Can empiricism legitimately constitute history as a separate epistemology?
This first question confronts White’s basic concern about history as a form of knowledge. The fundamental function of the historian is to understand, and explain, in writing, the connections between events and occurrences in the past – working out a relationship between knowledge and explanation, and as White points out explain that relationship in the form of a narrative. One way to explain that relationship would be to imitate the natural sciences, and although there has always been a substantial following among historians (especially among those with a positivist or social science training) for this form of flattery, it has never achieved a dominant methodological status. The lapsed Marxist E.H. Carr famously argued over forty years ago history cannot claim to be straightforwardly scientific in the sense we understand the physical sciences to be: it does not share the protocol of hypothesis-testing, does not employ deductive reasoning, nor is it an experimental and objective process
