Maybe you can help sort this out. I haven’t read Moon’s article since I wrote my article around 6 months ago. I haven’t read PoH or BoI in full for a long time. I reread some of PoH recently but a lot of the book is wordy and doesn’t seem relevant to our specific discussion.
I believe historicism encompasses multiple themes, not all of which must be present, which helps explain why you have a list of 3 versions.
Broadly speaking, Deutsch is making grand historical claims, including predicting the future course of history and making “prophecies” (predictions that you can’t make without predicting the future growth of knowledge).
Deutsch also does something similar with the past. He’s mainly ~predicting the past based on these abstract/grand theories, like he does for the future, rather than speaking about it based on historical research. His claims about the past are done mainly as armchair philosophy, not using evidence and knowledge of the past, so they have similar status to claims about the future. The past is more accessible than the future because you don’t have to predict the future growth of knowledge, but that only works if you actually have access to and use the knowledge from the past.
Deutsch presents many of his claims as logical, scientific or factually historical, and based on things like the logic of the situation or the logic of epistemology. In general this would make them non-historicist. However, this presentation is often misleading. A lot of his arguments are nowhere near rigorous, comprehensive logic. E.g. the static/dynamic meme dichotomy isn’t rigorous and IMO falls much more into the category of grand historical armchair philosophizing than logical analysis. The underlying concept (thinking about replication strategies of memes) is good, and parts of the analysis are good. But the analysis as a whole is inadequate and should have been presented as an early stages research project instead of as sweeping and very strong claims about the past and future of societies.
While Deutsch tries to present some of his claims as natural laws of memes/epistemology/creativity/etc parallel to laws of physics and based on both logic and research (to check that the historical record thoroughly matches the claims with no counter-examples), they substantively aren’t. He didn’t do much historical research and he didn’t do the kind of logical work that actually rules out alternatives, just the kind that makes a decent initial case to consider.
For some of what Deutsch missed re logical argument, see Curiosity – Third Type of Meme: Static Companion Memes
For history you might be able to get critiques at https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/ I would bet the majority of historians there would be unhappy with some of Deutsch’s history claims.
Also, without even worrying about history details, there are questions like: Was the Roman empire a static or dynamic society? Didn’t they make a decent amount of progress but also have horribly repressive, irrational parenting? It looks kind of like a mixed society. Our current society also seems mixed with varied parenting practices. But some of Deutsch’s comments don’t seem to allow for mixed societies while also not really addressing how long transitions take and how there can be a transition state when there are only two types of societies.