Harsh86_Patel, on 30 January 2013 - 09:13 AM, said:
I am a person who appreciates empirical science to the greatest extent but Conventional Mainstream History doesn't consider empirical/scientific evidence as the only criteria to acknowledge and herald a historical scenario as fact,like I said that in History very little is based on science and more is based on consensus. Like you rightly pointed out there is a huge bias on which mythological sources are to be declared as credible and which are not. Indian mythology also faces this same bias and many historians declare the whole mythology as a fairytale.
History isn't a science or a rational subject. It's a study of humans and human actions. It does you no good to try to expect it to conform with science or for you to expect it to use the scientific method. I'd go so far as to say your disappointment in it expressed above is a fault with you rather than the field -- a bad workman always blames his tools.
In point of fact, the entire concept of history is not to provide a framework of undisputed, sequential facts. (That, by the way, is archaeology.) History is a study of the human reasons behind series of events -- the how and why of things, not the what and when (again, those last two are acheaology, not history). That's why it changes: humans change, and their understanding of things change. The simple fact is that the passage of time precludes the possibility of finding indisputable answers to historical questions -- we can't go back and ask Elizabeth I why she chose the words she did for her speech at Tilbury -- so no historical understanding is ever 100% proven or 100% undisputable. And the only way such the historical interpretation we have now will stay the exactly same is if human culture and society stays exactly the same. And to date, we have no record of such stasis and no reason to believe it will occur. (And lacking definitive evidence, consensus of the educated is the only way forward, but as I've pointed out, that has the deeply anti-democratic founding that people who know more, know more and that the opinion of people who know less is not as useful.)
You may wish to read up on the study of historiography, to understand exactly what history is, how it's created and what it's for before decrying it so readily.
--Jaylemurph
Edited by jaylemurph, 31 January 2013 - 08:17 PM.