ke precise readings, in history, the results are obtained as they are found. These historical results could be documents hidden away in the basement of an old house for hundreds of years, which are then found and give a slightly different view of history to what the historians thought. These findings then have to be fitted into the timeline by the historians and could end up changing the historians’ ideas of reasons for why the events occurred. In my view this is not a systematic and methodical way of studying something, even though it is the best a historian can do.History can come close to a science when it is looking at the natural world and its phenomena. For example, if a formal account is written about the history of volcanoes, in which a number of volcanoes’ activities are compared and analysed over the course of the last five hundred years, then this would be very close to a science as it would have to explain why and how the volcanoes erupted when they did. However, this could be seen as just the science of volcanoes as all that is really being looked at is the reasons for the eruptions. So history and science are still two different concepts.Karl Popper said that any "positive support" for theories is both unobtainable and superfluous; all we can and need do is create theories and eliminate error - and even this is hypothetical, though often successful. Popper was in fact the first to argue that this is sufficient, although many superficial commentaries are keen to point out that other people stressed the importance of seeking refutations before Popper.Popper challenged some of the ruling orthodoxies of philosophy: logical positivism, Marxism, determinism and linguistic philosophy. He argued that there are no subject matters but only problems and our desire to solve them. He said that scientific theories cannot be verified but only tentatively refuted, and that the best philosophy is about profound problems,...
