The Punch Die's new poll is: Is History an art or a science?
A purposely vague and open-ended question. Vote, then have at it in the comments section!
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History
4 comments:
Neither choice seems to fit for me so I didn't vote. To me it's more like a story.
I've argued this one at length elsewhere, so here I'll keep it short and say merely that history can't be used to predict or produce results like a science, even a social alleged science like economics, because its data is always too partial. Its only function therefore is to enhance humanity's sense of itself, which makes it an art as far as I'm concerned, even if it can use scientific techniques to this end.
Brian: Thanks for commenting.
Tenthmedieval: Excellent points and, coincidentally I share them exactly. I once had the question posed to me during a seminar class in medieval history in grad school. I answered that, though scientific techniques could certainly be used in historical research, the results could not be used to predict outcomes, (though, I think, you certainly can form and "test" a hypothesis in historical research.) Therefore, it's not a science. A good historical monograph is a work of art. So I answered it's an art. And I was bitterly challenged by a fellow student who vehemently argued that history is a science.
Well, it's certainly not a science, and it certainly has many of the qualities of an art. That said, I don't think that one historical treatment is necessarily as good as another (although I must admit that I don't think all "art" is created equally, either!), and so I also didn't vote on this one. Cheers, N.
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