Weighting causes in historical explanation

Weighting causes in historical explanation

by

MICHAEL H A M M O N D (University of Lancaster)

A. Preliminaries

1

IT IS NOT CLEAR what philosophers of history should be doing when they investigate the problem of weighting causes in historical explanation. As with other ‘second order’ areas of philosophy the difficulty is over how much one considers philosophy to be a descriptive activity concerned primarily with elucidat- ing the logical forms of typical practices of whatever discipline is under investigation. Or whether one considers philosophy in some more messianic role showing how other practitioners ought to be operating, where this ‘ought’ can be seen as a prudential ‘ought’; e.g., if historians want to achieve knowledge of the past then they ought to explain in this particular way. The problem of weighting causes in history is no exception: one principal writer in this area, Morton White 1161, clearly sees the task of the philosopher of history as describing the logical form of historians’ practice in selecting the most important cause of historical events and showing how this selection is dependent upon the historian’s interest. His method of criticising other theories of what constitutes a main cause of an historical event, e.g., underlying conditions, actions of important historical individuals, etc., is to cite the evidence of other historians who don’t select causal conditions from these categories as being the most important cause of the event in question. Obviously, if the theories criticised were not attempts to describe historical procedure then it is not an adequate criticism to cite evidence that other historians don’t practice this procedure, for it may be the case that (a) the account of most important cause was a prescriptive account and (b) the historians

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whose selections of main cause is taken to refute the account of main cause don’t employ this set of criteria for distinguishing the main cause of an event.

This last point raises another important preliminary consideration,’ viz., that it is possible to make a distinction between historical practice which is the result of the conscious application of a set of criteria for weighting causes and practice which merely conforms to a set of criteria. So with descriptive accounts of criteria for the selection of the main causefs) of an historical event one must specify whether the description describes criteria that historians apply or criteria that historians conform to. Similarly with prescriptive accounts: it should be specified whether a set of criteria for weighting causes is offered as criteria that historians ought to conform to or ought to apply.

A partial illustration of this contorming/applying distinction can be seen in White’s descriptive account of the selection of main cause, i.e., his abnormalist account summarised as follows:

On most occasions when historians assert that a constributory cause is the (decisive) cause (a) that cause is the abnormal contributory cause (b) it is sometimes selected from a point of view which another investigator may not share and (c) we cannot always establish on absolute grounds that one of these points of view is superior to others. ([16], p. 107)

This account is clearly, at most, an account of criteria to which historians’ weighting of causes conforms as White gives plenty of evidence of historians applying different (because intended to be objective) criteria of the weighting of causes, i.e., when he is offering counter evidence to descriptions of the historians’ activity. The upshot is that White’s description of criteria to which historians conform is consistent with more or less any criteria that historians consciously apply when selecting the most important cause of historical events. If this were so, and indeed it seems as if White thinks it strengthens his case if it were so,

* This discussion stems from a distinction made by Russell Keat in an un- published paper. I am indebted to him for helpful criticisms during the genesis of this paper.

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then it is not clear that the declared advantage over Mill’s account, that weighting of causal conditions must be arbitrary, is gained.

2 Mere descriptive activity of criteria to which historians, perhaps accidentally, conform, is not an adequate philosophical activity. There should be more concern to offer an account of weighting criteria than can, in some sense, be justified, and which therefore can be offered to the historian as criteria which ought to be applied, or at least which ought to be conformed to. In doing this it is prima facie evident that the following considerations should be borne in mind:

(a) Criteria that make no essential reference to the historian’s values or interests and which therefore make the weighting of historical causes to some extent objective are to be preferred to those that do.

(b) Criteria should be applicable to the weighting of the causes of particular events, i.e., the emphasis in the historical context should be the criteria the historian can employ when explaining unique historical events. This is not the place to examine the role of covering laws in historical explanations, but at the least one must admit the possibility that whatever the role of laws in the explanation of an event and whatever implications there are for the testing of these laws it is contingently possible that for any (and most) historical event(s), an event of that type will not be repeated. Thus, even if it were possible to derive criteria for the weighting of causes of particular events from criteria for the weighting of causes of events of that type, this would not be much solace to historians because of the greater difficulty in establishing the relevant criteria of causal importance for explanations of types of phenomena. However, it is not possible to derive criteria for the weighting of causes of particular events from the weighting of causes of events of that type. As Raymond Martin argues ([6] p. 291 f.) it would be curious, if not wrong, to argue from the fact that driver-negligence is a ‘more frequent’ cause of automobile accidents than mechanical failures to the claim that in any particular accident involving both these causal conditions driver

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negligence is a more important cause than mechanical failure. So where the weighting of causal explanations of types of result involves a claim about the relative frequency of the occurrence of factors of the same type as the causes weighted and the result explained (which includes most plausible accounts of weighting, see [8]) it is not possible to read off the weighting of the causes of a particular event of any relevant type.

(c) Any account of criteria employed by historians should as far as possible be consistent with a plausible account of causation. It could be argued that it is to put the cart before the horse to discuss the weighting of causes, before offering an adequate analysis of causation. But: (i) There is no clear consensus about the meaning of and analysis of ‘x causes y’, particularly about the primacy of particular causal statements or general causal statements and about the role of counterfactual conditionals in this analysis. (ii) Historians are relatively unsophisticated in their views about the nature of the causal connection between historical events and prior conditions. (iii) Any analysis of the weighting of the causes of particular historical events involves both the problems mentioned in (i) above, viz., both how far general causal statements are involved as either part of the meaning of particular causal statements or as part of the truth conditions of particular causal statements, and how counterfactual analysis is involved in the weighting-which may provide clues as to the operation of counterfactuals with respect to the general problem of causation. (iv) Although historians are relatively unsophisticated in their conscious view of the causal relation, they are certainly adept at establishing causal connections in history and at offering critical analyses of alternative proposed causal explanations. So an examination of the justification of criteria for weighting causes and attention to how these criteria fit in with historical practice will provide the philosopher with material against which any analysis of causation can be tested (cf. Mackie [4], ch. 5 ) or, more hope- fully, will provide the philosopher with material on which to base hislher analysis of causation.

(d) One relevant feature that can be highlighted from some recent discussions of the nature of causation is that consideration

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of the possibility of a causal condition being a necessary condition of its effect has led to (i) awareness that events can have a plurality of sets of jointly sufficient conditions, i.e., events can be overdetermined, and (ii) Mackie’s discussion (in [3], [4]) of causal conditons being inus conditions of the event to be explained, i.e., where causal conditions are seen as ‘an insufficient but non- redundant part of an unnecessary but sufficient condition’. If Mackie’s account is modified so that the letters in the following formula are used to stand for particular conditions and events (and not, as in Mackie’s account, to stand for types of conditions and events), then an inus condition could be seen as a particular condition rather than a type of condition. Then, using the formula, in F all @ B c or DGH or J K L ) are followed by P , and in F all P are preceded by ABC or DGH or JKL ([4], p. 62) (where F stands for causal field (background conditions); C stands for the absence of the condition C , and A to L stand for factors considered to stand in some causal relation to the event P ) , it is possible to weight causes in either of two possible ways. First, we can determine whether or not we have a case of over-determination, i.e., whether or not we have a case of ABC or DGH or . . . or . . . , and if so the historian may wish to consider which of A B c or DGH etc. is the more important set of jointly sufficient conditions. Secondly, it may not be the case that the event in question is over-determined, in which case the weighting will concern the relative importance of the non-redundant inus conditions (where these are seen as particular conditions). What is to be expected is that there are at least two differing sets of criteria for the weighting of causes in historical explanation corresponding to each of these cases.

The causal field in this analysis is important, for this notion refers to the set of background conditions like the presence of oxygen or the existence of people in the absence of which there would be no historical events. If people had not been born there would be no historical events, so for any specific historical event it could be argued that a person’s birth was an important cause. However, such a suggestion would be a mockery of historical practice; so it is important to relegate such conditions (mere

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conditions, background conditions) to the causal field against the background of which any question about the cause of an event will be asked.

One difficulty with this notion is that what one selects as be- longing to a causal field might depend upon the historian’s question, e.g., consideration of the significance of the firing on Fort Sumter will be, normally, against the background of the preconditions of the American Civil War; whereas the existence of the institution of slavery might be considered to be a causal condition of the Civil War (in contrast to when the historian considers the significance of the Fort Sumter episode) if it is not considered part of the causal field. The problem is to formulate some more objective criterion of what constitutes a member of the causal field such that it is possible to assess the relative significance of, say, the firing on Fort Sumter and the effects on people’s consciousness of the institution of slavery. One way of specifying what belongs to the causal field of some event(s) is to say that those conditions common to all sets of jointly sufficient conditions constitute the causal field, so any causal condition which is a candidate for a most important cause is a causal condition in relation to a causal field thus specified. One difficulty, which will emerge, for this first characterization of a causal field is that for some historical events where there is only one set of conditions which become jointly sufficient when one of a range of possible conditions is conjoined, e.g., a triggering condition which could be any one of a number of different events, all the ‘predisposing’ factors would be considered part of the causal field. This would rule out the predisposing factors being considered as more important causal conditions than the triggers for the simple reason that they are not considered as causal conditions.

An alternative view is to say that mere conditions are not historical conditions. That is, just as historians have to select which events and their characteristics to explain, they also see some phenomena as more historically significant than others, i.e., the reason why presence of oxygen, birth of historical figures, etc., are relegated to the causal field is that these are not historically significant phenomena. One danger here is that of circularity. For


the most natural interpretation of the historical significance of causal conditions is causal significance, which is just the concept under investigation. Another danger is that of introducing value concepts into the explanans. If one wants to avoid the latter danger at all costs, then perhaps a rough characterisation of historical causal conditions is that these have to be considered as affecting the consciousness of historical individuals. So the difference between a mere condition like the presence of oxygen, and a precondition like the institution of slavery is that the former, although necessary for people to have thoughts, feelings, etc., is not an object of those thoughts feelings, etc. This difference allows the possiblility that some geographical, meteorological, physical, etc., conditions might be considered as historical causal conditions of specific historical events in so far as these have some causal relationship to the objects of consciousness of individuals (where this idea includes reference to the absence of a causal relationship as in the case where a military commander does not take the weather conditions into account).

(e) Before examination of these two sets of criteria of causal importance a plea for the importance of this discussion for historians is in order, especially given the explicit avoidance of certain aspects of the weighting problem by historians like Lawrence Stone [14] who espouses a preference to divide causal conditions of historical events into preconditions, precipitants and triggers, where it is claimed it doesn’t make sense to weight these categories against each other, though the historian can select certain conditions within each category as being more important than conditions in the same category. Rather than merely cite historians like E. H. Can- who claims that ‘every historical argument revolves round the question of the priority of causes’ [l], it is more persua- sive to consider the following argument about the explanation of the Scramble for Africa in the 1880s and 1890s.

It is indeed tempting to conclude that in the early 1880s a convergence of many forces resulted in the rapid partition of Africa. Each of these forces had multiple causes. Each one in turn requires a pluralistic explanation. But in spite of its apparent scholarly respectability, the multiple causes model is very unsatisfactory. Its explanatory power is

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minimal ... It is almost a non-explanation to say of a process like this (the Scramble): ‘Well it just happened that way-the coincidental result of several independent chains of event, each with multiple causes’. More- over, pluralistic explanations completely fail to solve the problem of timing. Why did the numerous forces which converged to produce the scramble all ‘go critical‘, in the sense of causing annexations, within one particular short period of time? The more pluralistic the explanation and the more numerous and various the forces, the more inscrutably mysterious this coincidence becomes. ([12], p. 17.)

Three significant points can be made. First, at least in the eyes of one distinguished historian, pluralistic explanations, viz., where the historian gives sets of conditions causally responsible for each element of the whole historical explanation but makes no attempt to establish the connections between these various elements, are seen as not respectable. What has happened is that the difficulties of weighting causes have persuaded historians that it is more respectable, perhaps because more subtle, not to consider weighting causes but to give a complex multi-causal analysis of the various elements that make up a specific historical event. Second- ly, one important aspect of historical events that requires explanation is the timing. Why didn’t the Scramble for Africa take place earlier in the 19th century? Why did the American Civil War occur in 1861 and not in 1820 (Missouri Compromise)? Thirdly, the timing of historical events at least, if not the occurrence of the events in question is not explained by any multi-causal analysis where this analysis does not consider the connections between the causal conditions. And it is by weighting causes that the causal connections between differing elements of a historical situation have to be taken into account.

B. Criteria of causal importance

Given the desire to formulate an objective procedure for weighting causes in historical explanation it is reasonable to look at two previous attempts to do this for explanation of particular events.’

* For analyses relating to weighting causes of types of events there is no better discussion than Nagel’s ([S], ch. 15).

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Max Weber’s discussion (in [15]) of objective possibility and adequate causation in historical explanation, found in his critique of Eduard Meyer’s methodological views, provides a useful starting point, for it contains (a) analysis of historians’ systematic use of counterfactual conditionals in the establishment of the causal significance of historical conditions, and (b) the basis of two different notions of how some causal conditions can have more causal significance than others. The view Weber is defending is that questions of the form ‘what might have happened i f . . .?’ are an important part of historical procedure, especially when as- certaining the causal significance of historical conditions. This is to counteract the worry (see [lo]) that some historians have, viz., that their concern is with what did happen rather than with what might have happened. A more sophisticated, but wrong, version of this worry is expressed by Stone in [14], where he correctly considers the importance of individual decision via a counterfactual analysis, but says that no logical or scientific defence can be offered for this procedure (p. 118). It is this latter claim that is wrong.

The argument for the importance of this procedure is in two stages: (i) The preliminary stage is to make the familiar Weberian point that the historian has to select from the infinite number of events which events helshe is going to explain and which aspects of those events are interesting or important. The role of values in this process of selection is a well-worn topic, and I propose, if possible, to avoid it. What is important is to recognise that when offering a causal explanation of an event it is an event under some description, where that description contains reference to the ‘essential’ components, i.e., to those aspects of the events which interest the historian. (ii) A causal explanation of a given historical event involves an abstraction process whereby the historian selects certain components from ‘the infinity of determining factors’. On the selection process Weber says

What might have happened . . . does indeed bear on something decisive for the historical moulding of reality, namely, on what causal significance is properly attributed to this individual decision in the context of the totality of infinitely numerous ‘factors’ all of which had to be in such and

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such an arrangement and no other if this result were to emerge . . . ([15], p. 164)

Two points of clarification are needed: (a) the reference to ‘this individual decision’ is to an example of a causal factor, viz., Bismark’s decision to make war (of 1866); ‘causal factor’ could be substituted for ‘individual decision’ without loss of Weber’s meaning, (b) Weber’s concept of causal significance might seem ambiguous between (i) the thought that a causal condition is significant if it involves the selection of that causal condition from the infinite regress of causal conditions, including the background conditions (the standard example of which is the presence of oxygen)-an inus condition could be seen as an example of a causally significant condition on this view-and (ii) the thought that a causal condition as identified under (i) is more significant than another such causal condition; this is the thought central to the phenomenon of weighting causes. The resolution of this ambiguity is important, for although it is clear that Weber is correct to claim that some abstraction procedure involving counterfactuals is necessary to establish causally significant conditions of type (i), and that it is necessary to establish causally significant conditions of this type, it is not so clear that similar abstraction procedures are involved in weighting causes in the second sense nor that such selection of causally significant conditions is necessary. However the important claim concerns not the necessity of weighting causes-which, perhaps, Weber doesn’t argue for-but the necessity for an abstraction procedure involving counterfactuals if historians are to weight causes. Weber clarifies that he is concerned with the problem of weighting causes in his treatment of the theory of objective possibility and adequate causation.

It is the theory of ‘objective possibility’ that allows us to consider systematically the absence or modification of a single causal component of a complex of conditions, and importantly to see that the procedure for assessing the causal significance of these conditions are objective. This is spelled out as follows:

. . . when we conceive of one or a few of the actual causal components as modified in a certain direction and then ask ourselves whether under


the conditions which have thus changed, the same effect (the same, i.e., in ‘essential’points) or some other effect ‘would have been expected’. ([IS], p. 171 f.)

The results of these counterfactual analyses Weber calls ‘judgments of possibility’, and he claims that for each judgment of possibility we know what would have happened by reference to an empirical rule (the reference to an empirical rule or to nomo- logical knowledge will not be developed here; what is essential is that such judgments of possibility are empirically decidable and that it is in virtue of this fact that assessment of causal significance is objective).

It is in the discussion of adequate causation that follows that there is both further discussion of how causes are weighted and clues to possible criteria for weighting causes. An adequate cause is defined thus:

If we ‘conceived’ the effects as having actually occurred under the modified conditions we would then recognise those facts thus modified to be ‘adequate causes’. ([lS], p. 175)

The idea here is the dual one that if certain conditions are conceived as being absent, and yet the remaining conditions would still have yielded the same event (i.e., at least those chosen significant elements of the same event), then (i) the ‘absent’ condition is unimportant, and (ii) the other conditions were such that the event in question was more than probable given those conditions. As this stands a significant criterion for main cause is not yielded, for the absent condition, as identified, would not qualify for being a candidate cause. But it is easy to modify this account such that (i) a causal condition is unimportant if when the historian considers the possibility of its absence an event very similar to the event under consideration would have occurred given the remaining causal conditions. And such a condition would be seen as important if when the historian considers its absence an event significantly different from the one under consideration would have occurred. (ii) a set of conditions is more important than another set if the event similar to the one in question is more 8 -Theoria 2 1977

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likely to occur, given the first set than given the second set. Raymond Martin has formulated a criterion similar to this

@ 2 ) A was a more important cause of P than was B if for any factor, X , such that A , B and X were each a cause of P, and were each a non- redundant member of the set of factors, (A, B , X ) , which set both occurred and was sufficient for P, the probability was greater, given A and X , than it was, given B and X , that a factor of type? would occur during an appropriate temporal interval. ([6], p. 298)

The idea behind this formulation, as in Weber’s case, is to arrive at an understanding how historians make a distinction between preconditions and precipitants where ‘the precipitants are relegated to the less important causal role, on the gruonds that the likelihood of the event of the relevant type happening within a fairly restricted time interval was very high given the pre-conditions. Another way of putting the same point is to say that the likelihood of a substitute condition occurring having the same causal role as the precipitant was high. So a causal condition is unimportant if the likelihood of substitute conditions having the same effect is high. The usual illustration of this point is the claim that historians argue that the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand at Sarajevo was an unimportant, though contributory, cause of the outbreak of the First World War, on the grounds that the underlying factors (preconditions) were such that it was more probable that the war (or a similar war at about the same time) would occur given the absence of the assassination than it would have been given the assassination and the absence of any of those preconditions.

Some of the difficulties involved in the application of this criterion, e.g., specification of the relevant factor of type-P and determination of the ‘appropriate temporal interval’ have the dubious advantage of being confined to the explanandum. This could mean that once historians were agreed on how an event was to be described, etc., there are objective procedures to follow

T h i s is offered as an improvement of Sten Nilson’s criterion in [9], which was endorsed by Marc-Wogau in [5]. The need for improvement is given in [6], pp. 296-7.


which enable the historian to assess the causes of those historical events. However, there are other difficulties involved in the application of this criterion, difficulties which might shed light on this whole approach to causal importance. But before a more detailed examination of these, let us follow up the other idea of causal importance found in Weber’s discussion, viz., that a cause is important if its absence would have led to an event significantly different to the one being explained. Again Raymond Martin has formulated a criterion of causal importance that goes some way to capturing this idea:

@1) A was a more imDortant cause of P than was B if ( I ) A and B were each a necessary cause of P , and ( 2 ) there is some appropriate state @, such that:

(i) A , B , and P are each deviations from (D and (ii) on the occasion in question had A occurred as it did and B

occurring in @, a result would have occurred more similar to P than had B occurred as it did and A occurred as in @.

(161, PP. 292-3.)

(1) is important here for it specifes one important difference between the conditions for the application of this criterion (D 1) and the criterion @2), viz., that here one rules out the possibility of, and hence the need for, consideration of alternative sufficient conditions of P . For the claim that A and B are necessary conditions of P is to say that, on the occasion in question, no sufficient cause of P was present which was causally independent of either A or B . Whereas the operation of 0 2 ) required consideration of alternative sufficient conditions for it involved the contemplation of alternative conditions. So the difference between (D1) and 0 2 ) may reflect the earlier point that there may be different criteria of causal importance depending on whether inus conditions are being compared with each other or where minimally siifficient conditions are being compared with each other. In this respect 01) appears much easier to operate, for it only involves the consideration of the absence of conditions-not the possible substitu- tion of alternative conditions. Whereas 0 2 ) is more complicated, given that it could be applied on one of these three situations:

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(i) Where there is a case of over-determination, i.e., more than one sufficient set of conditions was present, e.g., the case of a fire being the result of a lighted cigarette being thrown onto inflammable material and lightning striking at the same time and place. (What Scriven, in [13], calls simultaneous over- determination. )

(ii) Where there is a case of over-determination in the sense that if the actual conditions hadn’t have occurred another set of sufficient conditions would have done so, at a later time. (What Scriven, in [ 131, calls independent over-determination. )

A special case of this is linked over-determination, where it is the case that it is only if certain conditions are not satisfied that other conditions will be enacted. E.g., if Lincoln hadn’t been elected president in 1860, Southern secessionists would have found another target for their fear of the North, or Scriven’s own example ([13], p. 261) of a group of army officers watching another group’s attempt at coup d’ttat such that only if the attempt fails will the army take action.

(iii) The case where there is only one set of jointly sufficient conditions, but that there is more than one possible substitute for certain conditions.

A schematic way of representing these three alternatives, using Mackie’s analysis, as before, is:

(i) in F , ABC & DEF+P; (ii) in F, ABCVDEF (only if not ABC)+P; (iii) A B ( C V D V E V G ...)* P.

For the moment, however, it is (2) in (Dl) that requires clarification and modification. In the example Martin considers ([6], p. 294 f.) it is relatively easy to specify an appropriate state @- with reference to which A , B and P are deviations. The example is that of weight gain being caused more by increased food consumption than by less exercise. So it is easy to specify previous weight (P in Ca), previous level of food consumption (A in @) and previous amount of exercise (B in @) with reference to which


A, B and P are deviations. However, in the case of more historical examples it is not always easy to specify this prior appropriate state; the ease in the example being partially due to the fact that all three factors are quantifiable. One of Martin’s historical illustra- tions of the operation of 0 1 ) points the way to modification. The example he takes ([6], pp. 294 f.) is Morison’s claim (in [7]) that the knowledge that Washington and Jefferson were in favour of the New American Constitution was a more important cause of what public acceptance of the document there was prior to ratification than were the published essays of Madison, Hamilton and Jay. Here is Martin’s understanding of Morison’s weighting procedure:

. . . the weighting aspect of Morison’s . . . explanation . . . would be correct if both of the factors he cites were necessary causes of the level of public acceptance of the new Constitution that existed prior to its ratification, and if, under the circumstances present during this period, there would have been more public acceptance of that document had Madison, Hamilton and Jay not published their essays supporting it, but the public known that Washington and Jefferson were in favour of it, than had Madison, Hamilton and Jay published their essays supporting it, but the public not known that Washington and Jefferson were in favour of it. @I, P. 295)

P (Public acceptance of new constitution) in Q> is easy enough to specify: to a certain extent it is quantifiable. But A, and B in this example are contrasted with not-A and not-B; i.e., A in @ is equivalent to not-A, B in @ is equivalent to not-B. This suggests that an alternative criterion of weighting causes in historical cases might be:

@3) Awas a more important cause of P than was B if (1) A and B were each a necessary cause of P , and (2) if A had been absent then the result would have been

more different from P than ifB had been absent.

This has the advantage of avoiding problems of specifying the appropriate state @ in Martin’s @1) and still being able to capture the weighting procedures in the weight gain case as well as in the historical cases. For in that case A is increased food consumption,

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B is decreased level of exercise, so consideration of the absence of A would be consideration of no increase in food consumption, i.e., reference to the prior level of food consumption. Similarly, consideration of the absence of B would be consideration of no decrease of exercise, i.e., reference to prior level of exercise.

1-he operation of @ 3 ) is unclear in at least two important respects: (i) if one considers the absence of any causal condition, then that condition might have a causal effect on the remaining causal conditions: (ii) if one considers the absence of any causal condition, then it is not clear that only one outcome of the remaining conditions is possible.

The first need for clarification is important, for if the historian has to consider the effect of the absence of a condition on other conditions, then the whole problem of weighting causes arises all over again, viz., the selection of which consequences (and which aspects of those consequences) are chosen as most significant. So, in so far as this selection is dependent upon the historian’s values, the weighting of the causal conditions of the original eventlphenomenon which concerned the historian is also dependent upon values, and therefore the objectivity of this criterion is only apparent. This point arises for @2) also, and may have more far reaching consequences than those alluded to here.

The second need for clarification points to an amendment of 0 3 ) . D 3 ) has reference to a comparison between o m outcome and the actual historical event. To satisfy this condition what the historian must consider is the mosr probable outcome given certain conditions, so that the difference in this respect between D 2 ) and @ 3 ) is that 0 3 ) determines what would have been the most probable outcome of a certain set of conditions (i.e., with a specific condition being absented) and compares this result with the actual outcome. Whereas @2) considers the relative probability of the occurrence of an event similar to the actual event, given the amended set of conditions. The question arises at this point about the relationship between these two criteria. For example, if the application of each of these criteria yields different results, which result do historians accept? There is a temptation to think that, in practice, there is less difference in the opera-


tion of these two criteria than there is in principle, especially if one is careful about when @3) is applied. It seems obvious that if on @2) a set of preconditions are selected as the main cause(s) of a given event P, then one would expect that the same answer would be yielded by the operation of @3), i.e., if one considered the absence of any of the preconditions then the most probable outcome would have been more significantly different from that which would have followed the consideration of the absence of any of the precipitants.

However there is the possibility of (D2) and @ 3 ) yielding different results. First, there is the case where it is possible that by operating (D2) the historian concludes that there is a high probability that B would not be replaced by one of a range of substitute conditions (B1, . . ., Bn) , and so concludes that B is important. In the same conditions it is possible that by operating @3) the historian concludes that A is more important, for although without B the event would have been improbable, it could have been the case that the absence of A would have had a more significant affect than the the absence of B . But under these conditions, i.e., where there is a low probablility of replacement conditions, it is clear that the range of possible outcomes increases if these ‘crucial’ conditions are absented, in which case (i) the degree of probability of the outcome with the highest probability might be quite low, (ii) it becomes difficult for the historian to imagine what would have happened if ... Under these conditions it is possible to see some justification for historians abjuring the practice of considering events that haven’t happened, for the historian would have to enter the realm of fantasy, in order to come to a conclusion about the possible course of history.

The American Civil War provides an illustration of these points. If the historian is attempting to explain the sectional rivalry which divided the North and the South in the U.S.A. prior to 1861 prior to explaining why this rivalry erupted into secession and war in 1860-1861, then four sets of factors are usually chosen as candidates for the most important cause of the war.4 These are (i) social

The main source for the historical material is Parish [ I I ] .

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and cultural incompatibility between the North and the South, (ii) economic rivalry, (iii) constitutional disagreement, e.g., over states rights or amount of southern representation in Congress, and (iv) controversy over Negro slavery. If it is taken as true that if the institution of slavery hadn’t existed no similar institution would have taken its place, and similarly for the other sets of conditions, then we have the conditions for the operation of @3). But if the historian considers the events of the first half of the nineteenth century in America absenting the institution of slavery, then it is true that helshe can conclude that the sectional conflict, and hence the war, would not have occurred without the existence of slaves in the south. However, this is a primitive causal judgment; one which is involved in selecting candidates for causal importance. Once the historian tackles the more sophisticated problem of weighting the sets of causal factors there are problems. For when the historian entertains the idea of the absence of (iv) and the operation of (i)-(iii), no clear historical outcome is seen. And the main reason for this is not the absence of knowledge of relevant causal laws relating social, cultural economic and constitutional differences to sectional conflict and war, but because of the relationship between (i)-(iii) and (iv), the institution of slavery. That is, the historian’s description of cultural and social differences, of economic differences and of constitutional differences in pre-1860 U.S.A. should involve reference to slavery. For example, many contemporary southern writers saw the conflict as a social and cultural conflict between the noble agrarian values of southerners against the values associated with the Northerners’ support of the factory system based on the exploita- tion of wage slaves and on money-grabbing materialism, but it is a crucial feature of this difference that the agrarian system in the south was based upon slavery; whereas the factory system in the North was not. If slavery hadn’t have existed, then it is arguable that there would not have been this wide difference in the values of Northerners and Southerners. A similar result follows in the case of the other sets of factors. If the historian focuses on the constitutional disputes in the absence of one set of factors, e.g., slavery or economic differences, then it is again arguable that


there would not have been these constitutional differences if there had been no slavery, or if there had been no economic differences. That is, constitutional differences were focused on issues like the Missouri Compromise (1820), the Kansas-Nebraska Bill (1854) or the Fugitive Slave Law (18SO), all of which concerned the existence or the extension of slavery. Would these constitutional issues have arisen if slavery had not existed in the South? Similarly, without the growing economic and demographic power in the North which altered the sectional balance of power, especially in Congress, again there would have been no impetus for constitutional disagreement.

The upshot of these considerations is that there can be no clear and obvious outcome from the truncated set of conditions. Indeed, the sets of conditions are so inter-related that the historian’s reconstruction of historical reality becomes so far removed from the actual course of events that one must see that complete operation of (D3), in practice, is an invitation to the historical novelist.

This brief discussion of the American Civil War points to the kind of knowledge required to enable historians to make realistic assessments of what would have happened if . . .: this knowledge has to involve the identification of causal connections between sets of causal conditions. In the example of the Civil War the four sets of conditions were (a) seen to be causally connected, (b) each a subset of the preconditions of the Civil War. This has the effect that contemplation of the counterfactual: if not (i) . . . (or not (ii), or not (iii) or not (iv)) is effectively the same as contemplation of the counterfactual: if the preconditions hadn’t have occurred, would the Civil War have happened? This question is manifestly absurd, if asked as an important part of historical methodology. However, it i s possible to say that operation of (D3) highlights the importance of the causal connections between conditions, or between sets of conditions. One reason for this is that the distinction between important causes and unimportant causes picked out by (D2) (usually seen, or intended, as a distinction between preconditions and precipitants) is really a distinction between conditions between which there are strong causal connections (or bonds) and conditions that are in some sense ‘external’ to the

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causal structure. That is, in order to be able to identify the degree of replaceability of any causal condition (or set of conditions) prior causal knowledge is presupposed. To be able to decide whether or not the bombardment of Fort Sumter on 12th April 1861 was a relatively unimportant cause of the outbreak of war, the historian has to know a great deal about the sectional conflict in order to assess the likelihood of other possible rallying events concentrat- ing the minds of both Northerners and Southerners. Using the terminology of (D2) the question, Is an event similar to P likely to occur given the absence of certain conditions?, can be answered by referring to the substitutivity of a certain condition B (from a range of conditions B 1 , . . ., Bn) , but the determination of this fact seems, on the basis of the American Civil War example, to be a function of the high degree of probability that an event similar to P would occur given the absence of B . And to establish this latter fact it is necessary to know what causal consequence the absence of a certain condition would have on the remaining conditions. In this case those preconditions picked out as causally important by the operation of (D2) will be part of the ‘seamless web’ of causal conditions, and so the operation of 0 3 ) is bound to be fraught with the difficulties illustrated above.

To return to the second possible case of (D2) and 0 3 ) yielding different results. This is where it is possible that by operating (D2) one concludes that there is a high probability that B would be replaced by a substitute condition from a range of conditions @I1, ..., Bn) . In these circumstances one concludes that B is relatively unimportant and hence that A is more important, i.e., by operating (D2). Given that ( D 3 ) does not consider the substitutivity of absented conditions, it is possible that 0 3 ) yields a highly replaceable condition (according to 0 2 ) ) as the main cause of P , i.e., although there is a number of possible substitute conditions for B it remains the case that if B hadn’t have occurred (and replacement isn’t considered, i.e., @ 3 ) is operated) then the result P would have been more different than if ‘4 had been absent and B present.

A simple example illustrates the difficulties for such a case: A temperamental mother cuffs her child for misbehaving when


she is usually a mother who doesn’t practice physical punisnment because she does not believe in the efficacy of physical punish- ment.5 On this occasion she does so because she has been agitated by a quarrel with her husband. However, the range of aggravating conditions is large, so one concludes (operating @ 2 ) ) that the quarrel with the husband was a relatively unimportant cause of the cuffing. The problem comes when @3) is operated. LetA refer to the quarrel with the husband, and B to the temperament of the mother.

I fA is absented, then it is likely that the child would be punished in some non-physical way. If B is absented, then it is difficult to imagine how to proceed. All that can be said is that the mother did not have this temperament, no consideration of possible alternative temperaments is in order. But how is this temperament to be specified? If the results of the operation of @2) are taken into account, then at least part of the description of the mother’s temperament will include reference to the likelihood of being easily upset by a wide range of phenomena. In this case the absence of B , clearly makes more difference than the absence o f A . However, if @2) is not taken into account, then it is possible that the absence of A is considered to have more effect than the absence of B . But given the circumstances, it does not seem likely that anyone would take seriously the idea that such a replaceable condition could be the main cause of the cuffing (or similar event). One is more likely to think that there is something deeper in the character of the mother that makes her less resistant to these aggravating phenomena. This points to the need to operate (D2) before @3); otherwise the possibility of counter-intuitive results is increased.

These counter-intuitive results arise where the historian’s determination of the degree of replaceability of any condition is dependent upon knowledge concerning the causal relationship between the other conditions, where the substitutivity of a condition is a function of this causal relationsship. This is true in both the Fort Sumter example, considered earlier and in the example

Weber in [15] uses a similar example for another purpose.

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of the temperamental mother. Under these conditions it is wise to avoid the operation of @3).

However, there is a case for the independent operation of (D3) where the substitutivity of a condition is not a function of the prior causal conditions, e.g., as in the first two cases of over- determination mentioned earlier, viz., simultaneous and independent over-determination (though the former case is more problematic). Here there is a case for artificially ignoring the fact that if B hadn’t happened, B would have been such that, operating @ 2 ) , B is not considered to be an important cause, but, operating (D3), B is considered to have causal significance in relation to the prior conditions. Which of two over-determining conditions is more causally important is, of course, another question.

Tentatively, we can say that the relationship between 0 2 ) and @3) is such that the operation of @ 2 ) should only be a preliminary to the operation of @3) and be seen as dividing historical conditions into two types: preconditions and precipitants, where each type can have two sub-classes, i.e., the preconditions can be such than an event similar to P is highly probable, in which case the precipitant’s role is to heighten this probability, or the preconditions can be such that an event similar to P is not highly probable, in which case the precipitant has a more important causal role: that of altering what would otherwise have happened. This distinction between preconditions and precipitants should be seen as an improvement on L. Stone’s distinction in [14], for that only sees preconditions (and precipitants) as the first sub-class.

In the case of the American Civil War historians disagree about the nature of the preconditions. Those who emphasize the causal role of the sectional conflict see the war as a probable (if not inevitable or irrepressible) outcome given the nature of the deeply felt disagreement between Northerners and Southerners. Whereas ‘revisionist’ historians like Avery Craven and J . G. Randall claim that the preconditions for the American Civil War are to be identified as in the second subclass above, i.e., it is not the case given the sectional conflict was was virtually unavoidable. These historians identify precipitant events as being the most important causes of the war, as being the events which made the difference

WEIGHTING CAUSES IN HISTORlCAL EXPLANATION 125

to a situation where one would not have expected the outbreak of war. Thus if politicians etc. had been more adept at handling the situation, the war could have been avoided.

Why do these historians disagree? Dray [ 2 ] suggests that this is logically based upon the differing values of the historians reflect- ing their attitudes to slavery, to war, or to what can be reasonably expected of people in the state of sectional conflict. Whereas it does seem possible to conceive these disagreements as being empirically decideable; for if judgments of possibility are objective, then although historians do choose their position on the relative importance of the causes of the American Civil War as a result of their evaluation of Northern and Southern motives and actions, they need not do so.

However, there is some doubt whether these judgments of possibility are objective, especially now it is established that these depend upon knowing the causal relations between conditions. For as was seen when discussing @3), the whole problem of weighting causes rears its ugly head to cast doubt on the whole project of confining any value-influence to the description of the event to be explained: the explanandum.

In conclusion it is useful to draw the discussion together by comparing the account of weighting causes more explicitly with that offered by Lawrence Stone [ 141.

First, Stone is wrong to avoid assessing the relative causal importance of conditions from each of his categories; preconditions, precipitants and triggers. Operation of @ 2 ) does not neces- sarily divide conditions into preconditions and (precipitants or triggers) where the former render the outcome probable; it is possible for some precipitants or triggers to have a more important causal role than the preconditions.

Secondly, Stone’s claim that it is possible to weight causal conditions within each category should be seen as a fairly explicit application of criterion @3), when seen as yielding the same results on (D2) . One of the four most important preconditions of the English Revolution is seen to be a diffuse Puritanism: creating a burning sense of the need for change in the Church and eventually in the State. Stone says,

I26 MICHAEL HAhlMOND

It provided an essential element in the Revolution, the feeling of certainty in the rectitude of the opposition cause, and of moral indignation at the wickedness of the established authorities . . . without absolute confidence in the rectitude of their cause. which nothing other than Puritanism could have given, the Parliamentary leaders of the 1640’s would have been unable to bring themselves to the pitch of defying the King and levying war against him. ([14], p. 100 f.)

Clearly Stone is applying the kind of counterfactual analysis involved in @3): without Puritanism no revolution, hence Puri- tanism is one of the most important causes of the English Revolution. The other three sets of conditions selected by Stone as being of great importance have a similar status: they are clearly conditions without which there would have been no Revolution. The reason why this kind of counter-factual judgment makes sense is that it operates on a fairly crude level, and that it picks out conditions that are so deeply embedded in the social economic and political structure of England in the 100 years prior to 1642. These conditions are such that if they are absented then the historian has to alter hidher view of all other historical conditions because of their relation to these conditions; whereas less important conditions don’t have this intimate, all embracing causal relationship with all other causal conditions.

This relationship with other causes, as noted in the case of the American Civil War, provides good reason for Stone’s avoidance of the attempt to place his four most important preconditions into an order of causal significance. Weighting of causal conditions can and should occur, in accordance with the operation of D3), but only at a fairly crude level. The historian has to recognise that beyond a certain point it doesn’t make historical sense, and perhaps doesn’t make philosophical sense, to persist in weighting causes.

Thirdly, and lastly, Stone’s three-fold division of historical conditions might lead the historian astray when explaining pre- cisely why and when a given historical event occurred. This is because there may be a temptation to consider conditions of each category independently of conditions from other categories, and hence lose a sense of the inter-connectedness of conditions be-

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longing to different categories. It is possible via the operation of ( p 2 ) and 0 3 ) to conclude that a set of interrelated conditions from both preconditions and precipitants or triggers is a more important set than any other. This is an extension of the possibility, noted above, that later conditions can be more causally important than earlier conditions, for we now have the possibility that later conditions are in close relationship with earlier conditions. There is an example of this in Stone’s discussion of the precipitants of the Revolution. Precipitants, for the most part, are considered to be mistakes of policy which brought about the nature of the change of political power, i.e., confrontation rather than adjust- ment or revolution. One such mistake was that of Laud’s policy of supporting the Arminians, which according to Stone was the most important single contributor to the cause of Puritanism in early 17th century ([14], p. 128). But if one asks: would puritanism have been the force it was in changing the distribution of political power if Laud had not opted for the Arminians? The answer probably would be, ‘Yes’. Again, if the historian absents the preconditions and asks the question, Would these errors seen as errors have been made? or, Would these decisions, seen as errors, have been made?, the answer would be ‘No’ in each case, The errors heightened the prevailing conflict, e.g., gave strength to the Puritanism which already has been established as an important pre-condition of the Revolution. Two points follow: (a) in this case, the preconditions are clearly more important than the precipitants; (b) the historian only sees the nature, and hence the importance, of precipitants when these are related back to the preconditions. Two corollaries of (b) are: (i) the possibility that a set of inter-related, cross-categorial conditions is a more important set than any other, e.g., a set of conditions relating to Puritanism, and (ii) the relevance of the inter-connectedness of causal conditions for the understanding of the timing of historical events- for it is triggers and precipitants that are relevant to the understanding of the precise course of events, and these can only be fully understood in relation to the preconditions.

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References

[ I ] E. H. CARR, What is history?, London (1964), pp. 89-90. [2] W. H . DRAY, Philosophy of history, Englewood Cliffs, N.J. (1964), ch. 4. [3] J . L. MACKIE, ‘Causes and conditions’, American philosophical quarterly,

[4] J . L. MACKIE, Cement of the universe, Oxford (1974). [S] K. MARC-WCGAU, ‘Remarks on Nilson’s paper ‘On the logic of historical

explanation”, Theoria, vol. 27 (1970), pp. IS-20. [6] RAYMOND M m n N , ‘On weighting causes’, American philosophical quarterly,

vol. 9, (1972), pp. 291-299. 171 S. E. MORISON, The Oxford history of the American people, New York (1965),

p . 314. 181 E. NAGEL, Structure ofscience, New York (1%1), ch. IS. [9] STEN NILsoN,‘On the logic of historical explanation’, Theoria, vol. 26 (1970),

vol. 2 (1965), pp. 245-264.

p. 75. [lo] M. OAKSHOTT, Experience and its modes, Cambridge (1933), pp. 125-145. [ l l ] PETERJ. PMSH, The American Civil War, London (197S), esp. ch. 4. [12] G . N . SANDERSON, T h e European partition of Africa: Coincidence or con-

jecture?’, The journal of Imperial and Commonwealth history, vol. 3 (1974), p. 17.

[I31 M. SCRIVEN, ’Causes, connections and conditions in history’ in Philosophical analysis and history, ed. W. H. Dray, New York and London (1966). pp. 238- 264.

[I41 L. STONE. Causes of the English Revolution, London (1972), ch. 3. 1151 M. WEBER, ‘Critical studies in the logic of the cultural sciences’ in ~ e r h o d o l -

ogy of the social sciences, trans. and ed. Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch, New York (1949).

[I61 MORTON WHITE, Foundations of historical knowledge, New York and London (1965), ch. 4.

Received on June 15, 1976.

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Weighting causes in historical explanation