Are the conclusions we draw from science inherently more certain than those we draw from history?

Question

When it comes to forming historical conclusions, one starts with a limited dataset (the sources available to them simply by virtue of how history has played out) with which to draw inferences from. Obviously, these conclusions are restricted to the available data, and so unless new sources are discovered via archeology or other methods, new conclusions cannot be made.

In science, however, datasets are ever-expanding, and tests based on hypotheses can be carried out endlessly. Tests are made in the present, and the landscape of data is constantly evolving and by extension conclusions are constantly be reevaluated.

In other words, in science, time allows for data to build up, but in history, the data we have is virtually fixed (albeit discoveries here and there). Does this mean scientific conclusions are more empirically reliable than historical ones?

Answer 1

I don't think the question can be usefully answered in the round. If we assume that we have no certain knowledge, which means at least no beliefs which are immune from error, then neither science nor history can offer such knowledge. But you ask about degrees of certainty - whether the conclusions we draw from science are 'more certain' (? less uncertain, more probable) than those we draw from history. It depends on the examples we use.

For instance, it is more probable that Napoleon existed than in the current state of science that string theory is true. But it is more probable that the Darwinian theory of evolution is true than that Queen Victoria married John Brown. One could multiply examples but I can't see that however numerous the examples we used on each side, an overall judgement of 'more certain', more probable, could be assigned either to science or to history.

Answer 2

To date, we have seen the Higgs boson (I believe) twice, and gravitons exactly zero times, and yet both of these are considered properly scientific concepts. So something in your presentation of 'empirical reliability' is decidedly off.

Science is not really as data-driven as most people seem to believe. In science one makes a theory (often by looking at a small handful of curious observations) and then gives a few cogent examples to demonstrate that the theory works in principle. Usually the idea of replicability is sufficient, and so long as a theory can be used functionally within some practice, no one gives much thought to formal replication. Empirical data becomes important for distinguishing between different forms or nuances of the theory, or for elaborating further details — e.g., once we had the basic theory of the electrical properties of semiconductors, people began experimenting with different levels of doping to see how the material properties could tweak the electrical ones — but empirical research guides theories more than it establishes them.

History as a science is not quite as limited as you've suggested. I mean, sure, if we have a historical question like "What were the causes of World War II" it is obviously the case that there was only one World War II. But when seeking out the causes of that war there is a huge amount of empirical data that can be addressed: political speeches, demographic data, diplomatic communities, personal letters of world leaders, newspaper and magazine articles, economic data, patterns in previous historical conflicts, etc, etc. A historian will create a particular theory about the the origins of WWII, and then access as much of this trove of data as needed to make his case. Some other historian who wanted to replicate (or falsify) that theory, would dig further into the data. This is no different in principle from a what physicist or chemist does, except that a historian has the more difficult job of assessing motivation (something that material scientists can ostensibly ignore).

Answer 3

A key tenet of science is reproducibility - the same experiment should yield the same results, no matter where or when or by whom it is conducted. If it does not, there is a problem with either the experimental setup, or the underlying theory. This gives us the ability to make predictions about the future with near-certainty (in areas of well-understood science with longstanding theoretical bases). If we do find an experiment that defies our predictions, we have the ability to revise the model to account for this new, unexpected result.

Historical analysis does not, and cannot attempt to do that, because there is no way to control the experimental environment. History can give us a theory about what will happen next, but if that prediction fails to come true, it is impossible to disambiguate whether it was a failure of the theory, or whether is was due to different experimental conditions. Conclusions/predictions drawn from history can be useful, and can even be accurate, but there is no way to evaluate them as consistently and rigorously as one could for a scientific experiment.

One requires data to evaluate a model, but history is essentially a series of anecdotes.

Answer 4

Kolmogorov once confessed his reason to change from History major to Math was because in history one reason is usually not sufficient to deduce a conclusion while in Math as long as it's sufficient then u're done. So from this perspective, the key why science is universally believed to be more certain seems to lie in the application simplicity of its logic (classical propositional, formal, modal, predicate, etc) framework than that of history, which is hard to find the exact sufficient reasons to arrive at any general non-trivial historical conclusion or so called law. The availability of empirical data is of secondary importance theoretically speaking...

Answer 5

The empirical successes of science is "indisputable". That some of them are empirically adequate is in effect certain, as certain as we put a man on the moon. So, while it may sound strange, their relative adequacy is more likely than it is that there was a battle at Waterloo.

Sometimes there are empirical errors, hoaxes, fraudulent claims, mistakes. But it would be a miraculous conspiracy to deny the empirical adequacy of our sciences tout court.

I think I recall being told that it's more likely we're confused about gravity - maybe somewhere in the ocean it stops working - than we are the results of quantum physics.

Of course, you know there are arguments about the "truth" of physics when we go beyond or under the visible.

Answer 6

The biggest difference is that science, by definition, has strict criteria for drawing conclusions considered to be scientifically justified --that is a key part of what makes it science. We can discern patterns in history, and draw conclusions, but there is no real science of history, so when we say "science teaches us X" and "history teaches us Y" we are making two very different kinds of statements.

History has a wider scope than science, it touches on many things that science cannot, but it does not certify its claims in the way that science does. It's quite possible for two historians to be in absolute disagreement over a historical event in a different way than would be possible for two scientists to disagree over a scientific claim.

We cannot say, in any purely objective, external way, that science is more certain than history. What we can say is that scientific knowledge composes an internally consistent, self-reinforcing, useful and usable network of beliefs, and that any properly certified belief within that network is attested to by all the others in a way that is not and cannot be true of historical claims.