Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (13 page)

The implications of this insight have been explored in more detail by Frankel, who cites some examples of historical explanations which are simply statements about ‘conditions without which the events in question would not have taken place’:

In the words of Gallie, ‘Historians ... tell us how a particular event happened by pointing out hitherto unnoticed, or at least undervalued, antecedent events,
but for which
, they claim on broadly inductive grounds,
the event in question would not or could hardly have happened
.’
¹⁸⁰
One difference between science and history is that historians often have to rely on such explanations exclusively, whereas scientists can use them as hypotheses to be tested experimentally. In other words, if we want to say anything about causation in the past without invoking covering laws, we really have to use counterfactuals, if only to test our causal hypotheses.

Legal theorists of causation - who are, after all, as much concerned as historians with understanding the causes of past events - have arrived at the same conclusion by a different route. As Hart and Honoré demonstrate, there are practical problems from a lawyer’s point of view with Mill’s definition of a cause as ‘the sum total of the conditions positive and negative taken together; the whole of the contingencies ... which being realised the consequence invariably follows’.
¹⁸¹
For, in their quests for responsibility, liability, compensation and punishment, lawyers have to establish
which
of a multiplicity of causes - of a fire, for example, or a death - ‘made the difference’.
¹⁸²
Here too, the only way of doing so is by posing the ‘but for’ or
sine qua non
question: only by saying whether or not a specific harm would have happened without a defendant’s allegedly wrongful act can we say whether or not for legal purposes the act was the cause of the harm. In the words of R. B. Braithwaite, causally related events are thus those which are used:

Hart and Honoré acknowledge the practical limitations of the
sine qua non
(for example, in the hypothetical case in which two men have simultaneously shot a third man dead).
¹⁸⁴
But they have no doubt that it is nevertheless to be preferred to the no less subjective assumptions which ‘realists’ make about the intentions of law-makers.

The philosophical ramifications of the counterfactual are complex. As Gardiner has pointed out, much depends on the form the counterfactual question takes, which is often incomplete:

These problems of formulation have been explored at length by logicians.
¹⁸⁶
But from the historian’s point of view it is probably more important to decide
which
counterfactual questions to pose in the first place. For one of the strongest arguments against the whole notion of considering alternative scenarios is that there is no limit to the number which we can consider. Like Borges’s Ts‘ui Pen, the historian is confronted with an infinite number of ‘forking paths’. This was what Croce saw as the main flaw of the counterfactual approach.

In practice, however, there is no real point in asking most of the possible counterfactual questions. For example, no sensible person wishes to know what would have happened in 1848 if the entire population of Paris had suddenly sprouted wings, as this is not a
plausible
scenario. This need for plausibility in the formulation of counterfactual questions was first pointed out by Sir Isaiah Berlin. Berlin’s starting point in his critique of determinism, like Meinecke‘s, was its incompatibility with the historian’s need to make value judgements about the ‘character, purposes and motives of individuals’.
¹⁸⁷
However, he went on to make an important distinction (originally suggested by Namier) between what did happen, what could have happened and what could not have happened:

This distinction between what did happen and what could plausibly have happened is of critical importance:

Another way of putting this is to say that we are concerned with possibilities which seemed probable in the past. This was a point which Marc Bloch well understood:

Almost exactly the same point has been made by Trevor-Roper:

In short, by narrowing down the historical alternatives we consider to those which are
plausible
- and hence by replacing the enigma of ‘chance’ with the calculation of
probabilities
- we solve the dilemma of choosing between a single deterministic past and an unmanageably infinite number of possible pasts. The counterfactual scenarios we therefore need to construct are not mere fantasy: they are simulations based on calculations about the relative probability of plausible outcomes in a chaotic world (hence ‘virtual history’).

Naturally, this means that we need to have some understanding of probability. We need, for example, to avoid the gambler’s fallacy of believing that if red has come up five times running at the roulette wheel, the chance of black is greater at the next spin - it is not, and the same applies when we toss coins or roll dice.
¹⁹²
On the other hand, historians are concerned with human beings who, unlike dice, have memories and consciousness. For dice, the past really does not influence the present; all that matters are the equations which govern their motion when thrown. But for human beings the past often does have an influence. To take a simple example (borrowed from game theory): a politician who has shirked military confrontation twice may be emboldened to take up arms the third time he is challenged, precisely because of the memory of those humiliations. Any statement about his likelihood to fight must be based on an assessment of his past conduct and his present attitudes towards it. So historical probability is more complicated than mathematical probability. Just as God does not play dice, humans are not dice. We come back to what Collingwood called the truly ‘historical form’ of causation, where ‘that which is “caused” is the free and deliberate act of a conscious and responsible agent’.
¹⁹³
And, as Dray has said, the ‘principles of action’ of agents in the past were not always what we would regard as strictly rational.
¹⁹⁴

There nevertheless remains an unanswered question. How exactly are we to distinguish probable unrealised alternatives from improbable ones? The most frequently raised objection to the counterfactual approach is that it depends on ‘facts which concededly never existed’. Hence, we simply lack the knowledge to answer counterfactual questions. But this is not so. The answer to the question is in fact very simple: We should consider as plausible or probable
only those alternatives which we can show on the basis of contemporary evidence that contemporaries actually considered.

This is a vitally important point, and one which Oakeshott seems to have overlooked. As has often been said, what we call the past was once the future; and the people of the past no more knew what their future would be than we can know our own. All they could do was consider the likely future, the plausible outcome. It is possible that some people in the past had no interest in the future whatever. It is also true that many people in the past have felt quite sure that they did know what the future would be; and that sometimes they have even got it right. But most people in the past have tended to consider more than one possible future. And although no more than one of these actually has come about, at the moment
before
it came about it was no more real (though it may now seem more probable) than the others. Now, if all history is the history of (recorded) thought, surely we must attach equal significance to
all
the outcomes thought about. The historian who allows his knowledge as to which of these outcomes subsequently happened to obliterate the other outcomes people regarded as plausible cannot hope to recapture the past ‘as it actually was’. For, in considering only the possibility which was actually realised, he commits the most elementary teleological error. To understand how it actually was, we therefore need to understand
how it actually wasn’t -
but how, to contemporaries, it might have been. This is even more true when the actual outcome is one which no one expected - which was not actually thought about until it happened.

That narrows the scope for counterfactual analysis down considerably. Moreover, we can only legitimately consider those hypothetical scenarios which contemporaries not only considered, but also committed to paper (or some other form of record) which has survived - and which has been identified as a valid source by historians. Clearly, that introduces an additional element of contingency, as there is nothing inevitable about which documents survive and which do not. But, at the same time, it renders counterfactual history practicable.

There is, then, a double rationale for counterfactual analysis. Firstly, it is a
logical
necessity when asking questions about causation to pose ‘but for’ questions, and to try to imagine what would have happened if our supposed cause had been absent. For this reason, we are obliged to construct plausible alternative pasts on the basis of judgements about probability; and these can be made only on the basis of historical evidence. Secondly, to do this is a
historical
necessity when attempting to understand how the past ‘actually was’ - precisely in the Rankean sense, as we must attach equal importance to all the possibilities which contemporaries contemplated before the fact, and greater importance to these than to an outcome which they did not anticipate.