When to Use Counterfactuals in Causal Historiography: Methods for Semantics and Inference

Abstract

According to the interventionist framework of actual causality, causal claims in history are ultimately claims about special types of functional dependencies between variables, which consist not only of actual events but also of corresponding counterfactual states of affairs. Instead of advocating the methodological use of counterfactuals tout court, we propose specific circumstances in historical writing where counterfactual reasoning comes in most handy. At the level of semantics, that is, the specification of the variables and their possible values, an explicit specification of the latent contrast classes becomes particularly useful in situations where one may be prompted to take an event that is pre-empted by the antecedent of interest as its proper causal contrast. At the level of inference, we argue that cases in which two or more antecedents appear to be playing a similar role tend to fumble our pretheoretical intuition about cause and propose a sequence of counterfactual tests based on actual examples from causal historiography.