Counterfactual History Research Articles

Campbell's 1953 Book on “Manic-Depressive Disease”

Abstract The DSM-III symptomatic criteria for major depression (MD) were derived from those proposed by Feighner and colleagues in 1972, which closely resembled those published by Cassidy in 1957. I here present a counter-factual history in which Feighner carefully read a key reference in Cassidy, a large 1953 follow-up study by Campbell of depressed patients with detailed tables of depressive signs and symptoms. In this alternative timeline, the Feighner criteria for MD were modified by Campbell's results, which then changed DSM-III and subsequent MD criteria sets. The historical pathway to the current DSM MD criteria was contingent on a range of historical events and could easily have been different. This story is not meant to criticize DSM MD criteria that perform well. Rather, it suggests that these criteria represent a useful but fallible set of symptoms/signs that index but do not constitute MD and therefore are not to be reified.

On the Function and Nature of Historical Counterfactuals. Clarifying Confusions

Abstract In this article, I analyze historical counterfactuals. Historical counterfactuals are conditional statements in which the antecedent refers to some change in the past. We ask what would have happened, had that change occurred. I discuss the nature of such counterfactuals. I then identify important functions that historical counterfactuals have. I point out that they are at the heart of explanations and, therefore, reveal issues related to contingency and actual history. I then discuss counterfactual reasoning in historiography. I argue that the problem of suitable antecedent conditions has been exaggerated, and more serious issues concern the tracking of counterfactual scenarios. Throughout the paper, I argue that the interventionist way of thinking about historical counterfactuals clarifies both historical explanations and the nature of historical counterfactuals and should be adopted as the standard. I conclude by noting that historical counterfactuals may not fundamentally differ from more familiar forms of historiography.

Archives of Rejection

Abstract What can we learn about unpublished literature—and literature as such—by studying rejected literature? Each of the article’s four sections connects an archival document or set of documents to a topic in literary history and theory. In the first, a ledger tracking submissions to Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1882 leads to a discussion about recovery projects. In the second, a century of Houghton Mifflin reader reports leads to a discussion about evaluation. In the third, a novel submitted to Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare and Company in 1930 leads to a discussion about historical counterfactuals. In the fourth, correspondence from the archives of Amiri Baraka and his agent, Ronald Hobbs, from the 1970s leads to a discussion about taste. Together, these sections introduce a resource and exemplify a method: how attention to small, practical decisions can illuminate large, abstract processes.By attending to editorial debates about poetry, we can understand what artistic value meant to specific people in specific contexts—and thus what it might mean in general. Poetry, in other words, promises to illuminate what’s literary about literary history.

What if Walter Gropius were a Woman: Alternative Design History Teaching Experiment

AbstractAs one of the most literary and transdisciplinary cultural practices, speculative design has become one of the best mediums for discussing emerging technologies, the Anthropocene and the ecological crisis. When design history is merely perceived as established knowledge about the past and fails to engage in dialogue with reality or individual interaction, it often struggles to inspire students' agency in learning and willingness to deep involvement in research. Alternative design history, however, serves as a type and method of historiography that actively constructs history and alternatively imagines the past. It aims to situate historical knowledge as the context for design problem exploration rather than an end goal of education. This approach guides educators and learners to co‐speculate on historical design knowledge. By ‘reversing’ specific elements of historical experience, such as gender mentioned in this article, and employing alternative imagination to form what‐if scenarios and pose inquiries about existing historical facts, a distinct form of ‘counterfactual history’ emerges that diverges notably from traditional design history. Throughout speculation within ‘counterfactual history’, students can distinguish between historical facts and realities, which enables students to comprehend the construction of historical knowledge, the individuality of historical narratives, and the standpoint of historical discourse. In this way, it helps students cultivate a historical interest that ‘starts from the self’, guiding them to foster resilient historical thinking and a critical awareness of reality.

Counterfactual History and Diasporic Identity in Philip Roth’s The Plot against America

The Plot against America, a 2004 novel by acclaimed American author Philip Roth, starts out from a counterfactual premise, i.e., that aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh defeated Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940 election, running on an isolationist platform summarised in the slogan “America first!” The novel is a masterful exploration of trauma and the perception of history viewed through the eyes of a young boy, the author’s alter ego, Philip, who is also the narrator, and who sees his family and others around him question their place in society and their identity as American Jews in a world swiftly turning against them.

Counterfactual Histories: Philip Roth and Nicole Krauss

The canon of verisimilitude is a widely discussed concept, aiming at establishing the fictional pact ever since Aristotle’s Poetics. Multiple experiences of time seem to unsettle the logic of this fictional pact. To highlight the disjunctive chrono-methodology and its implications in reformulating a well-established canon, I choose the concept of uchronia –developed and discussed theoretically and literarily by two American writers of Jewish origin, Philip Roth and Nicole Krauss. The two developed alternative legacies and counterfactual histories of Franz Kafka: He either escapes to Palestine or gets immersed into an accomplished love relationship with Dora Dymant during the last year of his life. Thus, the “u-chronic” writers unsettle Kafka’s canonical legacy left to Max Brod, the official detainer of his post-mortem history.

CETD: Counterfactual Explanations by Considering Temporal Dependencies in Sequential Recommendation

Providing interpretable explanations can notably enhance users’ confidence and satisfaction with regard to recommender systems. Counterfactual explanations demonstrate remarkable performance in the realm of explainable sequential recommendation. However, current counterfactual explanation models designed for sequential recommendation overlook the temporal dependencies in a user’s past behavior sequence. Furthermore, counterfactual histories should be as similar to the real history as possible to avoid conflicting with the user’s genuine behavioral preferences. This paper presents counterfactual explanations by Considering temporal dependencies (CETD), a counterfactual explanation model that utilizes a variational autoencoder (VAE) for sequential recommendation and takes into account temporal dependencies. To improve explainability, CETD employs a recurrent neural network (RNN) when generating counterfactual histories, thereby capturing both the user’s long-term preferences and short-term behavior in their real behavioral history. Meanwhile, CETD fits the distribution of reconstructed data (i.e., the counterfactual sequences generated by VAE perturbation) in a latent space, and leverages learned variance to decrease the proximity of counterfactual histories by minimizing the distance between the counterfactual sequences and the original sequence. Thorough experiments conducted on two real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed CETD consistently surpasses current state-of-the-art methods.

Looking at the war in Ukraine and ways it could end from a global perspective

ABSTRACT Our dialogical book Debating the War in Ukraine covers more than three decades of world history, but focusses mostly on developments in Europe. Here we situate the war in Ukraine within a global context. The aim of this special forum is to broaden our dialogue on historical counterfactuals and possible futures in geopolitical terms (critically understood) by including new contributors. The forum will start with a book review, followed by one commentary and three articles that pose questions about counterfactual histories and possible futures by discussing the roles of Brazil, China, India, and Turkey and the difference they could make. How will the war end and how will it reconfigure global processes and constellations of world politics? Is the world becoming increasingly divided into antagonistic blocs? Are there real possibilities for a peace process or better common institutions? We conclude this forum by a further dialogue on future possibilities.

What Would It be Like to be Bohmians? Experiencing a Gestalt Switch in Physics as an Effect of Path Dependence

ABSTRACT The philosophical goal is to characterize ‘path dependence’ (PAD) in science by comparison to PAD in technology where the concept was initially introduced. I rely on quantum mechanics to substantiate the analyses, exploiting the contrast between standard versus Bohmian quantum physics (NQP/BQP). To achieve the goal, counterfactual history is mobilized as a means to generate instructive virtual alternatives to the actual scientific path: I design a ‘permuted-situations counterfactual scenario’ in which it is BQP, instead of NQP, that first acquires a monopoly on physics and is exclusively practiced in science education, before NQP is introduced. Then, I endeavor to ‘reenact’ – as forensic investigators carry out the re-enactment of a crime scene – how virtual mainstream Bohmians would assess NQP. Contrasting the two ‘views from inside’ – ‘what it is like to be’ a standard quantum physicist in our world (a physicist trained in NQP) and what it would be like to be a physicist exclusively trained in BQP – I attempt to come as close as possible to an ‘experience’ of the gestalt switch involved when shuttling back and forth between one scientific worldview to the other. The effects of PAD in physics are discussed on this basis.

The shape of things to come: a further dialogue

ABSTRACT Here we continue our debate about how the war in Ukraine might come to an end. Our differences indicate how background assumptions, anticipations of possible and likely futures, and normative assessments of the present actions are intertwined. Apart from warning about the escalatory potential, HP stresses the immense human and socio-economic costs of the war. He proposes that negotiations for a peace deal could revolve around concepts such as a ‘demilitarised zone' and an ‘UN-managed territory'. TF expects a protracted war going on for several years because the conditions for a just peace are absent. At this point, our dialogue turns towards uncovering and criticising some of each other's background assumptions and discussing the available evidence about who can be trusted. Here we see a possible role for third-party facilitators and mediators. Brazil, China, India, or Turkey may be decisive in terms of mediating the conflict and facilitating an agreement.

Counterfactual History: Three Worries and Replies

Abstract This article aims to shed light on what lies at the heart of skepticism towards counterfactual, alternative, or what-if history. On its face, counterfactual history gives historians and philosophers good reason to worry. First, because counterfactual pasts leave no traces, historians lack an important source of empirical warrant. Second, because rewriting historical events might unpredictably change the past, inferences about what might have happened seem only weakly supported by generalizations about what actually did happen. Third, counterfactual narratives appear especially vulnerable to wishful thinking. Ultimately, through consideration of the epistemic values that regulate the construction of counterfactual narratives, I marshal arguments against these objections and defend the legitimacy of the project. Still, I hope to show that far from being a mere ‘parlor game’, counterfactual history raises deep and provocative questions about historians’ ability to know our past, only some of which I address here.

Colonial Counterfactuals, the American Separationist Mindset, and Open-Minded Discourse on the Establishment Clause

This work first develops the idea of an American Separationist Mindset—a deeply rooted and often unthinking supposition that the strict separation of church and state is the only defensible church-state arrangement under the Establishment Clause of the United States Constitution. Such a Mindset can make arguments for religious accommodationism difficult to be assessed openmindedly in contemporary constitutional discourse. The essay next surveys the potential of a counterfactual history of topics long thought settled to weaken prevailing views and treasured interpretations so to allow greater critical engagement with alternative assessments. The work in turn deploys a counterfactual reconstruction of Maryland’s colonial Anglican establishment. This account imagines the founding vision for Maryland’s establishment of Anglicanism developed by Rev. Thomas Bray as having been sustained. The cogency of this counterfactual can assist contemporary constitutional discourse by weakening the prejudicial potential of the American Separationist Mindset.

Bureaucratic secrecy and the regulation of knowledge in Europe over the longue durée: Obfuscation, omission, performance, and policing

In his now-classic mediation on the sociology of secrecy, Georg Simmel cautioned that while ‘human interaction is conditioned by the capacity to speak, it is [also] shaped by the capacity to be silent’.1 As historians, we are trained to see what is present, what is material, and what has effect. Investigating absence, on the other hand, as rewarding as it can be when we are able to reconstruct the seemingly unknowable, can lead us astray with speculative banalities or even counter-factual histories. Yet, as one manifestation of absence in society – in this case, the absence of knowledge – secrecy has had a fundamental place in the constitution, shaping, and functioning of the premodern and modern worlds. It has operated in many registers and appeared in many forms, such as censorship, coded language, classification regimes, and in oaths promising secrecy. All these modes in which we find practices related to secrecy operated within bureaucracies where the regulation of knowledge was either explicitly or implicitly part of their functioning. In looking at manifestations of absences – in particular, practices designed to regulate and then render knowledge absent – bureaucracies represent an emblematic and instructive site to explore questions on the co-constitution of power and knowledge.2

A Methodological Inquiry on Compatibility of Droysen’s Understanding and Weber’s Counterfactuals

Gustav Droysen introduced understanding as the method of history. Max Weber analyzed what-if statements or counterfactuals as a form of causal explanation. Both scholars had a common interest in understanding and explanation. However, Droysen’s explanation was defined as method of natural sciences and served no use in history, while Weber’s understanding was focused on social reality rather than historical one. Still, precisely Weber’s idea of difference-making counterfactuals was later reinterpreted as defining for historical counterfactuals. In this paper, I determine what their methodologies say about understanding and counterfactuals, whether their views are compatible and whether historical research can benefit from combination of understanding and counterfactuals. To do this, I reconstruct Gustav Droysen’s views on understanding in the first part. Understanding here is a method that allows us to grasp events that are distant in time as contemporary ones through historical material and criticism. In the second part I review the tradition of counterfactuals of analytic philosophers (from Roderick Chisholm and Nelson Goodman to Julian Reiss) and Max Weber. Counterfactuals are conditional statements that contradict existing historical facts by changing or removing the causes of certain events, so that they can demonstrate the significance of these causes for historical events in case the counterfactual causes make a difference for the events. In the third part of the paper, I argue for compatibility between the methodologies, maintaining that understanding and counterfactuals can be beneficial for historical research in the following way: counterfactuals pinpoint the causes and main figures of historical events; knowledge about the figures improves our understanding of them; this understanding helps to see more counterfactual possibilities that can bring to light new causes, deepening our view of history.

The Refugee’s Dilemma: Evidence from Jewish Migration out of Nazi Germany

AbstractWe estimate the push and pull factors involved in the outmigration of Jews facing persecution in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1941. Our empirical investigation makes use of a unique individual-level data set that records the migration history of the Jewish community in Germany over the period. Our analysis highlights new channels, specific to violent contexts, through which social networks affect the decision to flee. We estimate a structural model of migration where individuals base their migration decision on the observation of persecution and migration among their peers. Identification rests on exogenous variations in local push and pull factors across peers who live in different cities of residence. Then we perform various experiments of counterfactual history to quantify how migration restrictions in destination countries affected the fate of Jews. For example, removing work restrictions for refugees in the recipient countries after the Nuremberg Laws (1935) would have led to an increase in Jewish migration out of Germany in the range of 12% to 20% and a reduction in mortality due to prevented deportations in the range of 6% to 10%.

EDITOR'S NOTES—COUNTERFACTUAL THINKING: A NECESSITY FOR PRACTITIONERS AND RESEARCHERS

EDITOR'S NOTES—COUNTERFACTUAL THINKING: A NECESSITY FOR PRACTITIONERS AND RESEARCHERS

Tragic blondes, Hollywood, and the “radical sixties” myth: Seberg and once upon a time in Hollywood as revisionist and reparative biopic

ABSTRACT In this essay I explore two recent ‘reparative biopics,’ Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino, 2019) and Seberg (Benedict Andrews, 2019), which share features found in the resurgent cycle of 1960s-set ‘back studio’ films that have appeared in the wake of feminist criticism of mainstream Hollywood. Although positioned very differently in terms of genre (as biopic and counterfactual history respectively) and in their creative engagement with the cultural and political history of the late 1960s, both are notable for the way they deal with the real female stars at the centre of their stories, Sharon Tate and Jean Seberg. While each film seems to be seeking reparation for the past, their approach ultimately recuperates the women into a mythic discourse of the ‘radical sixties’ in which masculine agency and homosocial bonds are privileged. I argue that these films rehearse familiar biopic conventions to depict the blonde female star as tragic victim, not only of history but also of her own inherent frailty.

John le Carré’s The Looking Glass War: imagining the Special Operations Executive – Secret Intelligence Service rivalry as post-war counterfactual history

ABSTRACT Published in 1965, John le Carré’s The Looking Glass War was met with little of the acclaim given to its predecessor, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. In this article, I propose an alternative reading of the novel, suggesting that it is embroiled in long-running debates within the British intelligence community, specifically the rivalry that occurred between the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the Secret Intelligence Service in WW2. Through this, this article explores how le Carré’s novel drew on SOE source material, and how it became part of the wider contest over post-war perceptions of the SOE.

Balázs Ablonczy. Ismeretlen Trianon: Az összeomlás és a békeszerződés történetei, 1918–1921 [Unknown Trianon: histories of the collapse and the peace treaty, 1918–21

Balázs Ablonczy. <i>Ismeretlen Trianon: Az összeomlás és a békeszerződés történetei, 1918–1921</i> [Unknown Trianon: histories of the collapse and the peace treaty, 1918–21

Jurisprudence, Temporality and Science Fiction

This article examines how justice is conceived of and constructed through temporality in different traditions of normative jurisprudence. Three non-exhaustive and overlapping temporalities are discussed: counterfactual histories, the near future and science fiction. All of these temporalities are examined in terms of when and how they envisage the delivery of justice. Some traditions, such as liberalism, see the architecture of justice having already been developed and delivered. However, most jurisprudential approaches see justice as something yet to be achieved. The article traces these theoretical traditions’ commitment to the pluralistic, the nonlinear, the impossible, the unlikely and the decentring of the human, and in so doing demonstrates the blurred lines between normative jurisprudence and science fiction. As a result, the article reveals the value of science fiction as a source of normative jurisprudence in its own right. Science fiction offers an important vehicle for enfolding the present and the future; in doing so it allows for the enactment of new forms of justice in the present. In its conclusion it is argued that placing science fiction within the field of normative jurisprudence helps us to imagine and create just futures.