HISTORY AND SCIENCE-
OBJECTIVITY IN HISTORY
HISTORY AND SCIENCE
1. There is fundamental difference in the subject of study: the natural
sciences are concerned with
phenomena of the physical universe, while history is concerned with human beings and human societies in the past.
There is a difference in the phenomena
studied, and these phenomean are very
different in charecter .
2. Historians do not conduct controlled
experiments of the sort typically conducted in a science laboratory.
3. Historical study (though some, obviously, would disagree with it) is not governed by general laws and is not concerned with
developing or refining such laws.
4. While scientific laws offer a power of
prediction, history (thought it should equip us to cope more intelligently with the World in which we live) does not have that power.
5. Science is ‘useful’ (it enables people to make televisions sets, or nuclear bombs);
history has no such direct material pay-off.
6. Similarly it is fairly clear when scientist have got things right, org ot them wrong;
with historians there is not quite the same sure way of telling whether or not they
have got things right.
7. While the relationships and interactions studied by scientists are almost always best expressed mathematicallyy, this is not
generally so of those studied by historians.
8. History, the ‘product’ of
‘interpretation’ by historians, comes in the form of an extended piece of prose (article or book) in which the various discoveries and interconnections have to be woven together with some
pretence to literary from and elegance.
Major scientific discoveries are often best reported in very terse articles, sometimes in a page or two of
mathematical equations.
9. While scientist can report in a neutral way on the results of their experiments, historians, being
concerned with human affairs in the past, are unable to avoid
value judgements: describing
certain events as ‘a massacre’ for instance, or analysing the
motives of a particular politician.
OBJECTIVITY:
The historian must treat sources with appropriate reservations;
The historian must not dismiss counterevidence without scholarly consideration;
The historian must be even-handed in treatment of evidence and eschew "cherry-picking";
The historian must clearly indicate any speculation;
The historian must not mistranslate documents or mislead by omitting parts of documents;
The historian must weigh the authenticity of all accounts, not merely those that contradict a favored view; and
The historian must take the motives of historical actors into consideration.
-“Ideally the past should be understood on its own terms. Historical events should be examined in light of the standarts, values, attitudes and beliefs that were dominant during a given period and for a given
people, rather than evaluated exclusively by twentieth-century standarts.”
-John Tosh “ the business of historian to be to apply theory, to refine it, and to
develop new theory, always in the light of the evidence most broadly conceived.”
