Is History Based Upon the Scientific Method?

[John_Harshman]

@nwrickert

My original objection was only to the “based upon” part of your title. History is broader than that suggests.

I said “some history”, right?

[gbrooks9 (GeorgeB)]

@AndyWalsh

I wonder if testimony or revelation would count as an additional source of knowledge.

@AndyWalsh

I would hesitate to call it knowledge… but i think we could call it information!

[dga471 (Daniel)]

So, to recap the debate so far, the biggest difference between me and @Faizal_Ali is that I don’t regard testimonial evidence as scientific evidence. Now, I’m not sure that me and Faizal are really that different, in the sense that even I acknowledge that testimonial evidence is empirical evidence, in the sense that it was written and passed down by humans who were living and writing about the world as they saw it. Faizal seems to like to call any method of investigation that reasons from any sort of empirical data as the scientific method, even when that “data” is written testimony about events, filtered through the lens of culture, prejudice, religion, or other biases. In contrast, I do not think that the use of empirical input is necessarily the same as doing science. (Even the word “data” implies some sort clean, artificial experiment from which it is possible to extract useful knowledge to make future predictions about the behavior of the system - certainly not the case in history.)

Now, I would argue that Faizal’s use of the term “scientific method” is incorrect and anachronistic. It is not simply how we use the term; otherwise the icons of the “scientific revolution” would not be Newton, Galileo, Copernicus - astronomers and physicists, not philosophers, historians, or mathematicians. This is also why when we talk about the “history of science”, we don’t talk about Herodotus or Thucydides (pioneer historians), but Ibn al-Haytham, Bacon, Galileo, Newton, maybe Aristotle - all natural scientists.

This demarcation is not just an accident of history. Systematic experimentation in the lab (for chemistry and physics) and observation (for astronomy) were crucial to the development of modern science. The fact that we can now extrapolate these methods to answer questions about how nature behaved in the past does not make the scientific method basically the same as the historical method.

But does it really matter whether we label the historical method scientific or not? Maybe it doesn’t. After all, we all agree that there are elements of the historical method which share commonalities with the scientific method. Maybe it’s more fruitful to talk about exactly how they differ from each other.

[dga471 (Daniel)]

Now, to start the process of comparing the historical and scientific method, I was intrigued by @Rumraket’s comment in another thread. I’m not interested in engaging the topic of that thread, but I found his comment interesting:

@Rumraket

Eye witness accounts are intrinsic to the scientific method. If you have some apperatus and you need to read some display and write down a number, like voltage or temperature or whatever, then what do you do if actually witnessing this is disallowed by the scientific method?

Two differences between the use of eyewitness accounts in history and natural science:

1. In science, we usually don’t speculate about the credibility of the human sources - their motives, cultural or political biases. Instead, we just assume that they are truthfully reporting what they thought or remembered they saw on the display of their multimeter, for example.
2. In science, eyewitness accounts are generally repeatable and can analyzed using statistics, whereas in history, often each piece of evidence is unique and analyzed on a case-by-case basis.

[Faizal_Ali]

What’s the other difference?