Since I enjoyed Ian Hutchinson’s essay so much, I decided to skip ahead and offer some more commentary.
Hutchinson writes:
Many of life’s most important matters simply do not possess reproducibility. History, for example, cannot be understood by appeal to reproducibility. Its most significant events are often unique, never to be repeated. There is no way to experiment on history, and no way to repeat the observations. Some parts of historical study benefit from scientific techniques, but the main mission of history cannot be addressed through reproducibility; its methods are not those of science. Yet history possesses real knowledge.
Here people will quibble about whether or not history is science (it is not). So let’s pick another example that cannot be disputed – memory.