We can use the past as a guide, but of course it does not mean we should rely solely on the past as a guide. It is commonplace to try and use past events as a template for judging the present. For instance, some people will look at Iraq today through the prism of the Vietnam War, or others will make parallels between modern day United States and the Roman Empire in the 4th century etc.

Moral of the story: Never trust an art critic. They're all lying bastards.

One can test hypotheses in fields such as these not by running controlled experiments in labs, but by making predictions about what evidence should already exist if a certain hypothesis is true (or what evidence should not exist if it is false), and then going out into the world to search for that evidence. Sometimes the necessary evidence has been destroyed by time, and in that case some questions will remain unanswered. However, in all of these fields, enough evidence has thankfully survived that we can put together a very good general picture of what happened.

History can be scientific, if it relies on physical artifacts and science to verify the artifacts as genuine. Problem is, artifacts are either there or they're not; you can't run another experiment. There's a lot more to it than that, and others have weighed in in a much more thorough manner than that, but I won't, since I really should be working right now.

I'm curious, where does history fit in here? The student of history has severe limitations on how scientific his methods can be. Many of the phenomena he studies cannot be reproduced in the laboratory, or outside it. General 'laws of history', if they exist at all, are elusive and very difficult to verify. So, is historical knowledge valueless because it lacks scientific rigour?

Sincerely,

Joel