

The Concept of Scientific History, by Isaiah Berlin (1960) [pdf] - benbreen
http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/published_works/cc/scihist.pdf

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benbreen
I posted a link to this in a comment earlier today [0] but after reading it
over again I thought it might merit a standalone HN post. Berlin is probably
most famous today for his short book "The Hedgehog and the Fox" but his essays
are really spectacular examples of the form in my opinion - intellectually
demanding but always concrete and straightforward; learned but not
pretentious. He's arguing here that historical reasoning is basically a form
of advanced common sense rather than something which can be founded on
scientific principles; there's also a digression about "electronic brains"
that might be of interest:

"Such a model or deductive schema is not much in evidence in normal historical
writing; if only because the general propositions out of which it must be
constructed, and which, if they existed, would require to be precisely
formulated, turn out to be virtually impossible to specify. The general
concepts that necessarily are employed by historians - notions like state or
development or revolution or trend of opinion or economic decline or political
power - enter into general propositions of far lesser range or dependability
(or specifiability) than those that occur in even the least developed natural
science worthy of its title. Such historical generalisations turn out too
often to be tautological, or vague or inaccurate; 'All power tends to
corrupt', 'Every revolution is followed by a reaction', 'Change in the
economic structure leads to novel forms of music and painting', will yield,
taken with some specified initial conditions, e.g. 'Cromwell had a great deal
of power' or 'A revolution broke out in Russia in 1917' or 'The United States
went through a period of radical industrialisation', scarcely any reliable
historical or sociological deductions. What is lacking here is an
interconnected tissue of generalisations which an electronic brain could
mechanically apply to a situation mechanically specifiable as relevant. What
occurs in historical thinking seems much more like the operation of
commonsense, where we weave together various prima facie logically independent
concepts and general propositions, and bring them to bear on a given situation
as best we can. The capacity to do this successfully - the ability to 'weave
together', 'bring to bear' various concepts - is a skill, an empirical knack
(sometimes called judgement) which electronic brains cannot be given by their
manufacturers."

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9674876](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9674876)

