“A profession is defined by exclusivity: the in-group is delineated from the out-group. There are criteria for qualification and entry; for maintaining standards; gatekeepers exist, and sanctions can be taken members who violate standards (both of competence and ethical probity).”
All of which exist for historians.
“The traditional “big three” are theology, the law, and medicine. Academics languished long as provisionally-respectable stepchildren, both helped and held back by the mundane fact that the first two were bound up with voluminous book-learning.”
Nonsense. You should start by reading up on the seven liberal arts.
They were: Grammar, Rhetoric, Dialectic, Arithematic, geometry, astronomy and Music.
This goes all the way back to the Greeks.
They are matched by what Aquinas called the seven sciences.
Civil law, Canon law, History, Natural Philosophy, Normative Philosophy, Theology and Metaethics.
This is very different from the programme today, but it demonstrates that history as a discipline is one of the oldest disciplines in existence.
“Forum members will note that “historian” and “scientist” “
You can fold up all of engineering and science into Natural Philosophy, respectively, if one studies the discipline even in the time of Galileo. It wasn’t until later that the disciplines began to divide where one might study Biology, and not Physics or Chemistry. This divide is actually quite late - late 19th century.
“Historians are usually writers, and there are no entry criteria for that activity.”
Quite the contrary. The study of rhetoric, logic and oratory are all part of the trivium and go back all the way to Ancient Greece. Whereas you may not value the ability to write and write well, it is very much a discipline.
“Historians are at most academics, and science was the province of wealthy eccentrics or underbusy clergy until the rise of government bureaucracies and university-led research institutions in the late 19th century.”
I suggest you look up the word empiricism and get back to me. Empirical history is possible, and it has many proponents, probably the greatest of them Ludwig von Ranke, who argued for the systematization of History and historical studies.
Again, please look it up yourself before commenting on historiography and the development of history through the ages. History as a discipline goes back to Herodotus, prior to Aristotle and natural philosophy.
” ... the seven liberal arts. ... Grammar, Rhetoric, Dialectic, Arithematic, geometry, astronomy and Music. ... the Greeks. ... Aquinas called the seven sciences ... Civil law, Canon law, History, Natural Philosophy, Normative Philosophy, Theology and Metaethics. ... demonstrates that history as a discipline is one of the oldest disciplines in existence.
... fold up all of engineering and science into Natural Philosophy ... . The study of rhetoric, logic and oratory are all part of the trivium and go back all the way to Ancient Greece. ... I suggest you look up the word empiricism and get back to me. Empirical history is possible, ... History as a discipline goes back to Herodotus, prior to Aristotle and natural philosophy.”
JCBreckenridge is confusing study and discipline with the workaday activities of professions. One would like to think that is being done inadvertently. It’s diverting to ponder stray bits of our cultural heritage (and it is a nice one), but very little of this stuff governs what we do.
I was thinking in operational terms. Rather less high-flown than “trivium,” “Natural Philosohpy, or “liberal arts” [all seven]. Readers are warned: “operational” might sound military but it is not. I mean it in the sense exposited by Percy W. Bridgman. Assuming any of you can be bothered to leave off kneeling in abasement before the ancients long enough to find out who he was.
” ... please look it up yourself before commenting on historiography ... seven liberal arts ... Aquinas ... seven sciences ... rhetoric, logic and oratory ...”
How sad that this is so difficult for so many.
Percy Bridgman is too harsh, one guesses (I’ve garnered similar horrified reactions from more than one respondent, and each one who divulged any background was infatuated with the classical/theological structures of knowledge), so I’ll backtrack farther:
I am interested in what a thing is, not what it’s called.
The Eurotrash approach - scholasticism, rhetoric, oratory, hierarchy, settled theology, orthodoxy - is to categorize, subsume, ultimately to limit, with a view to control. To be candid, attempts to force-fit all these High Middle Ages concepts onto the modern world can only assure chaos. Kneeling before the throne of Almighty Authority does not equip us to deal with reality.
Calling “history” a discipline does not make it a profession. Not even when one dresses it up as “historiography” and points out that it’s older than old. Much of it has been literary, and of superior quality, but that doesn’t make it more accurate. Nor less; there is nothing in the formulation to tell us about the accuracy of its content.