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Ted McCormick

In general I'd resist describing historical research as the testing of hypotheses, even though in some cases it is designed this way, and even if the prospect of looking like a STEM field (or a humanist's or administrator's idea of one) has powerful appeal for extremely obvious material reasons

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Ted McCormick

It's even likely that you could reverse-engineer a hypothesis that any given history might be read, in retrospect, as testing. And then you could describe the work as having been designed to test it. But, ironically but importantly, as a history of how the work happened, this account would be false

Ответ для Ted McCormick
Ted McCormick

I suspect that often the "hypothesis" would be so broad as to negate its putative value in likening history to a Science. ("My hypothesis was that context matters" seems weak.) Perhaps it's worth thinking about what the payoff of such an exercise would be. Some people do seem committed to it.

Ответ для Ted McCormick
Ted McCormick

Anyway, I think it would mislead anyone trying to learn to do history themselves, or to understand how many historians go about their work, which often begins with very open-ended questions (about what sorts of things an archive might say about a given topic, or what such-and-such a place was like).

Ответ для Ted McCormick
Ben Wurgaft

One very interesting objection to an historian's job talk I once saw, was "well this is very lawyerly, but do you actually care about reconstructing the past?" It was, in a way, a defense of historians' work against a bias towards argument itself as the reason for doing history.

Ответ для Ted McCormick
Ted McCormick

I'd add that, for someone who has worked on seventeenth-century natural philosophy, natural history, technological projecting, etc., various elements of natural knowledge-making have affinities with elements of historical knowledge-making; The Scientific Method is of limited use in grasping these

Ответ для Ted McCormick
conputer dipshit

even contemporary scientific practice can only roughly be described as hypothesis testing. often even there it looks a lot like reverse engineering you describe, after a more open-ended exploration

Ответ для Ted McCormick
Ted McCormick

(Just to continue my prior thought: not only does historical work often begin with open questions rather than delimited hypotheses, questions that may jump off either from a broad theme, or a specific historical event or figure, or a particular archive or type of source, or even a methodology...

Ответ для Ted McCormick
Ted McCormick

...but it can also, in my experience, persist in this mode through the research and into the writing, which, for this reason among others, is not like the "writing up" of a completed experiment. Perhaps writing here is akin to experiment there; but that is a pat analogy, not a precise description.)

Ответ для Ted McCormick
Snarky Yeti

Is an encounter with past discourse on method in the human sciences, and particularly what distinguishes them from the natural sciences, part of the standard training of academic historians? (Thinking of folks like Wilhelm Dilthey here.)

Ответ для Snarky Yeti
Ted McCormick

in general I’d say yes but no doubt it varies from one program to another; going back beyond the Annales is also probably getting rarer (and harder to do as time goes on)