Testable explanations and predictions. Linguistics, interesting as it is, isn't science. Neither is mathematics. Does that mean linguistics and mathematics aren't worthwhile? Of course not!
For historical linguistics, yes, you can't summon new historical evidence out of the void, but you still have a huge amount of existing evidence to work with, and you can always go looking for that which has been overlooked: you have the entirety of written history at your disposal.
You start with a set of axioms. Then you derive and prove theories that are explanations and predictions made by those axioms.
more like math attempts to make a verbal map of how our brains understands the external stimuli. It is usually physics that makes predictions about the external world, math doesn't need to do that.
E.g. basically math solves a problem for N-dimensional spaces. I have problems thinking in 3D, not to mention 256-dimensional.
ha. even though the mechanisms may be intractable for humans eventually the inputs and the outputs of math transformations must be dumbed down to be understood by human brains or else they are useless (to humans). neural nets come to mind
There are plenty of very valid disciplines of human knowledge that aren't sciences (and they seem perfectly fine in not being sciences since they have a clear aim and methodology for their work that, by impossibility of what they do, just can't follow the scientific method). History is a clear example.
It's refuting their validity as sciences. Science is often taken as more authoritative and objective as other subjects, so the label matters.
I may be a perfectly good dentist, the fact I am not a neuro-surgeon doesn't invalidate my worth as a dentist;
But If I claimed to be a neuro-surgeon I should be investigated before I cut open any skulls.
I meant that by stating that social sciences aren't actual sciences and have profound problems, one is in no way stating that disciplines that aren't sciences (like History, the example given) aren't not valid pursuits of human knowledge.
Hypothesis: Troy existed
Prediction: there's a buried city in asia minor
Test: dig it up
Hypothesis: What happened in Armenia was a genocide.
How do you disprove this? There are arguments for and against, but ultimately this would require reading the minds of the leaders at the time. You can also present logical arguments (which I totally buy, this is just an example), but there is no way to test this.
There is only one historic timeline, so History is not a science.