"...mein Acker ist die Zeit", Aufsätze zur Umweltgeschichte - Oapen

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The second remark refers to a contribution from the floor with the warning, at
least as I understood it, that theory-building should not be too far above the
ground and should be aware of scales, and so on. Surely this is correct, as well as to
a certain extent self understood. If you allow, I may rely on personal experience.
As a trained biologist, I am part of a scientific community where you are educated
in favour of permanent theory/hypothesis building. You get up in the morning,
create one hundred hypotheses and by the end of the day they all went into dustbin.
And nobody is disappointed about that. Because we believe, that the production
of heuristic approaches is important because any scientific progress only results
from the errors and does not arise from the obvious right. Giving errors a
chance you will improve science and scientific progress. By admitting this I hope
to encourage people who probably felt reluctant in continuing their work because
of warnings as the one from the floor. I want to encourage you: Just formulate
hypotheses in the morning, build alternative ones at noon and don’t be afraid of
dismissing them in the evening. Some may call this speculation, but it is more than
that.
As we have seen, it is exactly what Bruce Campbell did in his introduction to
the conference. By doing so, he created a most impressive scenario and a most
credible narrative on the “plague” event in 1348 in terms of environmental history.
As I mentioned earlier, the linkage between disasters, mentalities, and pathogens is
something that is hard to prove, and perhaps never will be in the sense of strict
scientific laws. The linkages are not “confirmed”, but they are reliable and we all
believe that he is absolutely right in creating this scenario and asking his key questions
about “coincidence”. Definitely I subscribe to what he has presented, though
it is distant from being really confirmed. But it is credible. His scenario is the hypothesis.
And if one has a different opinion, it would be too cheap to simply say
“No”, he/she would have to prove were Campbell’s assumed linkage is wrong.
This is the type of knowledge producing narrative that I favour as a common
enterprise. One of you just said “Well, we have to work on a common epistemological
basis.” – Yes, but its already visible, we simply got to work on it further.