Causalidad en la historia
Juan Camilo Espejo-Serna
Universidad de la Sabana
Por favor no se les olvide realizar la evaluación docente en el sistema.
La idea básica de la causalidad en la historia
¿Por qué cayó el imperio romano?
- Adopción del cristianismo
- Bárbaros y vándalos
- Enfermedades causadas por el plomo
- Problemas económicos. (inflación, malos manejos, corrupción, etc)
- Divisón geográfica y cultural del imperio
- ¡Entre otras!
"¿Por qué cayó el imperio romano?"
¿Qué tipo de pregunta es esta?
Pregunta sobre un suceso cultural particular en el pasado y que no necesariamente volverá a suceder
Tomemos la pregunta por la caida del imperio romano como una pregunta histórica por la causa del suceso.
¿Qué tipo de noción de la causaliad podríamos utilizar para entender la explicación causal en la historia?
- ¿Causalidad como regularidad?
- ¿Causalidad como dependencia contrafáctica?
- ¿Causalidad como probabilidad?
- ¿Pluralismo causal?
The most important explanatory notion in history is that of causation, although it is by no means the only one.
Scriven se encuentra entre el positivismo lógico de mediados de siglo XX y la respuesta al positivismo (Weber y verstehen)
The historian frequently encounters two special problems. On the one hand, he wishes to apply these terms to activities in the past, which he does not witness directly; on the other, he uses them to refer to entities on a scale where direct witness is impossible—for example, he may speak of a political movement as having caused certain social changes.
Lenguaje causal
y lenguaje no-causal
If you are watching people enter a lecture room, you might notice someone who seems to be in a particular hurry doing what you would naturally describe as "forcing his way in." A policeman is sometimes described as "forcing a door," or as "forcing suspects to get into the Black Maria." An investor is sometimes said to have been "forced to sell blue-chip stock" to cover heavy losses on a speculative issue. These uses differ in important ways, but they are all causal notions in that they identify some agent as being responsible for an identified effect.
Our task is to clarify the kind of interpretation involved in a causal claim by contrast with a simple non-causal description like "He walked down the shorter path"; and yet, as we look carefully at this example, we can see that the term "walked" means "caused to move by the action of his legs, etc."
It also shows how the distinction between cause and effect is itself a limited one, in the sense of being highly context-dependent. What is a cause in one context can be seen as itself a combination of cause and effect in another context. It is partly for this reason that historical narrative is explanatory—it incorporates what we might call micro-explanations in its very texture.
Historical writing is of other kinds too. The narrative may be explanatory without being causally explanatory, by interpreting historical events as being of certain kinds that we understand well. In a neutral sense, this can be described as "evaluative."
[...]
Moral distinctions are not only made, but are important, and part of an historian's task is set by, and hence requires understanding of, the moral distinctions and their relative importance.
Relaciones temporales y espaciales
A causal claim connects, though it may not distinguish, two distinguishable but perhaps not wholly separable elements.
Any account of cause that fails to allow for eases where cause and effect are physically identical and only conceptually distinct will do scant justice to the historian's use.
¿hay una diferencia entre una relación causal y una relación de constitución? Según Hume, causa y efecto son ontológicamente independendientes.
A causal claim connects, though it may not distinguish, two distinguishable but perhaps not wholly separable elements.
The feature of causal assertions usually regarded as the most important, from a logical or philosophical point of view, is their alleged claim to instantiate universal laws.
An illicit conclusion is that whenever we say C caused E we are committed to the unqualified generalization that C's always cause E's.We are only committed to some generalization of which the conjunction of C and E is a consequence. When an historian says that the London Corresponding Society "caused alarm" in the London of 1792 by its sympathy with the French Government, he obviously does not stand committed to the claim that sympathy with France is always a cause of alarm in London. He asserts only that in the circumstances of that time, sympathy by that group caused alarm.
What it actually shows is only that we must appeal to some general proposition which (a) applies reliably to the present case, and (b) is founded upon other cases.
The example is Maitland's explanation of Queen Elizabeth's use of "etc." in stating her full title: the Queen is said deliberately to have chosen a vague expression to leave herself freedom of maneuver on the religious question troubling England at a time when Henry's breach with Rome was by no means accepted as final. Nagel rightly points out that the explanation, although it may well be perfectly sound historically, only leads us to see why she would choose some ambiguous phrase, of which the one cited was merely one of many open to her.
In the Queen Elizabeth case, the contrast that interests the historian is between her using the ambiguous phrase and using her full title, not between using this ambiguous phrase and using another one.
Hence Maitland produces the factors which explain why Elizabeth used this phrase in so far as the phrase has any historical significance. It is not that he doesn't explain why she used this phrase; he does explain it, fully, with regard to the historically appropriate contrast.
We have introduced the idea that cause (and, in general, explanation) is essentially a context-dependent notion. This does not mean that we are giving a "psychological" rather than a "logical" analysis (as formalists often claim), or a "subjective" rather than "objective" one. It means that the territory of logic is not terminated by the period at the end of the sentence.
When we are looking for causes We are looking for explanations in terms of a few factors or a single factor; and what counts as an explanation is whatever fills in the gap in the inquirer's or reader's understanding. [...]
If one of two causal candidates—otherwise equal—is a standing condition, always- present, and known by the inquirer to be present, whereas the other is an unexpected "interfering condition" whose occurrence is a discovery for the inquirer, then it is correct to call the latter the cause.
Julien Reiss: La historia no busca causas
sino elementos que hacen la diferencia
to assess whether some event f (where f is a set that can but does not have to be a singleton) caused an event of interest J, the historian conducts a thought experiment in which he mentally removes f from the actual course of history and asks whether this removal would have made a difference to the occurrence of the event of interest J; or to know if f causes J, one needs to know whether ‘had f not been, J would not have been’ is true.
La explicación histórica es una explicación en términos de dependencia contrafáctica. Ok. Pero esta dependencia no es una relación causal
Si B no hubiese sucedido, E no sucedería. Pues si B no hubiese sucedido, C no sucedería. Y sin C no hay E. B no es la causa de E aunque E sí depende contrafácticamente de B.
La relación temporal entre el antecedente
y el conscuente es diferente.
"Si hubiese sido el caso que C entonces sería el caso que E" y
"Si no hubiese sido el caso que B, entonces no sería el caso que C" no son evaluables de la misma manera.(Backtracking counterfactuals)
La historia no excluye estos casos
El suceso B puede ser ofrecido como una explicación del suceso E —aunque no sea su causa.