The dissemination of divination in roman republican times

that precludes the investigation from being scientific. One could point to scientific areas
working on even more tenuous evidential basis, such as human paleontology or astrobiology.
“Since there is no possibility for controlled experiment, there is no possibility for
falsification, and therefore it does not qualify as science”. While the falsification criterion is
an important lever for scientific quality, few today would agree that it is the only necessary
and sufficient criterion for science. Once again let us first consider what other sciences we
would have to exclude from the academy if such a criterion was stringently applied. We
would have to deem unscientific: all of climatology apart from the past few decades, all of
geology apart from contemporary research, all of astronomy, all paleontology; basically all
sciences with a historical objective would be unscientific. Falsification consequently is not
enough as a standard of science. Other meta-theoretic criteria should be given equal priority,
such as consilience and parsimony.
“When you cannot do controlled experiments, you cannot isolate variables and therefore it
is not scientific”. This is another version of the former. The fact that you cannot make
controlled experiments does not mean that you cannot isolate variables. Variables may be
measured as well as in controlled experiments. Most of economy, sociology and parts of
medicine operate on the same conditions. It is true that historical research is constrained by
what evidence there is. It is not possible to produce new evidence and the historian
sometimes has to live with the fact that some things he will never know for sure. What is of
importance for scientific explanation, however, is when changes in one variable will
invariably result in changes in another variable (Woodward 2000). In historical investigations
you may not be able to see all possible combinations of manipulations of variables, but it
does not follow that the results are therefore unscientific.
I do not presume to have converted or even convinced neither historians nor cognitive
scientists that a cognitive historiography is necessary, but I do hope to have succeeded in
providing arguments that would at least warrant the attempt feasible to both sides. It should
also be pointed out that both camps may actually learn something from the integration of
cognitive science and history. Historians may gain a better model of the human mind than the
implicit common sense psychology typically employed by the historian. This can help the
historian to make better and more accurate hypotheses about the historical reality he tries to
understand. The cognitive scientist, on the other hand, may learn that factors that are
important in his lab are not very important in the real world, while others may turn out to be.
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