Predicting the Past: Testing Expert Historical Judgement

Absences pervade the historical record. The loss or destruction of material, redaction of documents, silence of participants, data embargoes, and poor record keeping present inherent difficulties to any understanding of the past. Gaps in the historical record pose significant challenges but they can also present valuable opportunities. Instead of avoiding all gaps, historians can test the accuracy of some inferences about the past by carefully outlining their assumptions and explicitly predicting what they believe to have occurred in the absence of evidence. Subsequent discoveries or declassifications can then be used to assess the accuracy of these hypothesized explanations and, in turn, help us to evaluate the quality of historians' thinking about the unknown past. Given enough examples, we can begin to learn more about how to make better predictions about the past or what we term "retrodictions." 1 The importance of prediction as a method and practice has been well documented across the humanities and social sciences for decades. 2 Economists, political scientists, and psychologists regularly extol the virtues of making testable predictions for good scholarly practice and improved judgement. Although historians and historically minded scholars in the social sciences routinely rely on their own expert judgement when studying the past, few have considered making and testing predictions when conducting historical research. Even fewer have considered the methodological demands and theoretical implications of retrodiction.