John Beatty (University of British Columbia), What does it mean to say that "history matters" causally speaking?

   

 Commentator: Menachem Fisch (Cohn Institute)

 Chair: Yossef Schwartz

 

 

Monday, May 6 2013, 18:00 PM

Gilman Building, Hall 449

 

 

In her book Modeling Nature, Sharon Kingsland discusses how in the 1970s and 80s, “the difficulty of knowing when history matters and how to incorporate historical thinking into science” became a central issue in evolutionary biology and ecology. For reasons that are not well understood, this became a major issue in the social sciences around the same time. And it remains a contentious issue to the present day. Yet for all the controversy, the claim that “history matters” often prompts the response, “Of course (or even ‘duh’) history matters. History always matters. That’s because causes matter, and causes lie in the past.” But is it really so trivial? My (non-trivial) proposal is this. To say that history matters with regard to a particular outcome is to say that there was an historically possible (as opposed to merely logically or physically possible) alternative to the actual past, whose occurrence would have led to a different result. To put it somewhat differently, it is to say that the result was due to an accident in the past.