4 ms·
That wasn't the question.
by tamana 10y ago
That wasn't the question.
- shawn-butler 10y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfactual_conditional https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfactual_conditional Some people believe they help people imagine creative solutions. I find counterfactuals, especially in history, to be devoid of any meaning and used by pseudo-intellectuals who don't really want to pursue the hard work of finding actual causality.
- yongjik 10y agoHuh? Actual causality is meaningless without counterfactuals. "Hitler caused Holocaust" means that if Hitler wasn't there, Holocaust wouldn't have happened.
- shawn-butler 10y agoNot really but sort of. Counterfactual historiography at best represents a sort of "reproducibility" for historians. They can't conduct experiments on the past. So, when someone asserts "Hitler caused Holocaust" some enterprising graduate student comes along and writes a thesis on Hitler's willing executioners and argues counterfactually that if Hitler wasn't there, Holocaust still happens. That doesn't mean at all that Hitler did not cause Holocaust or that the "eliminationist antisemitism" German culture caused Holocaust. I wish you had chose a less value-laden example.