Paper short abstract:

This paper examines whether historiography’s engagement with Anthropocene theory could be further through a rethinking of descriptions of historical evidence. Specifically, by describing evidence of change through time and hypotheses to explain these changes with probabilistic formalism.

Paper long abstract:

Human agency is at the core of the idea of the Anthropocene, as a man-made planetary change. Nevertheless, asserting this agency via temporal evidence has been somewhat delegated by historians to scientists. The literature of the past decades stressing the incompatibilities and/or limits of the modern historical imagination to grasp with climate change and the Anthropocene point to different reasons why historiography is ill-equipped vis-à-vis considering human beings as geological forces. In general, this literature accepts the scientific consensus on climate change and most of the Anthropocene thesis, by basically assuming that historians must follow the development of the sciences. This usually means refraining from directly engaging with the evidence that supports the scientific fact of climate change and the Anthropocene, evidence considered to be outside the domains of history. According to the historical sciences explanation of historiography (namely, in Carol E. Cleland, Adrian Currie, Aviezer Tucker), though, there should be no significant differences in the epistemological status of evidence in historiography compared to disciplines that deal with the history of the Earth. Since, in part, the historical sciences explanation resort to a formal definition of the hypothesis-evidence dynamics, assuming it to be describable in terms of Bayesian probability, it is the purpose of this work to discuss whether the use of formal language to speak of historical evidence could provide a bridge between historiography and sciences related to planetary change over time, thus increasing communicability between historians and scientists on the matter of human agency in planetary scale.