History and Science

[Carlton Bach]

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.

So, what is your feeling about linguistics? The entire debate, to my mind, appears to rest on the meaning attributed to the word 'science' which, sadly, is rather more complicated than it looks. I get the impression you favour a very narrow understanding, limited to the pursuit of theoretical understanding of natural phenomena based on inductive reasoning, aided by the copious application of metrology and mathematics, and subject to disproof by experiment. By those lights, history is not a science. BUt even the English word alone encompasses more than this in its prototypical field.

Now, once we cross language barriers or look into the past, things get even more complex. The term 'Wiossenschaft', for example, while once a straightforward rendering of 'scientia', as was 'science', can look back on over a century of divergent development. If I were asked to render it in English, the closest I could come today would be 'academic discipline' and a footnote. I don't know the situation in French and Italian, but suspect it is rather similarly complicated.

As to the placement of anything in any traditional canon of subjects of study, it means very little. German universities do not have an equivalent to 'Arts' or 'Humanities', for example. This is primarily a phenomenon of the English-speaking world. Here, history tends to feature under 'Geisteswissenschaften' or 'Kulturwissenschaften', which (like 'science' to 'Wissenschaft') is close, but not the same thing. And I recall several progressive places in the Anglosphere putting history in with the social, erm, sciences.

Personally, I would not want to use the word science to describe history because of the relative blurriness of its current meaning. But I would also be very careful to say exactly what I mean by that for precisely the same reason.