etc., etc. - I'm correct in this interpretation, am I? I agree wholeheartedly, but even with non-literary evidence conclusions about what people did in the past are still not provable in the manner that a biological or chemical hypothesis can be proven.

Just because I don't think History is a science does not mean that I consider that it does not posess intellectual rigour or validity, or even that I think it has less intellectual rigour than a science.

Surely History is at least in part about hypotheses about the nature of past events. I can think of one such situation off the top of my head. The Anglicisation of lowland Britain is interpreted as either the result of a mass migration of people from northern Germany or about the disproportionate influence of a few boatloads of German pirates on a land in social and political meltdown. These sound suspiciously like two competing hypotheses to me.