Hi fellow historians,
This is my first post on Reddit. I was wondering if history could be characterized as a science. I'm a dutch history student and I'm using this question as a thesis for philosophy of science. For this paper I'm using George Orwell's article "What is Science?" and Bertrand Russels book "The Scientific Outlook". Do you guys have a specific thought on this question and what literature/texts are belonging to your thought? I'm looking forward to your answers!
Lots of discussion of this here and here. I think "not unless you define 'science' in terms so loosely that it becomes useless." On the question of defining science, I would look into the "demarcation problem" in the philosophy of science; the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a nice page on it. It is not easy to come up with a rigorous definition of science.