Organon F
Volume 32, May 2025, Issue 2, Pages 168–192
ISSN 2585-7150 (online)
Research Article
Hypothesis Testing and Knowledge of the Human Past
David Černín
Historians and natural scientists are adept at inferring knowledge of the past from present traces and evidence. The repository of available methods has been rapidly expanding, and historians of the human past have learned that using techniques developed in other fields that study the natural past might prove beneficial to their endeavours in some cases. The network of inferences involved in historical discourse is vast and diverse. Influential philosophers of history and historical sciences like Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen and Aviezer Tucker have argued that it is necessary to expand the scope of the philosophy of history and to take a deeper look at underlying reasoning and inferential structure of history. This paper answers this call by analysing a group of inferences in human historiography that could be described in terms of hypothesis and hypothesis testing. Hypothesis testing has received some attention in the philosophy of historical sciences, but it is mostly underexplored in the philosophy of history in the context of human history. The paper examines four case studies and analyses their inferential structures by using concepts from the philosophy of historical sciences, such as trace-based and analogous reasoning, type/token distinction, etc. It will be shown that hypothesis testing helps generate knowledge about the past, but to fully appreciate it and to differentiate its types, philosophers of history must engage with the infrastructure of historical research.
Hypothesis testing; evidence; experimental archaeology; intellectual history; philosophy of historiography.
Author
David Černín
Affiliation
University of Ostrava
Address
Department of Philosophy, University of Ostrava, Reální 5, 701 03 Ostrava, Czech Republic
Received
22 January 2024
Revised
24 March 2025
Accepted
31 March 2025
Publishers
Institute of Philosophy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences
Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences
APA
Černín, D. (2025). Hypothesis Testing and Knowledge of the Human Past. Organon F, 32(2), 168–192. https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2025.32203
Chicago
Černín, David. 2025. "Hypothesis Testing and Knowledge of the Human Past." Organon F 32 (2): 168–192. https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2025.32203
Harvard
Černín, D. (2025). Hypothesis Testing and Knowledge of the Human Past. Organon F, 32(2), pp. 168–192. https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2025.32203
© David Černín
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