blog: Abductive Reasoning, A-Life, and the Historian's Craft: One Scenario for the future of History and Computing, John Bonnett

In any scenario devoted to the future of history and computing, it is important to refer first to the content and analytical methods historians are likely to employ. In the scenario presented here, this paper will offer three propositions. One, scholars in future will devote renewed attention to a class of historical events for which there is no clear presumptive cause, a domain in which some scholars points to environmental constraint, and others to social action to explain their occurrence. Second, historians will employ a method of reasoning known as abduction to assess the relative plausibility of competing explanations. Unlike deduction, which starts with a given hypothesis, abduction starts with an event, and searches for a plausible hypothesis. Possible world reasoning provides one means to employ abduction. In this method, candidate causes are individually tested to determine their capacity to produce an outcome mirroring the one produced by the historical record. Third, this paper suggests historians will turn to possible world reasoning due to the capacity of computer agent-based modeling to support its exercise. Archaeologists have already successfully applied this method to re-examine a long-standing problem: the reason for the disappearance of the Anasazi from the Long House Valley, Arizona in 1300.

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