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The Scientific Use of Historical Data

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Paul Meadows
Paul Meadows*
Affiliation:
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois
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Extract

The cogency of a scientific study utilizing historical data tends to be, unfortunately, very largely a matter of the methodological presuppositions of the reader. Indeed, the barriers to a more general and thorough scientific use of history are, for the most part, methodological. There are two such barriers: (1) the uncertainty as to the validity of an intensive scientific investigation of historical problems, and (2) the lack of a clear delineation of the fields of research.

Concerning the first, two problems must be considered: on the one hand, the nature of historical knowledge (the methodology of “history”) and on the other, the nature of scientific knowledge (the methodology of “science”). The predictive assumption of the present discussion is that to understand the essential identity of historical and scientific knowledge (though not of methods and problems) is to justify the scientific manipulation of data which are unquestionably historical. The thesis which is being argued here is that all data are historical, that all reality—whatever its level or type—is event-structured, that events have an existential dependence on one another, that therefore relationships of relevance and causation may be established, and that the determination of such relationships is the function of scientific research in any field.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , January 1944 , pp. 53 - 58
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association 1944

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References

1 It should be noted that ideological bias and cultural compulsions have not been insignificant in the widespread failure to make a scholarly attack on this problem.

2 The reference here is to the familiar distinction between history as the study of the unique and science as the study of the recurrent.

3 More or less typical presentations of this dualism are: C. Oman, On the Writing of History (New York, E. P. Dutton, 1939), and B. Croce, History, Its Theory and Practice (New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1921).

4 Cf. H. Berr and L. Febvre, “History,” Encyclopedia of Social Science, VII, pp. 357–68.

5 Cf. C. Becker, “What Is Historiography?” American Historical Review, XLIV (1938), pp. 20–28.

6 Cf. M. R. Cohen, Reason and Nature (New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1931), Book III; R. E. Park and E. W. Burgess, Introduction to the Science of Sociology (University of Chicago Press, 1928), Chapter I; and F. J. Teggart, Theory of History (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1925), Chapter V.

7 Cf. J. Dewey, “Context and Thought,” University of California Publications in Philosophy, XII (1931), pp. 203–224.

8 Cf. M. Mandelbaum, The Problem of Historical Knowledge, An Answer to Relativism (New York, Liveright, 1938), p. 6. My dependence on this study for much of the point of view being presented here is very great.

9 On these points, consult: C. A. Beard, “Written History as an Act of Faith,” American Historical Review, XXXIX (1933), pp. 219 ff.; K. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1936); V. G. Simkhovitch, “Approaches to History,” Political Science Quarterly, XLIV (1929), pp. 481–497 et sequitur.

10 “It is evident,” according to Pareto, “that the greater the number of facts we have at our disposal, the better, and that perfection would be attained if all the facts of a given kind could be utilized. That, however, is altogether impossible, and therefore it is simply a question of a more or a less.” Cf. Mind and Society (New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1935), I, p. 318.

11 Cf. Mandelbaum, op. cit., p. 199.

12 Cf. Mandelbaum, op. cit., p. 202.

13 Cf. Mandelbaum, op. cit., Chapter IX.

14 Cf. Mandelbaum, op. cit., pp. 293–7.

15 The physical scientists have developed the laboratory technique by which recurrence is studied under highly controlled and standardized operations. The social scientists have been forced to utilize “mental” experimentations by which, through the observations of successive contexts, uniformities of behavior are observed and classified. With repeated observation, generalization about uniformities loses its informal statistical and qualitative character and becomes formally statistical and quantitative. Cf. L. L. Bernard, “The Development of Methods in Sociology,” Monist, XXXVIII (1928), pp. 292–320.

16 Cf. H. A. Phelps, Principles and Laws of Sociology (New York, Wiley, 1936), p. 120. The claim of the historian that he deals only indirectly with events, with traces and effects as contained in “documents”, is no less true of the scientist. Knowledge is awareness of the realm of events, and it is mediated by a set of operations in what is called the knowing process: the knower operates upon the known in a manner called knowing to produce knowledge. The chief difference between the historians and the scientists as to method is that the latter carry their operations a stage beyond those of the former: to the symbolization of events in terms of a system of symbols inductively derived from previous observation. Cf. A. C. Benjamin, Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (New York, Macmillan, 1937), Chapter II.

17 Cf. R. Bain, “Concept of Complexity in Sociology,” Social Forces, VIII (1929-1930), pp. 222–231; 369–378.