Gaddis the landscape of history5/20/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() Gaddis argues, in even more simplistic terms, that the reductionist view is exclusive and the ecological view is inclusive. There is no way to separate each variable from the whole and study them as though the variables could exist independently from the whole. Natural sciences like geology and astronomy have an ecological worldview that allows them to study how each part effects the whole and how the whole affects the parts. They look for these independent variables and expect to find them out in the world. The social sciences understand reality by dividing it into parts and use each part to explain the whole. The social sciences will almost never be able to predict future events, but historians will be able to describe the past in more or less accurate ways. Because the social sciences are more speculative in that way, they are more likely to inaccurately carry out their task. In simplistic terms, social scientists are concerned with the future and historians are concerned with the past. In The Landscape of History, he argues that both history and the social sciences are scientific, but what the disciplines are concerned with differs. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University and is best known for his work on the Cold War. ![]() History and the social sciences are very different academic disciplines, and John Lewis Gaddis, in his book The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (2004), explains why. ![]()
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