I posted a link to this in a comment earlier today [0] but after reading it over again I thought it might merit a standalone HN post. Berlin is probably most fa

I posted a link to this in a comment earlier today [0] but after reading it over again I thought it might merit a standalone HN post. Berlin is probably most famous today for his short book "The Hedgehog and the Fox" but his essays are really spectacular examples of the form in my opinion - intellectually demanding but always concrete and straightforward; learned but not pretentious. He's arguing here that historical reasoning is basically a form of advanced common sense rather than something which can be founded on scientific principles; there's also a digression about "electronic brains" that might be of interest: "Such a model or deductive schema is not much in evidence in normal historical writing; if only because the general propositions out of which it must be constructed, and which, if they existed, would require to be precisely formulated, turn out to be virtually impossible to specify. The general concepts that necessarily are employed by historians - notions like state or development or revolution or trend of opinion or economic decline or political power - enter into general propositions of far lesser range or dependability (or specifiability) than those that occur in even the least developed natural science worthy of its title. Such historical generalisations turn out too often to be tautological, or vague or inaccurate; 'All power tends to corrupt', 'Every revolution is followed by a reaction', 'Change in the economic structure leads to novel forms of music and painting', will yield, taken with some specified initial conditions, e.g. 'Cromwell had a great deal of power' or 'A revolution broke out in Russia in 1917' or 'The United States went through a period of radical industrialisation', scarcely any reliable historical or sociological deductions. What is lacking here is an interconnected tissue of generalisations which an electronic brain could mechanically apply to a situation mechanically specifiable as relevant. What occurs in historical thinking seems much more like the operation of commonsense, where we weave together various prima facie logically independent concepts and general propositions, and bring them to bear on a given situation as best we can. The capacity to do this successfully - the ability to 'weave together', 'bring to bear' various concepts - is a skill, an empirical knack (sometimes called judgement) which electronic brains cannot be given by their manufacturers." [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9674876 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9674876