Sound science, including historical science, is issue-driven. When the issues involve interaction between natural systems and human society, we must incorporate methods from the human as well as marine sciences.

This is not unproblematic and the two types of science often lead separate lives. Some fifty years ago, physicist C.P. Snow lamented this fact, when coining the term the two cultures, the natural sciences and the humanities, operating in separate intellectual worlds. Since then, the differences have most likely grown greater in many ways. In recent theoretical works on historical science, it has even been claimed that there are absolute differences between natural sciences and history. English historian Arthur Marwick stated that ‘…there is a fundamental difference in the subject of study: the natural sciences are concerned with the phenomena of the natural world and the physical universe, while history is concerned with human beings and human societies in the past. There is a difference in the phenomena studied, and these phenomena are very different in character.’

Issues involving man's interactions with the environment transcend this ‘fundamental division’ of the two cultures, so how does one go about solving this problem as a historian?

A source is a function

First of all, we need to establish the status of history as a science. Within the continental European tradition, it is common to view history as a science, in the same way as medicine, physics, geology and biochemistry are sciences. Within the Anglo-American world though, this is more problematic. Part of the problem arises from what has been called an eccentricity of the English language, by which the term ‘historical science’ does not have the same connotations as for instance natural science. In Danish, and German this is not a problem, since Videnskab, or Wissenschaft, can be both historievidenskab (historical science) and naturvidenskab (natural science).

A more serious aspect of the problem, which also holds sway in some corners of European continental historical science, is the view held by some historians that the practice of history bears more resemblance to literary conventions, or that it is merely a craft enabling the historian to tell stories.