Toward a science of history
Linda Hayes1983, The Behavior analyst / MABA
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Abstract
The scientific status of History was compared to other sciences in the critical areas event selection, investigative operations, and theory construction. First, in terms of events studied, history is regarded as a quasi-scientific study of past events. However, viewed from the science of behavior's perspective of what historians actually do, history becomes a study of current records. As a study of currently existing records, not the non-existent past, history has potential to become a science. Second, like other scientists, historians may undertake manipulative investigations: they can locate the presence and absence of a condition in records and thereby determine its relation to other recorded phenomena. A limitation has been the lack of quantification that results from emphasis on the uniqueness of things rather than on their communality. Scientific training would facilitate viewing similar things as instances of a larger class that could be counted. Another limitation that c...
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Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 1993
I DIFFERENTIATE between historiogruphy, the written product of historians (Historie in German); and history, the collective past of humanity and the subject matter of historiography (Geschichte in German). This is an essay about a theory of historiography. The minimum task of historiographic literature is to produce true statements about history.' Naive empiricist historians prided themselves on being the mouthpieces of the historical past, writing 'just what happened'. The historical past was supposed to be the author of historiography, while the historian presumed to be the living hand of the dead past. The reliability of historiographic accounts was supposed to be the product of the reliability of the evidence. Modern, called by its practitioners 'scientific', historiography was founded by Ranke who went beyond the previous critical reading of narrative accounts, written by contemporaries of the studied period, into reading original non-narrative documents in European archives. Ranke's assumption was that the best historical evidence comes from primary sources, not distorted by being put into sometimes misleading narrative form. Contemporary Histoire des Mentalit&, as has been developed mainly in the Annales school, attempts, in a sense, to be more Rankeian than Rankeian classical historiography by studying those aspects of the past that were repressed and thus maintained their pristine undistorted truth: histories of madness, untruth, taboo, automatisms of behavior, thoughts and actions regarding life and death, beliefs and rituals.* Nagele points to the similarity between the historian and the psychoanalyst in their relationship to the evidence: both share a free 'hovering' attention to the evidence, a total ideological suppression, at the price of eliminating a *My research has been helped by a grant from the Research Support Scheme of the Prague Central European University.'
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