Doom wrote:
ThomisticCajunAggie wrote:
Under the standard contemporary definitions, those aren't science. None of them proceed via experimentation. Math is a science (or collection of sciences) in Aristotle's sense, but law and history are not...
Both history and law, or more accurately, jurisprudence, are sciences, there is no possible definition of 'science' you can come up with that would apply to something like physics but not disciplines like history, psychology, economics, or jurisprudence are not.
This can be disproved by counterexample. Here's the definition Google gives:
"the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment."
History and law do not fit under that umbrella, so your statement has been disproven. I don't necessarily think that's the best definition, but it is a definition (and roughly equivalent to what most people think of as science in the contemporary world).
Aristotle held that sciences involved knowledge of universals. However, law and history deal with particulars, and thus they are not sciences in the sense of Aristotle either.