Phronesis
phronesis ... “a sound practical instinct for the course of events, an almost indefinable hunch that anticipates the future by remembering the past and thus judges the present correctly.” [also see definitions here and the Aristotelean context here]
I was just talking about that with my Historiography course. We were doing some of the usual"is history a social science" and"should historians make predictions" discussions and I opined that one of the reasons that historians even talk about predictive models, etc., is that we want to be a social science, and the social sciences, by and large, claim (as sciences) to have as the end result of their analyses the potential to predict future behaviors and developments.
The problem, of course, is that all us social scientists have discovered that human behavior, individually or collectively, is incredibly complex and prone to confounding our best deterministic models and mechanistic regressions. We haven't even achieved the statistical un/certainty of quantum physics. Why not? Because people are people: free will does exist, personalities do matter, people are (ir)rational at their own convenience, accidents happen. In order to make our models sensible, we must use the study of the past to develop an intuitive sense for social process, for the quirky effects of leadership, for the likely and unlikely social reorganizations from technological progress.
Historians are, by nature, phronetic [Thanks, Irfan!], and we should be proud of that. I'm not giving up on the use of analogy, and the development of models of social processes, but I'm not going to be quite so shy about the intuitive judgement which I've earned.