Anthropological Theory by David Kaplan

Author:David Kaplan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2017-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

III

The elimination of theoretical objections to the possibility of warranted explanations in history obviously does not ensure the realization of that possibility. As a matter of fact, there are serious obstacles, other than those already mentioned, which frequently do obstruct the quest for such explanations.

The search for explanations is directed to the ideal of ascertaining the necessary and sufficient conditions for the occurrence of phenomena. This ideal is rarely achieved, however, and even in the best-developed natural sciences it is often an open question whether the conditions mentioned in an explanation are indeed sufficient. Most historical inquiry is even further removed from this ideal, since the full circumstances are often quite complex and numerous and are usually not known. Historians therefore frequently cite only what they regard as the “main,” “primary,” “principal,” “chief,” or “most important” causal factors and cover their ignorance of the others by the convenient phrase “other things being equal.” To mention but one example, the “main” cause of America's entrance into the first world war is declared by one careful student to be Germany's adoption of an unrestricted submarine warfare, though the factor cited is not assumed to be sufficient for producing the effect.

The “weighting” of causal factors in respect to their “degree of importance” is sometimes dismissed as essentially “arbitrary” and “meaningless”—partly on the ground that there is no warrant for selecting one occurrence as the cause of a given event rather than some prior cause of that occurrence (for example, since unrestricted submarine warfare was Germany's response to the British blockade, this latter occurrence is allegedly as much the cause of America's entrance into the war as is the former), and partly on the ground that no verifiable sense can be attached to such characterizations as “chief” or “most important” in connection with causal factors. It must be admitted that the natural sciences do not appear to require the imputation of relative importance to the causal variables that occur in their explanations; and it is easy to dismiss the question of whether there is any objective basis for such gradations of variables, with a peremptory denial on the ground that, if a phenomenon occurs only when certain conditions are realized, all these conditions are equally essential, and no one of them can intelligibly be regarded as more basic than the others. And it must also be acknowledged that most historians do not appear to associate any definite meaning with their statements of relative importance, so that the statements often have only a rhetorical intent, from which no clear empirical content can be extracted. Nevertheless, we often do make such claims as that broken homes constitute a more important cause of juvenile delinquency than does poverty, or that the lack of a trained labor force is a more fundamental cause of the backward state of an economy than the lack of natural resources. Many people might be willing to admit that the truth of such statements is debatable, but few would be willing to grant

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