Untitled Document Historical, literary, and cultural studies lie at the opposite end of the sprectrum of human knowledge from plane geometry. Euclid provided a set of axioms from which the geometer could derive the complete set of theorems. All relations within the system are stable and all are known. In history and other wayward disciplines that seek insight into how and why people act, think, and feel, there is no comparable set of axioms, no theorems, no proof.
Much crucial evidence is unrecoverable.
The objects of our study, furthermore, learn. Since they act, to some immeasurable degree, based upon their understandings of the choices they face, we can never truly see through their eyes, even though that is one of our chief goals. In predicting the weather it is possible that a butterfly landing on a flower in Sumatra can influence rainfall in Sudan. Forecasters ignore this as a merely theoretical possibility. They assume the minute effects of vast numbers of butterflies cancel out.