When we last discussed the historian's craft to borrow the title phrase made famous by Marc Bloch we delved into the relationship between time and space and we drew the comparison they have to the landscapes produced by cartographers. But unlike the cartographer, the historian does not gaze upon a vista of terrain that he can put down onto paper. The historian, instead, must deal most often with the residues left from the past. These residues of the past give a structure that exists through time and give the historian the ability to draw inferences from what has survived to the present.
The most obvious distinction between history and science comes with the very practice of science: The workings of the scientific method are such as to achieve consensus by many scientists testing the resultant facts brought by scientific inquiry over time. Science gains its particular distinction from other modes of human inquiry because science is structured in such a way that it must assemble reproducible results. When the matter of human activities over time are studied; science and its methodology prove less capable of providing consensual knowledge; instead, science can only serve as a model for historians in search of a method that would bring continuity to their practice because the sciences, in particular the sciences were becoming more methodologically historical.
With the discovery of 'deep time' in geology and evolution of organisms in biology from the late 18th century to the mid 19th century, the immutably static and timeless nature of science suddenly took on a significance that could actually be measured by aspects of change and development. By the time quantum mechanics were being discussed in the early 20th century, the importance of relativity of measurement had been added to the way in which science viewed the universe. The importance of these changes to the way science developed as a means of inquiry meant that scientists had constituted science as a means of deriving structures from processes: The end result of these developments was to make science a form of historical inquiry.
Much like scientists, historians engage in thought experiments and it is what makes the past inseparable from the present inhabited by the historian. And the historian must employ a delicately constructed yet powerful imagination to make the narrative about the past sufficiently prescient to the reader. History can only be truly constructed from sources that firmly place it within the milieu of the period being studied; it is certainly not an artistic representation because of this dependence on source materials. So when we question whether history is a science we must include in our inquiry what separates 'actual replicability' of precise means and methodologies from 'virtual replicability' associated with thought experiments.
Metaphorically, the cartographic association to the elements of time and space analyzed by history is important to reintroduce here. Maps are dependent on the degree of believability that they can bring to their human observers and that is achieved through a process the begins with the mapmakers assimilation of a real landscape or territory through a process of representation that results in the actual persuadability of the map.
The correlation to historical methodology takes a similar path in that the historian will begin the recounting of the past by using archival sources that are interpreted through the historian's particular perspective is employed and readies the history to be presented for the judgement of a human audience which will employ a collective as well as individualized view of the historian's completed work.
Missing from the work of historians distinctive from that of social scientists is the absence of 'scientifically-based' equations, graphs, matrices, and the other social science-based modes of proving their inquiries. The distinction between the way history is done and social science is done brings to the forefront of our discussion the question of whether there is such a thing as an independent variable. Historians do not do history with their attention focused on independent and dependent variables. Historians deal with the interdependency of variables by searching for and connecting them through their passage through time and thus there is no need to create this bifurcation of interdependency into independent and dependent variables. The thought that all variables are dependent on all other variables becomes key in understanding the specific difference between how history and the social sciences operate and is akin to the difference between how a reductionist and ecological view of reality differ and will be the focus of a future discussion.
No comments:
Post a Comment