Was Dublin ever Irish?

Rebelheart wrote: »

Usually I'd agree with you MarchDub but in fairness to Doozie - who gave me supremely detailed maps and information on the medieval walls of Dublin thanks to this thread from last year - it's perfectly acceptable in historical articles for a professional historian to postulate on events where there is A) a clash in the primary sources a gap in the primary sources where an aspect of the past needs to be understood. As long as they explain the lacunae in sources and make it clear that their interpretation of it is surmised then it is acceptable for them to offer an explanation to their peers. It is then often followed by an article from another historian disputing it and from that academic debate is fed. Doing this, within the above confines, is common in history writing. It also accounts for a large part of the reason why history is an 'arts' subject rather than an entirely verifiable science subject.

You raise an interesting point about the position of history within disciplines. As you likely know there has been a raging debate about this for some time with many historians claiming that historic research is a science and ought to be treated as such.

An argument against the science model is that science develops predictive models for the future i.e. smoking can cause cancer etc. and history is about the past. But then there is a counter-argument against this predictive quality as the imperative and sole science model - and that science is about conclusions based on empirical evidence and as such the history model does fit.

I have no issue whatsoever with the model of advancing a position in historic research and then looking for the empirical evidence to support the theory – I’m an empiricist in that sense. What I was talking about in my post was injecting a postulation into a discussion as if that were enough to suggest an alternative to the known evidence. Do you see the difference?