Hedgehogs and Historians

In "Expert Political Judgment: How Good is It? How Can We Know?", Philip E. Tetlock presents empirical evidence that political pundits are overwhelmingly wrong in their predictions about future political events (book, interview).   What's more, he claims that the more knowledgeable an expert is in some particular field, the worse his/her predictions about that field. Tetlock uses Isaiah Berlin's famous take on Archilochus' equally famous fragment ("The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing") to analyze the situation.

According to Berlin, thinkers can be classified as either "hedgehogs" or "foxes". The hedgehogs are those who "relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel" and the foxes are those who "pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way". According to Tetlock, political pundits are generally hedgehogs, and so understand the political world through whatever more or less coherent system (liberalism, conservatism, etc.) they endorse. Consequently, they tend to over-emphasize evidence that supports their worldview and under-emphasize evidence that runs contrary to it. In essence, Tetlock argues that political pundits are bad predictors because the nature of punditry is such that it causes the pundit to be a bad judge of evidence. (Notice that this is an argument about how evidence is evaluated, not about the peculiar nature of prediction, the unknown future, etc.)

No doubt, this make for great cocktail party banter. But does it mean anything for historians of philosophy?

I think that it might. After all, aren't most of us hedgehogs? Our individual work usually revolves around a small set of philosophers, if not a small set of philosophical questions with which a small set of philosophers was concerned, and each of us usually has a “line” that s/he is trying to push. I, for one, can confess: my dissertation (on which I'm currently working) is built on a single idea, and the whole work is an attempt to articulate a more or less coherent system of historical facts and philosophical arguments that explicate this idea. Pretty hedgehogish, don't you think?

Now here's the troubling part. If Tetlock is right, then whether I am consciously aware of it or not, my supposed expertise is causing me to misjudge the historical evidence. Moreover, if I am not the only hedgehog, then maybe this problem is prevasive! Does the field of history of philosophy have any hope of achieving a relatively accurate historical understanding of the development of philosophy? It seems that empirical evidence is against us.

Perhaps we need to wait for studies that somehow average pundit opinion. Maybe the sum of us do better than each taken separately?…. Any takers for this project?