Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Paleontologie" in Romanian language version.
To structure my discussion of the historical sciences, I shall borrow a way of analyzing them from the great Victorian philosopher of science, William Whewell [...]. [...] while his analysis of the historical sciences (or as Whewell termed them, the palaetiological sciences) will doubtless need to be modified, it provides a good starting point. Among them he numbered geology, paleontology, cosmogony, philology, and what we would term archaeology and history.
[Whewell] distinguished three tasks for such a historical science (1837 [...]): ' the Description of the facts and phenomena; - the general Theory of the causes of change appropriate to the case; - and the Application of the theory to the facts.'
Historical scientists successfully learn about the past by employing a 'smoking-gun' approach. They start by formulating multiple, mutually exclusive hypotheses and then search for a “smoking gun” that discriminates between these hypotheses [...].