Historical Contingency: A Special Issue on Epistemic & Non-Epistemic Values in Historical Sciences

Abstract

Historical contingency has been a central theme of much recent work in the philosophy of historical science. This includes a rich and interdisciplinary literature on the role and nature of contingency in sciences like evolutionary biology, paleontology, geology, ecology, astrobiology, and more. Philosophers have approached the shared historical character of these sciences through mostly metaphysical and epistemic questions about the nature of life’s past, trends and determinism, the presence (or absence) of directionality, the fragility and causal dependence of events, and the success and nature of narrative explanations in these contexts. Much of this work has centered around a particular controversy about the nature of life’s history. Contingency as a feature of historical analysis in much of this work derives from Stephen Jay Gould’s characterization of evolutionary history.1 In that treatise, Gould analyzed work concerning the fossils of the Burgess Shale, a quarry that houses some of the earliest fossils from the Cambrian period over 500 million years ago. He asked: if we were to replay the tape of life, would outcomes be largely the same or vastly different? The Burgess shale fossils included a striking variety of animal body plans, and Gould wondered how differently the world today might look if most of the animals today had descended from one