Is history a science?

Philosophy and Literature 29 (2):477-488 (2005)
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Abstract

An odd, but persistent question. In _Guns, Steel and Germs, Jared Diamond's answer is that history is or should be a science. Like sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists, he wants to extend the methods of the natural sciences to the social sciences and the humanities. My answer is an emphatic 'no!' E. H. Carr's _What is History? made an extended case for scientific history. The main burden of my essay is a dismantling of Carr's argument. Concerned with objective truth (_pace the radical skeptics), history writing may have science in its tool kit. But it is essentially an interpretive, narrative art

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10.1353/phl.2005.0024

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