I use it to describe a real difference between science disciplines. And I am not alone. From the evolution side of the debate:
Empirical and Historical Science
The sciences are not all the same either. Although the process of science remains the same, the nature of the observations may differ. These observations can be either non-historical (time independent) or historical (time-dependent) (Simpson, 1963). Sciences like physics, chemistry and much of molecular biology are largely non-historical, although they may rely on historical observations in particular instances. They deal with observations that are not expected to change with time — they are time independent. An experiment done today should produce the same results as one done 10 years ago or 10 years in the future. For example, water should always flow downhill because the effect of gravity does not change with time, whether it be a billion years ago, yesterday, or today. We can expect that gravity will not change in another billion years. Sciences like astronomy, anthropology, much of biology, geology, paleontology, and evolutionary biology are largely historical, although each uses experiments commonly.
Historical sciences rely on observations or evidence (results) of phenomena that happened in the past. These results arose through a series of events, the history, and each event was contingent on previous ones. Historical scientists can only infer the causes from the results, since the results happened in the past...
Historical science has a greater margin of error most of the time than non-historical, experimental science because scientists cannot repeat each event and must view only the results of those events through a filter of time. That margin should not, however, be mistaken for a lack of knowledge. We understand the formation of the Grand Canyon in all aspects, but not in every detail. In evolutionary biology, so-called missing links are details, not evidence that destroys the theory. Just because you may not have any information about your great great grandmother does not invalidate her existence nor that she is a part of your history. Paleontology and evolutionary biology are largely historical sciences that reveal the broad patterns, and very commonly even the detailed patterns, of evolutionary history. Gaps do exist in that record, just as there are likely to be gaps in your own family's historical record, but that does not invalidate or make the science less substantive.
Likewise, I have no use for "just so" stories which constitute much of the hypotheses offered by the historical sciences, e.g. anthropology, archeology, Egyptology, evolution biology.
That we are able to observe adaptation of wildlife in the field or evolution of bacteria in the laboratory does not make "just so" stories any less the fabrications that they are.
In my view, the historical record is simply too spotty for historical sciences to be taken as seriously as the hard sciences, e.g. physics.
As Cleland put it, paraphrased, the inability to perform tests should be offset by proliferating alternative explanations and then searching for a smoking gun to discriminate between them.
Failure to do that makes the only explanation offered smack of religious dogma as well as a "just so" story.
This is Science!
I must admit, I find it rather amusing that you decided to link to and quote an article which appears to be written by a scientist, explaining the scientist's perspective, and which corroborates pretty much everything I have said about science and the scientific method. I posted a little while ago about how Marx did not base his socialistic ideas in science, even though he called it "science"--if I had read that article before making that post, I probably could have pointed at quotes in that article that explain the point I was trying to make.
That said, the use of the "historic" vs. "non-historic" terminology as used by that author are different than the way the philosopher used the terms. It is more of a semantic difference than anything else, and approaches into a huge grey area. For example, I may wish to examine the effect of a chemical on gene expression, so I do a series of experiments using successive generations of cells (what I call "passages"). Later, I want to reexamine my experiment, so I repeat it, but I use cells from ten passages later. I find out that my cells have evolved to the extent that they no longer respond to the chemical the way they did during earlier passages. Does this mean my earlier experiments were "historical"? Does it mean my results were invalid (assuming all other components of the experiment were constant)?
I should point out that this situation is not a hypothetical--it really did come up, when I was in graduate school.
Of particular interest is a passage near the end of that same article that you linked:
Evolution is the scientific study of how organisms — bacteria, archaea, protists, fungi, animals and plants — came to be. Evolution relies on the same sort of scientific processes and evidence as do all other fields of science. The methods and processes of evolutionary biology do not differ in any significant way from those used in any other science. Evolutionary biologists use critical thinking, evidential reasoning, judgment of authority, hypotheses development, data gathering, and hypotheses testing just like all other scientists. Evolutionary biologists practice nonhistorical or historical science or both. All biologists contribute to evolution in one way or another. Some use experiments, for example with fruit flies, while others observe the sequence of fossilized organisms in the rock record. Some rely heavily on the other sciences for complementary data, for example the evolutionary paleontologist is beholden to physicists for the understanding of dating by radioactive decay of various rocks.
Darwin (Darwin, 1859) brought together a large number of observations and developed the hypothesis that the environment acted to select individual variants in a population that had particular characteristics. He did not know what caused the variation, such as eye color, growth rates, or height, but he determined that if a particular character were consistently selected by the environment through successful breeding, in the same way that dog breeders selected characters they desired in their dogs, then changes would ensue in future generations. This hypothesis he called "natural selection". As he and others gathered more evidence and added additional hypotheses in the following decades, his hypothesis became strengthened and called a theory. Evolution is a simple elegant theory in its basics, yet it rapidly becomes complex. This complexity leads to other hypotheses to account for aspects of the overall theory. For example, punctuated equilibrium — the idea that species are in some kind of evolutionary stasis for long periods of geologic time and then rapidly evolve into another species — was presented as an alternative to Darwin's idea that evolution was a gradual affair with changes taking place slowly and evenly over a long time. Punctuated equilibrium enhanced Darwin's theory by clarifying how evolution took place through time — it did not disprove the theory as some religious zealots have claimed. Today, many biologists and paleontologists around the world are working to better understand and test Darwin's theory in all its details. Some of these biologists confirm Darwin's ideas, some develop more critical details, and all constantly test the theory, but the theory of evolution has yet to be disproved in spite of all this effort.
As I mentioned earlier at post 509, Henry Gee, Editor of "Nature" was not so kind. He said: [quote not repeated here]
That quote is almost certainly part of a description of something else. While I couldn't find that quote in context, I will say that while such things as the development of language are difficult to reconstruct in controlled-experiment fashion, we can find enough evidence of language evolution to logically conclude that it is an on-going process. That does not mean that careful documentation of language differences over time is not scientific.
Evidently you have no use for Philosophers of Science like Sir Karl Popper and Carol Cleland - both of whom I've linked earlier in this thread.
True. I have little use for philosophers, and little patience for attempts by people untrained in the scientific method at trying to describe it.
Likewise, I have no use for "just so" stories which constitute much of the hypotheses offered by the historical sciences, e.g. anthropology, archeology, Egyptology, evolution biology.
That we are able to observe adaptation of wildlife in the field or evolution of bacteria in the laboratory does not make "just so" stories any less the fabrications that they are.
In my view, the historical record is simply too spotty for historical sciences to be taken as seriously as the hard sciences, e.g. physics.
Apparently, the only evidence you would accept would be a recording made by a time machine that can go back and observe (maybe by time-lapse photography?) the process of evolution as it occurred. That will never exist. Nor will we ever find every single fossil example of every member of a single unbroken lineage stretching back hundreds of millions of years, in which we can see the morphological changes as they occur. That we cannot document every single step along the way does not mean it didn't happen, or that the progression is fundamentally different than what we logically deduce.
To reject the observations that led to the formulation of the theory of evolution, and to its refinements over the years is to essentially reject just about all science--even physics.
Your use of the word "historical sciences" still does not match the usages of that term by either the philosophers or Lipps. Although you apparently reject my specific scientific discipline as "historical" because I make heavy use of evolutionary theory, I have never heard anyone describing biochemistry as "soft", or any science as "historical".
We are polar opposites here as well. For instance, I would say that the geometry (e.g. circle) exists, and the mathematician came along and discovered it.
Physical matter forms geometric shapes. Humans almost certainly observed natural circles, spheres, squares, trapezoids, etc., for millenia before the development of mathematics.
Obviously they cannot test what is not there. It is equally ridiculous to say that there can only be one explanation for evidence in the historical record.
I'll refer you back to the section of the This is Science! article that you linked earlier, and which I quoted above. There may be many explanations, but only those which are borne out in a systematic scientific analysis are accepted. You are perfectly welcome to propose an alternate explanation, test it scientifically, and publish it if it stands up to the scientific scrutiny.