Historians write papers. As do philosophers and classicists. There are papers in literary criticism, law, music theory, and theology, and none of them have ex

Historians write papers. As do philosophers and classicists. There are papers in literary criticism, law, music theory, and theology, and none of them have experiments, mathematics, or data (at least in the scientific sense of the word). I don't think that makes those endeavors invalid. The difference between an academic paper and a blog post is that an academic paper needs to fit into the context of the academic literature through its format (particularly through citation of prior work), and it needs to undergo some form of peer review. None of that is any guarantee of quality, of course. There are lots of terrible academic papers and lots of excellent blog posts. But you don't need to be a scientist to write an academic paper.