Prediction and Testing in Historical Natural Science

Rossetter, Thomas

Abstract

Attention among philosophers to the historical sciences has increased dramatically in recent years. A major concern in this growing body of research is whether the historical sciences are methodologically fundamentally different from the experimental sciences. A central question in this debate is whether historical scientists derive and test predictions in the way experimentalists do, and this is the subject of this chapter. The purpose of the chapter is (a) to provide a reasonably comprehensive overview of the main literature on this question and (b) to elucidate the question further by discussing two case studies from the history of the earth sciences. The cases I will look at are James Hutton’s predictions about veined granite and angular unconformities and Frederick Vine, Drummond Matthews and Lawrence Morley’s prediction about seafloor spreading and geomagnetic reversals. These are some of the most famous predictions in the history of the historical sciences, and yet while they have been discussed at length in other contexts they have not yet been brought to bear on questions about the role of prediction in this field. I argue that these cases challenge certain views about the evidentiary role of prediction in the historical sciences and indicate that these sciences may be closer methodologically to their experimental counterparts than some have suggested.

Citation

Rossetter, T. (2025). Prediction and Testing in Historical Natural Science. In A. Tucker, & D. Cernín (Eds.), The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Philosophy of the Historical Sciences and Big History (253-273). Bloomsbury

• Online Publication Date: Aug 21, 2025
• Publication Date: Aug 21, 2025
• Deposit Date: Jul 7, 2025
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 22, 2026
• Publisher: Bloomsbury
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 253-273
• Book Title: The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Philosophy of the Historical Sciences and Big History
• Chapter Number: 13
• ISBN: 9781350409224
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/4255325
• Publisher URL: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/bloomsbury-handbook-of-the-philosophy-of-the-historical-sciences-and-big-history-9781350409224/
• Contract Date: Aug 5, 2022