Abstract
Within the debate on the inevitability versus contingency of science for which Hacking’s writings (The social construction of what? Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1999; Philos Sci 67:S58–S71; 2000) have provided the basic terminology, the devising of counterfactual histories of science is widely assumed by champions of the contingency thesis to be an effective way to challenge the inevitability thesis. However, relatively little attention has been devoted to the problem of how to defend counterfactual history of science against the criticism that it is too speculative an endeavor to be worth bothering with—the same critique traditionally levelled against the use of counterfactuals in general history. In this paper, we review the defense of counterfactuals put forward by their advocates within general history. According to such defense—which emphasizes the essential role of counterfactuals within explanations—good counterfactual scenarios need to exhibit the right kind of plausibility, characterized as continuity between said scenarios and what historians know about the world. As our discussion shows, the same requirement needs to be satisfied by good counterfactual histories of science. However, as we mention in the concluding part of the paper, there is at least one concern raised by counterfactual history of science as used to support the contingency thesis for which the defense based on the plausibility of the counterfactual scenarios does not seem to offer easy solutions.
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Notes
- 1.
Although in what follows we shall stick to the “inevitability versus contingency” couple and cognate expressions, some terminological variations in the relevant literature are worth mentioning: for instance, French (2008, p. 572) contrasts “contingentists” with “necessitarians,” Henry (2008, p. 552) “contextualists” with “positivists,” and Fuller (2008, p. 577) “underdeterminism” with “overdeterminism.”
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- 3.
- 4.
Note that advocates of the contingency thesis do not suggest that one can devise a full-fledged alternative to our science: in view of the long-term collective investments of time, efforts, ingenuity, and resources involved in the emergence of anything as complex as our current body of scientific knowledge, this is an impossible task (see especially Trizio 2008; Kidd 2016).
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The tradition that characterizes counterfactuals in historical explanations as thought experiments dates back to Weber’s 1905 essay “Objective Possibility and Adequate Causation in Historical Explanation,” published in English in Weber (1949). I wish to thank Marco Buzzoni for pointing this out to me.
- 7.
As Frigg and Hartmann (2012) put it, idealized models characterized in this way instantiate the so-called “Aristotelian idealization, which amounts to ‘stripping away,’ in our imagination, all properties from a concrete object that we believe are not relevant to the problem at hand. This allows us to focus on a limited set of properties in isolation.”
- 8.
These remarks raise the well-known problems faced by the consequentialist approach to counterfactuals, such as, for instance, the delimitation of the set of background conditions, which Bunzl seems to sidestep. Here, however, we are not concerned with the viability of Bunzl’s avowal of counterfactual history; rather, we discuss it at some length because it is one of the most thorough attempts to spell out the solution to the problem of telling sound from unsound counterfactuals in the case of general history.
- 9.
This specific counterfactual explanation is rendered intuitively even more plausible by the fact that, when the bridge was reconstructed, it had a roadbed with four lanes, and it never suffered from the problems that led to the collapse of the first Tacoma Narrows bridge (Bunzl 2004, p. 851).
- 10.
This point was famously made by Hempel in his paper “The Function of General Laws in History” (1942).
- 11.
See, e.g., the review symposium of Darwin Deleted, featuring Alan C. Love, Robert J. Richards, and Bowler himself (Love et al. 2015).
- 12.
I wish to thank two anonymous reviewers for pressing me to address this issue.
- 13.
Admittedly, neither Fox Keller nor Merchant explicitly deploy full-blown counterfactual narratives, which they nevertheless plainly evoke.
- 14.
A short paper by Bowler, anticipating the themes of the book, is tellingly entitled: “What Darwin Disturbed. The Biology that Might Have Been” (2008).
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Acknowledgments
This chapter is based on material presented at the MBR’015 conference, held in Sestri Levante in June 2015. Thanks are due to the audience, and especially Mario Alai, Marco Buzzoni, and Darrell Rowbottom, for questions and suggestions concerning my presentation. Insightful comments by Gustavo Cevolani, Roberto Festa, and two anonymous reviewers on previous versions of the paper led to important improvements in the final version. Usual caveats apply. Financial support from PRIN grant Models and Inferences in Science is gratefully acknowledged.
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Tambolo, L. (2016). Counterfactual Histories of Science and the Contingency Thesis. In: Magnani, L., Casadio, C. (eds) Model-Based Reasoning in Science and Technology. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 27. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-38983-7_35
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