[quote]Originally posted by General Woundwort:
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Originally posted by Tigbit:
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Originally posted by General Woundwort:
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Does historical evidence qualify? Or eyewitness testimony?
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Only if it can be tested under controled conditions. Testimony cannot be tested.
Such a standard is pretty much a death knell to history as a serious field of study. The standards of scientific experimentation are fine in their intended place (study of physical/energy processes), but when applied to the rest of life (which is *not* a "controlled environment") you end up with very little. That's why positivism died out as a viable philosophy.
Unfortunately that's exactly the way history is. Even science is not totally immune to the deliberate inacuracies that plague historical study. People will only write what supports their view. It is the checks and ballances that I detailed in the post Fyron found pointless that rescues science from the damnation of nearly every other dicipline.