I’m not sure how the foundations of Science can be responsible for crappy history.

The historical profession went through interesting developments around the turn of the century and through the World Wars. I suggest a reading of Novick’s That Noble Dream, wherein a good case is made for the influence of science on history.

I think I understand how your model outlines the process of identifying doctrine, and I think that there is much benefit for thinking about the process in a legal sense.

Sterling,

You are right about textbooks and the gatekeepers of inclusion–though I would argue that a college survey textbook varies significantly today from one from twenty years ago. Textbooks change slowly, but they change. What hasn’t changed is the glut of popular history on the market that tells the same stories about great men and women.

I don’t know how historians can control for their own biases let alone the biases of their sources. We do the best we can, but we generally identify and rank causes based on our own conceptions of what causes history or our sources conceptions of what was important. Even the process of choosing our projects is a demonstration of our biases of what kinds of things are important.

Finally, we’ll have to wait and see about the effects of text mining. I think it will change the historical discipline for the better; I just don’t think it will be the omniscient answer for creating scientific history.

Historians may have left the Grand Narrative, but the gatekeepers of historical significance still police our historical narratives. Just look at the uniformity in what U.S. history textbooks include or exclude.

Historians do not need control groups because they avoid the deadly sin of social science: looking for the independent variable. Historians instead work with (and often rank) multiple causes when explaining how and why events happened. Testing and hypotheses work in history as historians control for things like the bias of their sources.

I think text mining will prove way more complicated than cliometrics. Dan Cohen is probably right that almost all historians will feel threatened by this new technology.

I mispoke here. What I meant to say was that my theory needn’t imply THE REJECTION OF a revelatory basis for one’s substantive allegiance to church doctrine; it just denies a revelatory basis for answer the formal question of what is church doctrine. Put more simply, one might believe that church doctrine is authoritative on the basis of personal revelation, but — in theory at least — I think that someone without such a revelation could still discover church doctrine. (On the other hand, without a thorough socialization in Mormonism our unbeliever is unlikely to be able to discover church doctrine well, just as an untrained layman will have a hard time grasping the contours of common law rules.)

I think the reason why historians have left the Grand narrative is because it omitted so much. The problem with hypotheses and testing in history is that there can never be a control group. All historical subjects are biased by their specific historical circumstances. Although text mining has and will have a profound effect on the historical field, I think that words will probably prove as complicated as statistical data was for the cliometricians.

jupiterschild,

I was trying to say exactly what you said, though not particularly well, in the statement you looked at. I was simply saying that while an observer’s testimony is the product of one interpretation, the historians treatment of that observation is an interpretation of an interpretation.

I’m simply advocating for a more robust collection of data, analyses that consider the data, and less making stuff up.

I probably misspoke when I said that your ideas didn’t leave space for revelation–I stand corrected. I’m sure the tone of the paper was geared toward a journal article which explains the overtly humanistic tone. I’d imagine most journals wouldn’t be interested in the meta-physical aspects of the process. I still don’t think your model explains devotional history in its totality because it doesn’t address the full range of authorial intent–though I would love to hear more of your ideas on the subject. How would your ideas play out at the methodological level? I think my conception of methodology sees historians as a much more active force in the creation of evidential constraints than you seem to be implying in your first comment. Many of historians’ most important choices about narrative and story play out in the ways they decide to evaluate and then use evidence. The historian plays an integral role at every step of the process. Maybe I’m just misunderstanding you and we are really trying to say the same thing?

The historian cannot go back to a particular moment in history to observe what happened. Thus, he must interpret the interpretations made by human observers made at or near the time a historical event occurred.

Joel, this is true to an extent, but I hear hints of the assumption that observation is itself not an interpretation, that observation would be more like scientific inquiry. Even were we to observe events at first hand (as anthropologists do) and describe them, this would not be an unmediated window on reality. (Not saying this is what you mean, but that your point raises this issue.)

It seems to me that scale is one the keys to solving the puzzle of whether history is an art or a science. I think scientific methods naturally lent themselves to the Annales School when its practitioners wrote history on a grand scale. Since then, historians have become much more narrow and specialized in their historical pursuits. I think historians these days have become less accustomed to analyzing the overarching structures in which the events they write about take place. Maybe if their was more emphasis on overarching synthesis in historical writing we would see greater attention to the forces and structures that scientific history tried to explain. Or maybe the explication of patterns and generalizations was the linchpin that originally held together scientific history–the ability to move from observation to hypothesis and then from testing evidence for patterns to generalizing about the past. For contemporary historians, specialization has apparently become the antithesis of or antidote to generalization.

I suspect Bushman was influenced by scientific history in the 1950s and 1960s. His 1969 essay “Faithful History” seems to contain elements of it. I wonder if his essay was trying to bridge the tension between scientific history and providential history–whether science explained the workings of the natural world or the hand of God was the engine of history. This may well be one of the main contradictions of modernity. As long as Mormon apologists can accuse secular historians of being too scientific with their naturalistic explanations, and academic historians can ridicule faithful historians for masquerading as scientists who talk about the forces or laws of providential history, I am not sure how we will work ourselves out of this dilemma.