Is History an art or a science?

In work beginning in the 1930s, Popper gave falsifiability a renewed emphasis as a criterion of empirical statements in science.

Popper noticed that two types of statements are of particular value to scientists.

The first are statements of observations, such as "there is a white swan." Logicians call these statements singular existential statements, since they assert the existence of some particular thing. They are equivalent to a predicate calculus statement of the form: There exists an x such that x is a swan, and x is white.

The second are statements that categorize all instances of something, such as "all swans are white". Logicians call these statements universal. They are usually parsed in the form: For all x, if x is a swan, then x is white. Scientific laws are commonly supposed to be of this type. One difficult question in the methodology of science is: How does one move from observations to laws? How can one validly infer a universal statement from any number of existential statements?

And that convinces me that Popper wouldn't (or shouldn't) have included history as a social science. After all, history doesn't attempt to predict anything.

I'm using the term "verification" in the common, everyday manner, not in the specialized, Popperian manner.

In any event, for Popper, "verification" was far less important than "falsification," because, whereas a falsified empirical claim was always false, a verified empirical claim could only ever be provisionally true.

Who's Adam Lincoln?

Unlike physics and chemistry, history has not yet discovered any universal statements, except false ones. ("Communism will triumph by the year 2000!")

And I suppose that makes history a less accomplished science.

But historians can still make singular factual statements such as "Adam Lincoln lived from 1809 to 1865", check them for their truth, and collect the ones that prove true. Sciences can't make universal statements that are unfalsifiable, but they have no duty to contain any universal statements at all.

No, I don't think you are. When I look up verification, Webster passes the buck to its entry on verifying. And according to that entry, the common, everyday manner of using the word "verify" is "to prove, show, find out, or state that (something) is true or correct". It's your usage that is specialized and idiosyncratic, Popper's that is common and everyday-like.

Yes, that is true for universal statements like "all swans are white". But to the extent that a science states singular observations ("this swan is white", "this president lived from 1809 to 1865"), I don't think the distinction matters much.

His point is precisely that it would be unscientific to pretend we can predict anything (according to Popper, the future cannot be predicted). Biologists don't try to predict the future, and historians shouldn't either, if they want to be scientific.

Who said historians want to be scientific?

A major trend of historical methodology in the 20th century was a tendency to treat history more as a social science rather than as an art, which traditionally had been the case. Some of the leading advocates of history as a social science were a diverse collection of scholars which included Fernand Braudel, E. H. Carr, Fritz Fischer, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Bruce Trigger, Marc Bloch, Karl Dietrich Bracher, Peter Gay, Robert Fogel, Lucien Febvre and Lawrence Stone. [...]

In opposition to the claims of history as a social science, historians such as Hugh Trevor-Roper, John Lukacs, Donald Creighton, Gertrude Himmelfarb and Gerhard Ritter argued that the key to the historians' work was the power of the imagination, and hence contended that history should be understood as an art.

My major was bacteriology and I got out with a Bachelor of Arts. They were picky in my day.

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Who said historians want to be scientific?

Quite a few historians:

Olivier5 wrote:

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Who said historians want to be scientific?

Quite a few historians:

Poor deluded souls.