Hendrix's Eccentric Commentary

12/16/2024

Big Historiographical Thought for the Day:  It is perhaps pretentious for me to have a philosophy of history, but to the extent that I do, it is that history has more in common with the humanities, say philosophy and literature, than it does with the social sciences such as sociology or psychology.  (Incidentally the University of Pittsburg did not agree with me and put us in the social sciences’ building.)

The heart of my belief lies in a sense that the social sciences are an attempt to quantify the essentially unquantifiable. It often seems to me that the social sciences are engaged in generating statistics that either confirm what we already know (which admittedly has some utility), or instead are engaged in generating a mass of data without any guidance at all as to what it might mean. This is perhaps the doubt of a math illiterate, but the fact that the social sciences are apparently currently having something of a “crisis of replication” enhances my suspicions.