History 200 DE
Week 2
Stephen J. Gould - "Contingency"
Dr. Bruce Haulman
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History 200 DE Week 2 Stephen J. Gould - "Contingency" Dr. Bruce Haulman |
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Stephen J. Gould defines contingency in the following excerpt from his book Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shales and the Nature of History. Ask yourself how the slaughter of the buffalo (E in this definition) might have been different if Congressman Fort's bill had passed (E' in this definition). Historical explanations take the form of narrative: E, the phenomenon to be explained, arose because D came before, preceded by C, B, and A. If any of these earlier stages had not occurred, or had transpired in a different way, then E would not exist (or would be present in a substantially altered form, E', requiring a different explanation). Thus, E makes sense and can be explained rigorously as the outcome of A through D. But no law of nature enjoined E; any variant E' arising from an altered set of antecedents, would have been equally explicable, though massively different in form and effect. I am not speaking of randomness (for E had to arise, as a consequence of A through D, but of the central principle of all history -- contingency. A historical explanation dies not rest on direct deductions from laws of nature, but on an unpredictable sequence of antecedent states, where any major change in any step of the sequence would have altered the final result. This final result is therefore dependent, or contingent, upon everything that came before -- the unerasable and determining signature of history. ... [Contingency] is central to the most
memorable scene in America's most beloved film [It's a Wonderful Life] --
© Bruce E. Haulman 2008 |