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spatiality comments on Crossing the History-Lessons Threshold - Less Wrong
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But are there testable hypotheses in history? I just really want to know, because I have seen this argumentation pattern that I'd love to call 'instant historicising' whereas an argumenter says ' Oh this was a totally different situation and has so nothing to do with this other situation so we shouldn't even ever compare' whereas my mind goes bing - .
I don't think there are testable hypotheses in history, though there are certainly falsifiable ones in the sense that they could be shown wrong (which does NOT mean they could be proven right).
A simple example is the hypothesis that Columbus was the first European to discover the New World. It was successfully falsified by finding a Viking settlement in Newfoundland.
However if you say that, for example, the main cause of WW1 was the Great Power rivalry, well, I don't know how that could (realistically) be falsified.
It would be easy to construct situations where historians could have opportunities to make and test hypotheses. Just find a section of history they don't know anything about, and give them a summary of 99 years, and ask them to predict what happens in the 100th. Or give them a summary of a couple years and ask them to fill in more complex details. Or give them descriptions of what happened on either side of a year, and ask them to figure out what happens during that year. Then see if they predict accurate things.
I can't see how could that possibly work in practice. At best you'll be constructing exams for individual historians, but not tests for theories.
I see, um, some tension between the bolded parts... X-)