History is a Social Science, But Without Science

HISTORY IS A SOCIAL SCIENCE, BUT WITHOUT SCIENCE A few decades ago a comprehensive work published on social sciences named as ‘‘Open the Social Sciences’’ by Gulbenkian Commision; in the introduction part, Immanuel Wallerstein divides the sciences into three categories, historically. The first part is natural sciences, the third one is humanities and the second one is social sciences which are in between the first and the third one. According to Wallerstein’s article the social sciences fall into two parts as nomothetic (economics, political sciences and sociology) and idiographic (history and anthropology) social sciences. Wallerstein, Immanual. "Introduction." In Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996. On the other hand, the article, ‘’The Challenge of Quantitative History’’ written by E.H. Monkkonen, is a work having several arguments which abnegate above mentioned segregations. In my opinion, Monkkonen’s article is an offensive and simultaneously a defensive work, and that makes it possible to hide some dark points, and highlight his arguments to put forward the idea of quantitative history. To be able to understand these, we need to know what nomothetic and idiographic means. ‘‘Nomothetic is based on what Kant described as a tendency to generalize, and is typical for the natural sciences. It describes the effort to derive laws that explain objective phenomena in general. Idiographic is based on what Kant described as a tendency to specify, and is typical for the humanities. It describes the effort to understand the meaning of contingent, unique, and often subjective phenomena.’’ "Idiographic and Nomothetic." A Different Voice. October 28, 2010. Accessed October 6, 2015. As we can see, history as a social science has its own position. Validity of the position, of course, opens to discussion. Therefore, we need to look at what Monkkonen claims in his article. His one of the main arguments is ‘‘to promulgate the investigation of questions that arise from the context of historical problems’’. This is his defense, when it comes to his argument he says that ‘‘promulgate but not by making development of covering laws’’. It looks like a contradictory expression because it is hard to understand how he will promulgate history by slipping it from idiographic to nomothetic without putting general laws. When we have looked at his other argument, he claims that ‘‘[today’s history is far from being quantitative.] This is why historians seem atheoretical while critics and positivist social scientists seem flighty. It is also why both can share a similar criticism of history, while simultaneously rejecting each other.’’ As we all know history is a window looking into the past, and the number of the windows is equal to the number of different history schools. As we can get from Kant’s describe, it is mostly about meaning, naturally. Even in a simple case, people may mention about the case differently. It is not just about the memory; it is almost all about the perspective. We cannot interpret the structure of a molecule in a different way, but we can do this in history, for example a historically significant deal may be interpreted by a Marxist and a Micro historian in a different way. This doesn’t make it a fiction or a fictional work, because it is all about the nature of the history discipline. When it comes to the problem of narrowness, I think it is not an important problem as much as Monkkonen said. To look at a wide field from a distance may provide us a holistic perspective but it also leads to lose some details. That’s why it is mostly about what historians want to do. ‘Quantitative history’ has also a similar approach to the sources, it uses a hierarchical method. When I take into consideration all these, it is very close to say that it may be just a problem of naming. That is, when it called as quantitative history, the sound is getting bad and it has many different connotations. Rather than calling it as quantitative history, it would be better for history to mention about that as ‘‘history with a pinch of number and a little bit of graphic’’.