[lit-ideas] Re: What If?
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2012 08:29:56 -0700
JL,
I became attracted to Counterfactual History from reading Niall Ferguson, but
that isn't what I am engaging in when looking at battles. Students at a war
college wouldn't see these notes as "counterfactuals." One looks at the two
forces, at their leaders, numbers, arms, and logistics as well as movements
during the battle. It isn't counterfactual to suggest for example that if the
left wing of Hoods forces held out a little longer, and they could have if Hood
had the men he requested, his army wouldn't have collapsed and General Thomas
wouldn't have won that battle. Any military instructor worth his salt would
impress upon his students the consequences of poor logistics and tactical
execution during a battle.
I engaged in counterfactuals briefly when I considered what the territory that
is presently the U.S. would have looked like if the South had won the Civil
War. As far as I can recall nothing else I wrote would qualify as
counterfactual history in the Niall Ferguson sense of the term.
Which isn't to say that I didn't enjoy your research on the subject. I did.
Lawrence
-----Original Message-----
From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
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Sent: Saturday, June 09, 2012 6:48 AM
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Subject: [lit-ideas] What If?
What would have happened had Hitler drunk coffee instead of tea on the
afternoon he committed suicide?
James C. Bresnahan (ed.):
Revisioning the Civil War: Historians on Counterfactual Scenarios.
Churchill, Winston.
"If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg".
The Churchill Centre. Archived
Counterfactuals in History: The Philosopher's Viewpoint
In a message dated 6/9/2012 5:39:29 A.M. UTC-02, lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
writes:
Hood was never given enough troops to enable him to fight on an equal footing
with his Northern enemies. The Southern Draft never worked properly and at
some point no more troops were forthcoming. So a “draw” for Hood was not the
same as a “draw” for Sherman’s generals. Sherman could replace his troops.
Hood could not. Had Hood been able to replace his troops as Thomas or
Schofield did, he would certainly have fared better.
From wiki:
_http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History)
Counterfactual history: the study of historical events as they might have
happened in different causal circumstances.
and a running commentary from
_http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfactual_history_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfactual_history)
as we consider L. Helm's posts.
Grice should not have been altogether critical. Grice is credited for bringing
in the Martians -- in philosophy. In "Some remarks about the senses"
(now in his book, WoW) he famously introduced the Martian way of seeing things,
and this Thought-experiment was soon imitated. (But of course, the
counterfactual thinking quite diverges from the Martian-type example that Grice
explores -- even if the category 'thought experiment' can be used for both).
Note below a few specific references to the Civil War:
Notably:
James C. Bresnahan (ed.):
Revisioning the Civil War: Historians on Counterfactual Scenarios.
"What if?" is the title of at least two collections on counterfactual history
which has to be distinguished, as the wiki entry notes, from 'alternate
history'. Grice was fascinated with the logical form of "if", which he thought
was too complex for simplistic philosophers like Strawson. For Grice, "if"
carries a conversational implicature, and not, as Strawson thought, a
CONVENTIONAL implicature.
Strawson thought that "if" works as "therefore" works in nonsubordinate
clauses. (Strawson, "If and -->"). Grice had more than one occasion to respond
to Strawson's simplifications. Further, in seminars with Nancy Cartwright, in
the series, "Hands across the Bay", at Stanford and Berkeley (Cartwright taught
at Stanford, Grice at Berkeley) they played with yet another logical operator,
the "as if" (The philosophy of the as-if). This Grice used to explain some
concoctions in the philosophy of physics (quantum physics). He thought that
as-if thinking can be profitable. AND THEN there's the "what if?" which still
requires a different sort of analysis, if alla A. C.
Danto's terms in 'basic statements', the better.
The wiki entry reads:
"Counterfactual history, also sometimes referred to as VIRTUAL history, is a
form of historiography that attempts to answer "what if" questions known as
counterfactuals."
"It seeks to explore history and historical incidents by means of extrapolating
a timeline in which certain key historical events did not happen or had an
outcome which was different from that which did in fact occur."
"The purpose of this exercise is to ascertain the relative importance of the
event, incident or person the counterfactual hypothesis is negating."
"For instance, to the counterfactual claim,
What would have happened had Hitler drunk coffee instead of tea on the
afternoon he committed suicide?
the timeline would have remained unchanged—Hitler in all likelihood still would
have committed suicide on April 30, 1945, regardless of what he had to drink
that afternoon."
"However, to the counterfactual "What would have happened had Hitler died in
the July 1944 assassination attempt?", all sorts of possibilities become
readily apparent, starting with the reasonable assumption that the German
generals would have in all likelihood sued for peace, bringing an early end to
World War II, at least in the European Theater."
"Thus, the counterfactual brings into sharp relief the question of how
important Hitler was as an individual and how his personal fate shaped the
course of the war and, ultimately, of world history."
"Although there are Victorian examples of counterfactual history, it was not
until the very late 20th century that the exploration of counterfactuals in
history was to begin in earnest."
"An early example is
-- "If It Had Happened Otherwise"
(1931)
which features a contribution by Winston Churchill who examined what would have
happened had Robert E. Lee won at the Battle of Gettysburg."
"Although this volume is notable for featuring imagined histories by serious
historians, the histories are presented in narrative form (in most cases with a
fairly whimsical tone) without any analysis of the reasoning behind these
scenarios, so they fall short of modern standards for serious counterfactual
history and are closer to the fictional alternate history genre."
"A significant foray into treating counterfactual scenarios seriously was made
by the economic historian Robert Fogel. In his 1964 book
"Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History", Fogel
tried to use quantitative methods to imagine what the U.S. economy would have
been like in 1890 had there been no railroads.
"Fogel hypothesizes that, in the absence of the railroad, America’s large canal
system would have been expanded and its roads would have been improved through
pavement; both of these improvements would take away from the social impact of
the railroad. He estimates that “the level of per capita income achieved by
January 1, 1890 would have been reached by March 31, 1890, if railroads had
never been invented.”"
"Few further attempts to bring counterfactual history into the world of
academia were made until the 1991 publication of
"Plausible Worlds: Possibility and Understanding in History and the Social
Sciences"
by the Cambridge sociologist Geoffrey Hawthorn, who carefully explored three
different counterfactual scenarios.
"This work helped inspire
"Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals"
(1997), a collection of essays exploring different scenarios by a number of
historians, edited by the historian Niall Ferguson. Ferguson has become a
significant advocate of counterfactual history, using counterfactual scenarios
to illustrate his objections to deterministic theories of history such as
Marxism, and to put forward a case for the importance of contingency in
history, theorizing that a few key changes could result in a significantly
different modern world."
"Some scholars argue that a counterfactual is not as much a matter of what
happened in the past but it is the disagreement about which past events were
most significant."
"For example, William Thompson employs a sequence of counterfactuals for eight
lead economies that have driven globalization processes for almost a thousand
years."
"From Sung China to Genoa, Venice, Portugal, the Netherlands, Britain, and the
United States, and claims that each actor in succession played an unusually
critical role in creating a structure of leadership that became increasingly
global in scope across time "
"Counterfactual history is neither historical revisionism nor alternate
history."
"Counterfactual history distinguishes itself through its interest in the very
incident that is being negated by the counterfactual, thus seeking to evaluate
the event's relative historical importance. Such historians reason arguments
for each change, outlining changes in broad terms only, as befits a mere
byproduct of the exercise."
"An alternate history writer, on the other hand, is interested precisely in
the hypothetical scenarios that flow from the negated incident or event.
A fiction writer is thus free to invent very specific events and characters in
the imagined history."
"The line is sometimes blurred as historians may invent more detailed
timelines as illustrations of their ideas about the types of changes that
might have occurred. But it is usually clear what general types of
consequences the author thinks are reasonable to suppose would have been likely
to occur, and what specific details are included in an imagined timeline only
for illustrative purposes."
"The line is further blurred by novelists such as Kim Stanley Robinson, whose
alternate-history novel The Years of Rice and Salt has a character talking of
historians' use of counterfactuals, within the novel's alternate history. He
dismisses this as "a useless exercise"."
"Since it is a rather recent development in historiography, many historians
dismiss counterfactual history as sometimes entertaining, but not meeting the
standards of mainstream historical research due to its speculative nature.
Advocates of counterfactual history often respond that all statements about
causality in history contain implicit counterfactual claims—for example, the
claim that a certain military decision helped a country win a war presumes
that if that decision had not been made, the war would have been less likely
to be won, or would have been longer."
"Since counterfactual history is such a recent development, a serious,
systematic critique of its uses and methodologies has yet to be made, as the
movement itself is still working out those methods and frameworks."
"Aviezer Tucker has offered a range of criticism of this approach to the study
of the past both in his review of Ferguson's Virtual History in History and
Theory and in his book Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of
Historiography."
See also: Alternate history, Stalin's Missed Chance, Jonbar Hinge
References
Martin Bunzl (June 2004). "Counterfactual History: A User's Guide".
American Historical Review. Retrieved 2009-06-02.
Churchill, Winston.
"If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg".
The Churchill Centre. Archived from the original on January 5, 2009.
Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History | Book
Reviews | EH.Net
Smoler, Frederic (September 1999). "Past Tense". American Heritage 50 (5).
Thompson. W. The Lead Economy Sequence in World Politics (From Sung China to
the United States): Selected Counterfactuals. Journal of Globalization Studies.
Vol. 1, num. 1. 2010. PP. 6–28 [1]
Review by Keith Brooke
Tucker, Aviezer (May 1999). "Historiographical Counterfactuals and Historical
Contingency". History and Theory 38 (2): 264–276.
DOI:10.1111/0018-2656.00090.
Tucker, Aviezer (2004). Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of
Historiography. Cambridge University Press. DOI:10.2277/0521834155. ISBN
978-0-521-83415-5.
Further reading
James C. Bresnahan (ed.):
Revisioning the Civil War: Historians on Counterfactual Scenarios, ISBN
0-7864-2392-7
Robert Cowley (ed.): What If?: The World's Foremost Military Historians Imagine
What Might Have Been, Putnam Publishing Group, ISBN 0-425-17642-8; Pan ISBN
0-330-48724-8
Robert Cowley (ed.):
More What If?: Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been, Pan, ISBN
0-330-48725-6; Berkley Publishing Group ISBN 0-425-18613-X
Robert Cowley (ed.):
What If? America: Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been, ISBN
0-330-42729-6
Niall Ferguson (ed.): Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, ISBN
0-330-35132-X; ISBN 0-465-02323-1; ISBN 0-330-41303-1
Geoffrey Hawthorn: Plausible Worlds: Possibility and Understanding in History
and the Social Sciences, ISBN 0-521-40359-6; ISBN 0-521-45776-9
Roger L. Ransom: The Confederate States of America: What Might Have Been, ISBN
0-393-05967-7; ISBN 0-393-32911-9
Philip E. Tetlock and Aaron Belkin (eds.): Counterfactual Thought Experiments
in World Politics, ISBN 0-691-02792-7; ISBN 0-691-02791-9
Philip E. Tetlock, Richard Ned Lebow, and Geoffrey Parker (eds.): Unmaking the
West: "What-If?" Scenarios That Rewrite World History, ISBN 0-472-11543-X,
ISBN 0-472-03143-0
External links
Counterfactual Thought Experiments: A Necessary Research Tool - Academic
discussion of counterfactuals in history, and suggested ground rules for their
use
Counterfactual History: A User's Guide - article by Martin Bunzl from The
American Historical Review
Categories: Fields of history
Theories of history
Alternate history
Historiography
Cheers,
Speranza
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