tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1030220433025894048.post3498450870155884707..comments2023-11-03T08:02:25.369-04:00Comments on AmericanScience: A Team Blog: Writing, Theory, and the History of ScienceDavid Roth Singermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12841041983824755867noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1030220433025894048.post-6129290193887014192011-03-09T11:29:02.749-05:002011-03-09T11:29:02.749-05:00DR: Thanks for the thoughts, and the link to Gelma...DR: Thanks for the thoughts, and the link to Gelman - as you know, his name came up a lot at the seminar, so I'm happy to have his musings.<br /><br />As to whether causality as such ever comes up for historians, the answer is a dull "sometimes." Besides a relatively recent focus issue of Isis on counterfactuals in history, there's something of a division between those who are obsessed with rooting out the intentions of actors to produce given effects before those effects are gone into in an historical narrative, and those with alternative approaches to the question of intention, cause, and effects.<br /><br />That is (and this is to put it somewhat dumbly for the sake of space): it comes up when people of the former type demand clarity on the causal claims underlying the events being narrated, or when people of the latter type raise it in the more theoretically-inflected manner of Martin and others. <br /><br />These latter tend to be interested in the issue as it plays out in other disciplines (social sciences, but also English Lit), while the somewhat more orthodox former group tend to assume that history "has" a theory of causality, albeit an assumed one, that basically lines up with our commonsense notions of actor-produced effects.<br /><br />Make sense? Maybe not. More on this soon...Hankhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02841787256060612291noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1030220433025894048.post-36064852711278644792011-03-08T19:26:59.721-05:002011-03-08T19:26:59.721-05:00It’s unclear to me what Martin’s take-away point w...It’s unclear to me what Martin’s take-away point would be for historians. The quest for rigor in social sciences has pushed methodologists and statisticians towards a view of causality and causal inference so far removed from everyday notions that Martin’s criticism comes off more as preaching to the choir (sociologists) than general proscriptions for the “human sciences” like history. That said, much of what he was arguing against in the paper arose in its strictest form first in historical sociology, which cast the comparative-historical program as a sort of natural experiment. Because you couldn’t re-run the history of America five hundred times and build a probability distribution for the American Revolution, historical sociologists reasoned we might look at other countries which varied differently to understand the counterfactual cases. The result was a strange rebirth of Millsian-style causality (necessary/sufficient causation), which subsequently made its way into hardcore statistical modeling (but only recently). <br /><br />In my happier days in HoS, historical causation in terms of necessary and sufficient causes never once came up. In fact, does causality, period, ever really come up in professional history? Perhaps, this is what is at stake when someone makes the claim: “To what extent is your 19th century story really an 18th century story?” or some variation thereof. Clearly, historians strive to get things “right”, but in my experience what’s “right” depends more on correctly framing your case in a conventional manner (one part “institutional history”, one part “transnational flows”, two parts “history from the ground up”), than actually identifying the three necessary and sufficient causes of some historical event. If the former is true, then historical rhetoric and its expression in writing would seem far removed from more theoretical/epistemological questions of causality that Martin puzzles through. <br /><br />ps. If you want to get a real taste of the causal kool-aid, check out the blog of statistician/political scientist par excellence Andy Gelman: http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/blog/David Reineckehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04723982914240789793noreply@blogger.com