Historical Science Is Not Worse, More Restricted, Or Less Capable Of Achieving Firm Conclusions Because Experiment, Prediction, And Subsumption Under Invariant Laws Of Nature Do Not Represent Its Usual Working Methods. The Sciences Of History Use A Different Mode Of Explanation, Rooted In The Comparative And Observational Richness In Our Data. We Cannot See A Past Event Directly, But Science Is Usually Based On Inference, Not Unvarnished Observation (you Don't See Electrons, Gravity, Or Black Holes Either).

-Stephen Jay Gould

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Historical Science Is Not Worse, More Restricted,

Stephen Jay Gould

Historical Science Is Not Worse, More Restricted, Or Less Capable Of Achieving Firm Conclusions Because Experiment, Prediction, And Subsumption Under Invariant Laws Of Nature Do Not Represent Its Usual Working Methods. The Sciences Of History Use A Different Mode Of Explanation, Rooted In The Comparative And Observational Richness In Our Data. We Cannot See A Past Event Directly, But Science Is Usually Based On Inference, Not Unvarnished Observation (you Don't See Electrons, Gravity, Or Black Holes Either).

Topic

Past

Law

Data

Words Change Their Meanings, Just As Organisms Evolve. We Would Impose An Enormous Burden On Our Economy If We Insisted On Payment In Cattle Every Time We Identified A Bonus As A Pecuniary Advantage (from The Latin Pecus , Or Cattle, A Verbal Fossil From A Former Commercial Reality).

Latin

Reality

Bonus