From nobody Thu Sep 4 06:16:43 2003
Newsgroups: soc.culture.african,soc.culture.african.american,alt.politics,alt.romance
Subject: Re: Ilya Shambat
Message-ID: <m2ada5tpmy.fsf@hartford-hwp.com>
Organization: SBC http://yahoo.sbc.com
Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2003 19:26:08 GMT
What makes a statement historical?
By Haines Brown, 4 September 2003
This reply has been edited for clarity
> news:m2n0e6txfd.fsf@hartford-hwp.com... What, in your words is
> historical understanding? Why did he kill so many people?
As to the first question, it is a good one, for very few professional historians could answer it comfortably. All I can give you is my own personal view.
Besides some obvious contextual points too obvious to bother with here, I would list several parameters that taken together I consider would make a statement “historical.”
- Since history is about change in time, a historical statement is about a process. To represent something as a process, it must be defined as being part of a relation prior to a definition of empirical specifics. The empirical qualties are secondary and emerge as a result of the causal relation.
- A historical statement should refer to a process that is normally “emergent,” by which I mean that its outcomes are novel and only probabilistically determined by initial conditions. Historical situations that are not emergent are possible, but marginal. Emergence can only take place in a system (an implication of the Second Law of Thermodynamics), and so historical explanations are systemic.
- By “system” I mean that the “parts” that make up the system as a whole are defined as effects of its causal relations, rather than as a priori bundles of static empirical properties. The effect of any one part on another is a function of the state of the system as a whole because the parts embody systemic qualities as they develop through participation in the system.
What this adds up to is that circumstances (structures inherited from the past) constrain causal relations in the present and so necessarily yield novel empirical outcomes in the future.
... [comment on Amin as an example]
If someone has a better definition, I’d be very happy to hear of it. To be honest, though, my points are rather abstruse and most historians would only scratch their heads over them. So if it seems hard to swallow, I well understand. That is, I don’t expect it to be very persuasive, although I could defend each point at GREAT length ;-).
... [more about Amin]
Haines Brown