Is there a term for the principle of preferring earlier statements over later statements made by historical eye witnesses?

Question

Back when I was majoring in History in college, one professor explained to the class that when a person made multiple statements about a time or event they lived through or were involved with, and they contradicted each other, it was generally best to give more weight to the earlier statements. The reasoning was primarily that the person's memory would be fresher and the actual course of events would tend to be more clear in their mind. Additionally, earlier comments would be less likely to be colored by long term reactions to the events (example: a politician who had been vocally pro-segregationist in the 1950s but then says in the 1990s that he never really liked the idea of segregation).

Since that time I have come across this principle stated in histories that I have read. Invariably when I see it, I am reading a very well-sourced history with solid analysis (most recently Playing at the World by Jon Peterson).

My question is this: is there a commonly used or accepted term for this historical principle?

Note that opinions on the validity or usefulness of the principle are not the subject of my question. Thank you.

Answer 1

I don't believe there is a canonical name for that one principle, all by itself. Rather this is one of the common principles of Source Criticism, which are intended to be used together (highlighting mine):

The following principles are cited from two Scandinavian textbooks on source criticism, written by the historians Olden-Jørgensen (1998) and Thurén (1997):

• Human sources may be relics (e.g. a fingerprint) or narratives (e.g. a statement or a letter). Relics are more credible sources than narratives.
• A given source may be forged or corrupted; strong indications of the originality of the source increases its reliability.
• The closer a source is to the event which it purports to describe, the more one can trust it to give an accurate description of what really happened
• A primary source is more reliable than a secondary source, which in turn is more reliable than a tertiary source and so on.
• If a number of independent sources contain the same message, the credibility of the message is strongly increased.
• The tendency of a source is its motivation for providing some kind of bias. Tendencies should be minimized or supplemented with opposite motivations.
• If it can be demonstrated that the witness (or source) has no direct interest in creating bias, the credibility of the message is increased.

I'm not sure how (/if?) this is taught in schools, but it doesn't look like there's an accepted universal mental framework/jargon for learning and applying the principles, like say we Computer Science students got for the Software Analysis principles of Cohesion and Coupling. Perhaps professional Historians' brains don't work that way, or perhaps there just aren't as many Source Analysts out there as there are coders.