” ... 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.
“Percy W. Bridgman”
Not a historian. He’s outside of his discipline. There are problems with operationalism. It’s fake empiricism. Empiricism has a concrete definition. In history, historical empiricism relies upon primary sources. Anything outside of primary sources is speculative and cannot be relied upon in order to construct a historical narrative.
Empiricism can only deal with measurables. If it cannot be measured, then it is simply not an empirical observation. if two people can look at the same thing and come to different conclusions as to to what they are observing, then it’s not empiricism.
Operationalism assumes that we can acquire reliable knowledge using non-empirical observations.