Napoleon on his Imperial Throne, by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1806)
(Wikimedia Commons public domain)
Not exactly a cross section of humanity or a representative of the typical human.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
There are those \u2014 some of them read my blog \u2014 who appear to argue that science is the only valid kind of knowledge, and that anything that isn\u2019t scientific isn\u2019t really knowledge.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
I find such claims \u2014 if that\u2019s indeed what they\u2019re really saying \u2014 unspeakably weird and obviously false.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
I offer, below,\u00a0a comment on the subject from the great German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002; yes, you read that right). \u00a0It\u2019s perhaps just a bit difficult, but his point seems to me unassailably sound to the point of obviousness.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
The physical and natural sciences study particular cases in order to generalize rules from those particular cases \u2014 replicability being an important aspect of sound work in such sciences as chemistry and physics, though rather less so (or, anyway, differently so) in areas like cosmology, geology, and paleontology. \u00a0Evolutionary biologists aren\u2019t typically enamored of this or that individual fruit fly; ichthyologists don\u2019t\u00a0usually try to write biographies of individual groupers or jellyfish; wildlife biologists don\u2019t often devote their careers to a particular elk; no botanist has focused his life\u2019s work on an individual shrub.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
By contrast, historians can spend, and have spent, entire careers on the life and\u00a0times of Andrew Jackson, on the late Byzantine empire, on the Umayyad Dynasty, on the biography of Napoleon, and on the Tokugawa shogunate. \u00a0And they\u2019ve done so not so much in order to formulate predictive general theories \u2014 in the style of biochemistry or particle physics \u2014 about the American presidency, the rise of dynasties or the collapse of states, or the life-cycle of famous Corsicans, as because they wanted to understand those people or those periods in and of themselves<\/em>.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
That\u2019s what Gadamer is getting at in this passage. \u00a0History, he insists, is\u00a0very different from the natural or physical sciences and, even, from \u201csocial sciences\u201d like anthropology, sociology, and psychology:<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
But the specific problem that the human sciences present to thought is that one has not rightly grasped their nature if one measures them by the yardstick of a progressive knowledge of regularity. \u00a0The experience of the sociohistorical world cannot be raised to a science by the inductive procedure of the natural sciences. \u00a0Whatever \u201cscience\u201d may mean here, and even if all historical knowledge includes the application of experiential universals to the particular object of investigation, historical research does not endeavor to grasp the concrete phenomenon as an instance of a universal rule. \u00a0The individual case does not serve only to confirm a law from which practical predictions can be made. \u00a0Its ideal is rather to understand the phenomenon itself in its unique and historical concreteness. \u00a0However much experiential universals are involved, the aim is not to confirm and extend these universalized experiences in order to attain knowledge of a law \u2014 e.g., how men, peoples, and states evolve \u2014 but to understand how this man, this people, or this state is what it has become or, more generally, how it happened that it is so.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nHans-Georg Gadamer,\u00a0Truth and Method<\/em>, 2d ed., rev., translation by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 4.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
It is extraordinarily odd, though \u2014 or, at least, so it seems to me \u2014 to claim that historical knowledge isn\u2019t really knowledge.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 \u00a0 There are those \u2014 some of them read my blog \u2014 who appear to argue that science is the only valid kind of knowledge, and that anything that isn\u2019t scientific isn\u2019t really knowledge. \u00a0 I find such claims \u2014 if that\u2019s indeed what they\u2019re really saying \u2014 unspeakably weird and obviously false. \u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[16128,6990,2767,5,915,243,117],"class_list":["post-87978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-gadamer","tag-hans-georg-gadamer","tag-historiography","tag-history","tag-knowledge","tag-science","tag-scientism"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/a>