Introduction: Why What If?

ISIS

Volumn 99, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 547-551

  Radick, Gregory ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 53549120590     PISSN: 00211753     EISSN: 15456994     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/591712     Document Type: Review

References (14)

1. On history of science counterfactuals as serving the end of explanation but not, however, causal explanation see Theodore Arabatzis, "Causes and Contingencies in the History of Science: A Plea for a Pluralist Historiography," Centaurus, 2008, 50:32-36, esp. pp. 33-34.
2. Steven Shapin, "What Else Is New? How Uses, Not Innovations, Drive Human Technology," New Yorker, 14 May 2007, online version: http://www.newyork.er.com/arts/critics/books/2007/05/14/070514crbo_books_ shapin?currentPage=all. Two indispensable guides to counterfactual history in methodological perspective are Niall Ferguson's introduction to his edited collection Virtual History (New York: Basic, 1999), pp. 1-90;
3. and Geoffrey Hawthorn, Plausible Worlds: Possibility and Understanding in History and the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991).
4. On the controversies over history of science contingentism see Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1999), esp. Ch. 3;
5. and Gregory Radick, introduction to a 20 Aug. 2005 New Scientist feature on history of science counterfactuals: http://www.newscientist.com/ channel/opinion/mg18725131.500-what-if-exploring-alternative-scientific-pasts. html.
6. William Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences: From the Earliest to the Present Time, 3 vols., Vol. 1 (London: John W. Parker, 1847). p. 322. I am grateful to John Christie and Thomas Dixon for helpful discussion of this passage.
7. Imre Lakatos, "History of Science and Its Rational Reconstructions," Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 1971, 8:91-136, esp. pp. 106-107.
8. For further discussion of evidentiary issues confronting the counterfactualist historian of science see Gregory Radick, "Other Histories, Other Biologies," in Philosophy, Biology, and Life, ed. Anthony O'Hear (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005), pp. 21-47.
9. Osvaldo Pessoa, Jr., has been exploring a role for computer models in assessing history of science counterfactuals; for an early statement see Pessoa, "Counterfactual Histories: The Beginning of Quantum Physics," Philosophy of Science, 2001, 6'8(Suppl.):S519-S530.
10. On contingency in the history of science as an open, investigable question rather than an ideologically loaded assumption see Arabatzis, "Causes and Contingencies in the History of Science" (cit. n. 1), pp. 34-35.
11. Much the same spirit animates Hasok Chang's proposal about history and philosophy of science as "complementary science," so far as UPS can (Popperishly) preserve critical resources from the scientific past that specialist science, for its own (Kuhnian) reasons, has cut itself off from. Sec Hasok Chang, Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004), Ch. 6.
12. Counterfactual thinking across the cognitive board flourishes as an object of psychological investigation; see David R. Mandel, Denis J. Hilton, and Patrizia Catellani, eds., The Psychology of Counterfactual Thinking (Oxford: Routledge, 1995).
13. Counterfactualism and debate over contingency versus inevitability-and how to interpret evidence from, the actual past-have been explicit themes in modern evolutionary biology since Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989). For discussion see Radick, "Other Histories, Other Biologies" (cit. n. 6), pp. 26-27.
14. An encouraging sign: while this section was in press, a complementary set of essays on "The Contingentism versus Inevitabilism Issue" appeared in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 2008, 59:220-246.