sam humphrey
Joined: 07 Jan 2013
Posts: 11
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 Posted: Mon Jan 21, 2013 10:58 pm Post subject: |
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I’m not quite sure what the first question is asking, but I think both science and history have become more objective. In the sense that science is figuring out how things work, people began to use the scientific method a few hundred years ago instead of only observe and record, or pray to deities to learn why things work the way they do. I don’t think they are pushing against each other, because they are fundamentally different despite some similarities.
Science is about observing, experimenting, and theorizing why something works the way it does or why a natural event happens. History is more about studying human patterns, so the historian cannot ‘observe’ or experience his study first hand like the scientist can. Historians can also theorize why people act the way they do, but they cannot experiment with people because that would be logistically impossible.
Answering Alexis’ question, Darwin is because he is the only real scientist of the group. Marx theorized about class structure and Jackson proposed key parts of the American identity, but neither studied the hard sciences like Darwin or contributed much, if anything, to them.
I don’t have a new question, but I was thinking about one of the prompts we wrote about last week: Is History a science? My expansion to that is: Are studies like political science, economics, anthropology the ‘sciences’ of History? |
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