This is an irrelevant objection to anybody who isn't a determinist. That something did not happen does not mean that it could not.
Ming China
- Thread starter Soda7777777
- Start date
Not really, as I just showed how counterfactual the OP is.
Anything that could happen, however, isn´t part of history, but rather of fiction. A famous example is the assassination of archduke Ferdinand, triggering WW I. What if it didn´t happen? is a question ignoring the fact that that assassination was the end result of a process. Similarly, asking What if the Qing...? is basically saying What if the Qing weren´t the Qing? Well, then we wouldn´t be talking about history, would we? Basically, What if? questions are speculation. That´s all fine and dandy, but they´re not part of history. History is about what did happen, not about what might happen. No determinism in there.
Speculating about how things could have happened can help sometimes in understanding why things that did happen happened. And it's fun.
Your personal conception of what 'history' is has got basically nothing to do with the OP. In a nutshall, you said that any answer to the OP's question doesn't matter because it didn't happen that way. This is just avoiding the question. It is determinist. It is confusing to me that you would waste so much metaphorical ink avoiding a question when it would take significantly less to answer it on its own merits, but then again, there's a lot I can't really understand about you and your posting habits.
Counterfactuals are relevant because they tell us why certain events mattered.1 This seems to me to be a fairly important question for the historian. "Why should you care?" Why indeed. I might even go so far as to say that counterfactuals are essential to narrative history, because in addition to defining why things mattered, they provide context, or can be a mechanism for providing it. If changing one thing was unlikely to change the way certain others happened, explaining why that is the case informs the reader. (And probably the historian too!) Handwaving 'well it couldn't have happened that way' is contrary to the spirit of inquiry. It embodies everything that is anti-history. We should want to know why. That's the whole point of the field of study.
Saying that 'they could not have happened differently because they didn't happen differently' does not inform anybody. It's a hand-wave. The actual reasons why something happened as it did are necessary. Otherwise, we are left with the rather implausible belief that Lee Harvey Oswald physically could not have missed his shot in Dallas, because God, or the Force, or Darkseid, or Athena, or whomever guided his hands and built the entire edifice of history to structure his actions such that no freak gust of wind, no oncoming sneeze, no sudden impulse on Kennedy's part could have prevented that bullet from hitting Kennedy and taking its meandering path through the president's body. That the freak gust of wind that destroyed the Roman fleet off the coast of Africa in 468 was no fluke, but that the entire history of Rome itself built up to that moment and the weather itself was dictated by some Plan. That no matter what Qais ibn al-Mulawwah said, no matter what poetry or language he deployed, no matter what he could do in the sack, and no matter what he said about her father, Laila bint Mahdi's family always was going to be able to spirit her away and force her to marry another man. That Georges Boulanger was never going to launch his coup in the first place, and that his intention always had been to waste the critical moment at his mistress's house instead.
Of course there are legitimate reasons to say 'yo okay this probably wouldn't have mattered if they did it differently' or 'they wouldn't have done this differently because that'd be hilariously out of character' for some actions in human history. A counterfactual about what would have happened if the Qing devoted all of their financial and human resources to beating the Polish in the space race is stupid, because they never would have done that; you don't need to refer to the history of China to say that.2 Asking about a well-known counterfactual that has been the subject of best-selling books and which does still get some play in secondary literature is not nearly the same thing. And asking about events that were not just the products of contingency, but of pure, random chance is entirely appropriate.
I'm sick and friggin tired of holier-than-thou jerks coming into WH threads and posting one-liner responses like 'alternate history is teh stupid' or 'alternate history is for nubs' for broadly similar reasons as you just did and who never change their opinions about this no matter what arguments about contingent events one deploys. Maybe they blither about the butterfly effect, and claim that the effects of any action are unknowable or that causality doesn't matter or something. (Which is why any attempt at anything more than a very vague ceteris paribus counterfactual for any sizable length of time is totally fictional, onanism, or both. It is not difficult to get people to agree on this.) Or maybe they go the route that you do and claim that it doesn't matter, which is worse.
1 = Or they tell us what certain people think mattered. This is most easily visible when discussing someone's personal life in the context of counterfactual speculation. For instance, I think that if I had never signed up for CFC, I would probably know significantly less about history than I currently do; it might even have changed what I studied later in high school and then in college, and ultimately the entire trajectory of my TBD career. I also probably would have had slightly more of a social life in high school, although given the nature of high school social lives, this would probably be in the 'negative' side of the ledger. This tells you a fair bit about what I think has mattered during the course of my life, possibly more than it does about the actual course of my life.
2 = By the way, I believe I already told you off about the Qing thing in an entirely separate thread and you refused to read what I said, refused to comprehend what I said, or read it and then ignored it. The Qing government very clearly caused its own destruction in large part because of their efforts to reform, not because it refused to change with the times or some nonsense like that. Reforming destroyed its ideological base for legitimacy, disenfranchised its entire ruling elite, and created a military that could play kingmaker. Now, what would have happened differently had the Qing state in fact acted as you seem to think it acted, and refused to reform entirely (or slowed the pace), is virtually impossible to discern. It's basically rolling the dice to think about late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China without the Beiyang Army. It's also very vague; at what point, and how, would these reforming impulses have ceased to fire? This is a topic worthy of serious discussion, not simply 'well the Qing were the Qing and it couldn't have happened any other way'.
sophie
Break My Heart
Gosh durnit Dachs! Stop giving such great responses all the time, it relegates my posts to little more than, "YEAH!" and "What he said!" 
aelf
Ashen One
Love the cartoon about Poland. Where is that from?
PS: Zheng He would have totally kicked Sobieski's ass (no teabagging would be involved, though).
PS: Zheng He would have totally kicked Sobieski's ass (no teabagging would be involved, though).
No arguement there.
In a nutshell you a) misquote me b) rant on a lot about ´counterfactuals´. That´s one way to ´not understand´ what someone´s saying... I note you don´t even comment on what I´m saying in my post. I also suggest you study some actual history sometime - it may learn you a thing or two (like where footnotes are really for). It might also improve your essays.
Moderator Action: Infraction for trolling (the portion about go and study real history). No personal comments, pls. - KD
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889
Excuse me... What? Is that a question?
With a dash of "don't poke the sleeping dragon, lest it awaken."
RedRalph
Deity
- Joined
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Dachs, while I agree with the thrust of what you are saying, the question is almost a philosophical one and how much value you place in alternate history is pretty subjective IMO. Determining to any serious degree of certainty whether or not it was possible for things to go differently than they did is far beyond you, me or anyone else here.
I disagree. Writing about history involves making judgments like this all the time, whether one recognizes it or not. Any causal statements one cares to make have embedded counterfactuals in them.
For instance, if you claim that the Roman Empire in the West ceased to exist due to a cocktail of factors, most preeminent being a movement in the locus of imperial power from Gaul and Roman Germania to Italy, then the automatic presumption is that if the locus of imperial power had not moved from one place to another, things would have turned out differently for the western Roman Empire. Or, to take another example, the oft-criticized foreign policy of Germany has been stated as leading to a general estrangement of most Continental powers from the Germans and setting the stage for the First World War; this inherently implies that if the Germans had done anything differently with regards to their foreign policy, such an estrangement need never have occurred. (Sometimes in historical writings this is irritatingly explicit, of course.)
The only acceptable way to avoid counterfactual inference of any kind is to employ a purely noncausal narrative, which seems rather difficult at best (some might say impossible). These pathways have been explored in a much more exhaustive, logical way by actual historians and political scientists, such as Tetlock and Belkin, Elster, Schroeder, and Showalter. Counterfactual reasoning is not just a phenomenon of history and idiographic disciplines, but of nomothetic ones as well; it is impossible to avoid the statement that it is inherent in state policy, as well.
There is indeed a great gap between claiming that things would have been different in some way had something else happened, and determining whether that difference would have actually, to put it crudely, mattered. That is perhaps more up to personal bias and one's own philosophy of history. Obviously there is no way to prove things one way or the other. (Which is the chief reason, by the way, history is not a science. One cannot falsify "experiments" such as these, and as such, history has little predictive power. The incredibly poor predictive power of historians and political scientists has been well documented, especially by those with interest in counterfactual reasoning. But I, obviously, am not one to argue for the predictive power of counterfactual scenarios.) That does not erase their persuasive power, of course, much less their intrinsic merit.
Take idiographic counterfactuals, i.e. counterfactual scenarios based on particular moments in history with high levels of indeterminacy, which are perhaps the most popular scenarios, especially for writers of fiction. Tricks of the wind, a narrow miss with a bullet or arrow, an inconveniently timed illness - all with the potential to, as people tritely put it, change the course of world events. But in addition to this utility in entertainment, they provoke one to abandon simpler determinism and acknowledge the impact of unpredictable factors in history. (Not that determinism is inherently opposed to unpredictability, of course. Among historians, it usually is, but not always.) At the most basic, an idiographic counterfactual can be used as a check on cognitive closure. Whether certain things are inevitable or not, it is well known that "creeping determinism" exists even in situations in which it is difficult, even irrational, to justify it. Retrospective scenario generation can serve as a check on that.
Some attempts have even been made at combining idiographic counterfactuals centered around an event, with analysis by contributors from nomothetic disciplines, generally on the model of the speculation surrounding the K-T boundary extinction event and the Alvarezian hypothesis. A historian identifies a point with a high level of indeterminacy, and, say, a game theorist works out logical responses to it in terms of policy. Whether an individual is all that invested in the viability of game theory as a discipline with any predictive power is of course up in the air.
And, of course, counterfactuals have the potential to be used as elegant attacks on another's causal reasoning. This is more easily demonstrated in the natural sciences and in mathematics. Take Euclid's proof of the existence of infinite primes, for example: he went about it by arguing that the counterproposal, finite prime numbers, must be absurd, because it involves making contradictory claims. Attempts have been made at constructing models for various political-science scenarios to highlight logical flaws in certain arguments. The most persuasive, in my opinion, is Cederman's claim that the neorealist interpretation of international politics with regards to balancing is flawed, because in an anarchic system, hegemonic structures, not balancing, tend to emerge more often, especially in instances when defense-dominance prevails at the policy-making level, per constructed models. Of course, pace Schroeder, this may just be art reflecting life, as it were.
On the issue of subjectivity, various efforts have been made at constructing a universally acceptable series of criteria for counterfactual scenarios in the social sciences; I'm afraid I don't know where this has gone, unfortunately, because I'm still extremely new to the attempts to systematize counterfactual reasoning. At the very least, these should be able to limit subjectivity and permit contributors to engage in meaningful dialogue without, as it were, talking past each other. Of course, given the nature of history, let alone the so-called social sciences, perhaps talking past each other is - ha - inevitable.
For instance, if you claim that the Roman Empire in the West ceased to exist due to a cocktail of factors, most preeminent being a movement in the locus of imperial power from Gaul and Roman Germania to Italy, then the automatic presumption is that if the locus of imperial power had not moved from one place to another, things would have turned out differently for the western Roman Empire. Or, to take another example, the oft-criticized foreign policy of Germany has been stated as leading to a general estrangement of most Continental powers from the Germans and setting the stage for the First World War; this inherently implies that if the Germans had done anything differently with regards to their foreign policy, such an estrangement need never have occurred. (Sometimes in historical writings this is irritatingly explicit, of course.)
The only acceptable way to avoid counterfactual inference of any kind is to employ a purely noncausal narrative, which seems rather difficult at best (some might say impossible). These pathways have been explored in a much more exhaustive, logical way by actual historians and political scientists, such as Tetlock and Belkin, Elster, Schroeder, and Showalter. Counterfactual reasoning is not just a phenomenon of history and idiographic disciplines, but of nomothetic ones as well; it is impossible to avoid the statement that it is inherent in state policy, as well.
There is indeed a great gap between claiming that things would have been different in some way had something else happened, and determining whether that difference would have actually, to put it crudely, mattered. That is perhaps more up to personal bias and one's own philosophy of history. Obviously there is no way to prove things one way or the other. (Which is the chief reason, by the way, history is not a science. One cannot falsify "experiments" such as these, and as such, history has little predictive power. The incredibly poor predictive power of historians and political scientists has been well documented, especially by those with interest in counterfactual reasoning. But I, obviously, am not one to argue for the predictive power of counterfactual scenarios.) That does not erase their persuasive power, of course, much less their intrinsic merit.
Take idiographic counterfactuals, i.e. counterfactual scenarios based on particular moments in history with high levels of indeterminacy, which are perhaps the most popular scenarios, especially for writers of fiction. Tricks of the wind, a narrow miss with a bullet or arrow, an inconveniently timed illness - all with the potential to, as people tritely put it, change the course of world events. But in addition to this utility in entertainment, they provoke one to abandon simpler determinism and acknowledge the impact of unpredictable factors in history. (Not that determinism is inherently opposed to unpredictability, of course. Among historians, it usually is, but not always.) At the most basic, an idiographic counterfactual can be used as a check on cognitive closure. Whether certain things are inevitable or not, it is well known that "creeping determinism" exists even in situations in which it is difficult, even irrational, to justify it. Retrospective scenario generation can serve as a check on that.
Some attempts have even been made at combining idiographic counterfactuals centered around an event, with analysis by contributors from nomothetic disciplines, generally on the model of the speculation surrounding the K-T boundary extinction event and the Alvarezian hypothesis. A historian identifies a point with a high level of indeterminacy, and, say, a game theorist works out logical responses to it in terms of policy. Whether an individual is all that invested in the viability of game theory as a discipline with any predictive power is of course up in the air.
And, of course, counterfactuals have the potential to be used as elegant attacks on another's causal reasoning. This is more easily demonstrated in the natural sciences and in mathematics. Take Euclid's proof of the existence of infinite primes, for example: he went about it by arguing that the counterproposal, finite prime numbers, must be absurd, because it involves making contradictory claims. Attempts have been made at constructing models for various political-science scenarios to highlight logical flaws in certain arguments. The most persuasive, in my opinion, is Cederman's claim that the neorealist interpretation of international politics with regards to balancing is flawed, because in an anarchic system, hegemonic structures, not balancing, tend to emerge more often, especially in instances when defense-dominance prevails at the policy-making level, per constructed models. Of course, pace Schroeder, this may just be art reflecting life, as it were.
On the issue of subjectivity, various efforts have been made at constructing a universally acceptable series of criteria for counterfactual scenarios in the social sciences; I'm afraid I don't know where this has gone, unfortunately, because I'm still extremely new to the attempts to systematize counterfactual reasoning. At the very least, these should be able to limit subjectivity and permit contributors to engage in meaningful dialogue without, as it were, talking past each other. Of course, given the nature of history, let alone the so-called social sciences, perhaps talking past each other is - ha - inevitable.
You can change your underwear now JEELEN
beotch
Moderator Action: Infraction for trolling. No personal barbs please, thank you. - KD
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889
beotch
Moderator Action: Infraction for trolling. No personal barbs please, thank you. - KD
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889
Terrance888
Discord Reigns
He is an Eunuch, he has no balls.
sophie
Break My Heart
Silly human! You can't cut off the balls of Zheng He! The man grew them back by sheer force of will and ballsyness.
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