Thanks. I like this:

>Lorraine Daston

>I think of history as a discipline, one that invented and is still inventing ever new rigorous methods for not only the cross-examination of the sources we have, but even more importantly, the discovery of sources we don’t yet have.

>I look upon the integration of many different strands of evidence braided together into a strong rope of argument in history as identical, philosophically to the practices of any science. This is one of the reasons why the history of science is, of use to science and scholarship.

>All of these methods, which constitute, taken in toto, rigor in any given scholarly or scientific discipline develop at different times under different circumstances.

>Without knowledge of how differently, for example, in medicine, clinical observation and randomized clinical trials developed, you have no clue, no foothold in the next task, which is: how do you weigh these two kinds of evidence? How do you integrate them?

>And that holds, I think, mutatis mutandis, for all scientific disciplines. So that’s one good reason why the history of science is of use to not only the sciences, but all branches of scholarship.