Download or read book Virtual History Alternatives And Counterfactuals written by Niall Ferguson and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2008-08-06 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What if there had been no American War of Independence? What if Hitler had invaded Britain? What if Kennedy had lived? What if Russia had won the Cold War? Niall Ferguson, author of the highly acclaimed The Pity of War, leads the charge in this historically rigorous series of separate voyages into “imaginary time” and provides far-reaching answers to these intriguing questions.Ferguson's brilliant 90-page introduction doubles as a manifesto on the methodology of counter-factual history. His equally masterful afterword traces the likely historical ripples that would have proceeded from the maintenance of Stuart rule in England. This breathtaking narrative gives us a convincing, detailed “alternative history” of the West—from the accession of “James III” in 1701, to a Nazi-occupied England, to a U.S. Prime Minister Kennedy who lives to complete his term.

Download or read book Telling It Like It Wasn t written by Catherine Gallagher and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-01-26 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inventing counterfactual histories is a common pastime of modern day historians, both amateur and professional. We speculate about an America ruled by Jefferson Davis, a Europe that never threw off Hitler, or a second term for JFK. These narratives are often written off as politically inspired fantasy or as pop culture fodder, but in Telling It Like It Wasn’t, Catherine Gallagher takes the history of counterfactual history seriously, pinning it down as an object of dispassionate study. She doesn’t take a moral or normative stand on the practice, but focuses her attention on how it works and to what ends—a quest that takes readers on a fascinating tour of literary and historical criticism. Gallagher locates the origins of contemporary counterfactual history in eighteenth-century Europe, where the idea of other possible historical worlds first took hold in philosophical disputes about Providence before being repurposed by military theorists as a tool for improving the art of war. In the next century, counterfactualism became a legal device for deciding liability, and lengthy alternate-history fictions appeared, illustrating struggles for historical justice. These early motivations—for philosophical understanding, military improvement, and historical justice—are still evident today in our fondness for counterfactual tales. Alternate histories of the Civil War and WWII abound, but here, Gallagher shows how the counterfactual habit of replaying the recent past often shapes our understanding of the actual events themselves. The counterfactual mode lets us continue to envision our future by reconsidering the range of previous alternatives. Throughout this engaging and eye-opening book, Gallagher encourages readers to ask important questions about our obsession with counterfactual history and the roots of our tendency to ask “What if...?”

Download or read book Altered Pasts written by Richard J. Evans and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2014-03-27 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bullet misses its target in Sarajevo, a would-be Austrian painter gets into the Viennese academy, Lord Halifax becomes British prime minister in 1940: seemingly minor twists of fate on which world-shaking events might have hinged. Alternative history has long been the stuff of parlour games, war-gaming and science fiction, but over the past few decades it has become a popular stomping ground for serious historians. Richard J. Evans now turns a critical, slightly jaundiced eye on the subject. Altered Pasts examines the intellectual fallout from historical counterfactuals. Most importantly, Evans takes counterfactual history seriously, looking at the insights, pitfalls and intellectual implications of changing one thread in the weave of history.

Download or read book Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics written by Philip E. Tetlock and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1996-09-08 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political scientists often ask themselves what might have been if history had unfolded differently: if Stalin had been ousted as General Party Secretary or if the United States had not dropped the bomb on Japan. Although scholars sometimes scoff at applying hypothetical reasoning to world politics, the contributors to this volume--including James Fearon, Richard Lebow, Margaret Levi, Bruce Russett, and Barry Weingast--find such counterfactual conjectures not only useful, but necessary for drawing causal inferences from historical data. Given the importance of counterfactuals, it is perhaps surprising that we lack standards for evaluating them. To fill this gap, Philip Tetlock and Aaron Belkin propose a set of criteria for distinguishing plausible from implausible counterfactual conjectures across a wide range of applications. The contributors to this volume make use of these and other criteria to evaluate counterfactuals that emerge in diverse methodological contexts including comparative case studies, game theory, and statistical analysis. Taken together, these essays go a long way toward establishing a more nuanced and rigorous framework for assessing counterfactual arguments about world politics in particular and about the social sciences more broadly.

Download or read book Possible Worlds Theory and Counterfactual Historical Fiction written by Riyukta Raghunath and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-09-10 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a comprehensive Possible Worlds framework with which to analyse counterfactual historical fiction. Counterfactual historical fiction is a literary genre that comprises narratives set in worlds whose histories run contrary to the history of our world, usually speculating on what would have happened had a significant historical event (such as a war) turned out differently. The author develops a systematic critical approach based on a customised model of Possible Worlds Theory supplemented by cognitive concepts that account for the different processes that readers go through when they read counterfactual historical fiction, a genre which relies heavily on pre-existing knowledge about history and culture. This book will be of interest to anyone working with Possible Worlds, including within the fields of philosophy, literary studies, stylistics, cognitive poetics, and narratology.

Download or read book Counterfactual Thinking Counterfactual Writing written by Dorothee Birke and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-11-30 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Counterfactuality is currently a hotly debated topic. While for some disciplines such as linguistics, cognitive science, or psychology counterfactual scenarios have been an important object of study for quite a while, counterfactual thinking has in recent years emerged as a method of study for other disciplines, most notably the social sciences. This volume provides an overview of the current definitions and uses of the concept of counterfactuality in philosophy, historiography, political sciences, psychology, linguistics, physics, and literary studies. The individual contributions not only engage the controversies that the deployment of counterfactual thinking as a method still generates, they also highlight the concept’s potential to promote interdisciplinary exchange without neglecting the limitations and pitfalls of such a project. Moreover, the essays from literary studies, which make up about half of the volume, provide both a historical and a systematic perspective on the manifold ways in which counterfactual scenarios can be incorporated into and deployed in literary texts.

Download or read book Unmaking the West written by Philip Eyrikson Tetlock and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 9788472457904.txt

Download or read book Coincidence and Counterfactuality written by Hilary P. Dannenberg and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2008-07-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Coincidence and Counterfactuality, a groundbreaking analysis of plot, Hilary P. Dannenberg sets out to answer the perennial question of how to tell a good story. While plot is among the most integral aspects of storytelling, it is perhaps the least studied aspect of narrative. Using plot theory to chart the development of narrative fiction from the Renaissance to the present, Dannenberg demonstrates how the novel has evolved over time and how writers have developed increasingly complex narrative strategies that tap into key cognitive parameters familiar to the reader from real-life experience. ø Dannenberg proposes a new, multidimensional theory for analyzing time and space in narrative fiction, then uses this theory to trace the historical evolution of narrative fiction by focusing on coincidence and counterfactuality. These two key plot strategiesøare constructed around pivotal moments when characters? life trajectories, or sometimes the paths of history, converge or diverge. The study?s rich historical and textual scope reveals how narrative traditions and genres such as romance and realism or science fiction and historiographic metafiction, rather than being separated by clear boundaries are in fact in a continual process of interaction and cross-fertilization. In highlighting critical stages in the historical development of narrative fiction, the study produces new readings of works by pinpointing the innovative role played by particular authors in this evolutionary process. Dannenberg?s original investigation of plot patterns is interdisciplinary, incorporating research from narrative theory, cognitive approaches to literature, social psychology, possible worlds theory, and feminist approaches to narrative.

Download or read book Understanding Counterfactuals Understanding Causation written by Christoph Hoerl and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-11-03 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twelve essays explore what bearing empirical findings might have on philosophical concerns about counterfactuals and causation, and how, in turn, work in philosophy might help clarify issues in empirical work on the relationships between causal and counterfactual thought.

Download or read book Shaping the Past written by Ylva Grufstedt and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-07-18 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This series provides a multidisciplinary framework for scholarly approaches to video games in the humanities. It focuses especially on the dialectics of methodology and object: how do different scholarly fields apply their theories and methods to video games, and how do video games in turn affect these theories and methods? This series seeks to reconnect media-centric Game Studies to the disciplines it had to distance itself from in its foundation, such as literary studies or film studies, in an attempt to use their differences and contact zones in a mutually productive dialogue. It also seeks to present innovative approaches in other fields in the humanities that have yet to consider video games in a systematic way, and give a home to ground-breaking publications that push the boundaries of existing discourses and debates. In this endeavor, the series is committed to a decidedly global scope as it assembles perspectives from different cultural and academic contexts. In short, this series wants to see what the humanities do with video games and what video games do to the humanities. Proposals can be send to: [email protected] Advisory Board: Alenda Y. Chang, UC Santa Barbara Katherine J Lewis, University of Huddersfield Dietmar Meinel, University of Duisburg-Essen Ana Milosevic, KU Leuven Soraya Murray, UC Santa Cruz Holly Nielsen, University of London Michael Nitsche, Georgia Tech Martin Picard, Leipzig University Melanie Swalwell, Swinburne University Emma Vossen, University of Waterloo Mark J.P. Wolf, Concordia University Esther Wright, Cardiff University

Download or read book What Might Have Been written by Neal J. Roese and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2014-01-14 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Within a few short years, research on counterfactual thinking has mushroomed, establishing itself as one of the signature domains within social psychology. Counterfactuals are thoughts of what might have been, of possible past outcomes that could have taken place. Counterfactuals and their implications for perceptions of time and causality have long fascinated philosophers, but only recently have social psychologists made them the focus of empirical inquiry. Following the publication of Kahneman and Tversky's seminal 1982 paper, a burgeoning literature has implicated counterfactual thinking in such diverse judgments as causation, blame, prediction, and suspicion; in such emotional experiences as regret, elation, disappointment and sympathy; and also in achievement, coping, and intergroup bias. But how do such thoughts come about? What are the mechanisms underlying their operation? How do their consequences benefit, or harm, the individual? When is their generation spontaneous and when is it strategic? This volume explores these and other numerous issues by assembling contributions from the most active researchers in this rapidly expanding subfield of social psychology. Each chapter provides an in-depth exploration of a particular conceptual facet of counterfactual thinking, reviewing previous work, describing ongoing, cutting-edge research, and offering novel theoretical analysis and synthesis. As the first edited volume to bring together the many threads of research and theory on counterfactual thinking, this book promises to be a source of insight and inspiration for years to come.

Download or read book The Science of Can and Can t written by Chiara Marletto and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A luminous guide to how the radical new science of counterfactuals can reveal that the scope of the universe is greater, and more beautiful, than we ever imagined There is a vast class of things that science has so far almost entirely neglected. They are central to the understanding of physical reality both at an everyday level and at the level of the most fundamental phenomena in physics, yet have traditionally been assumed to be impossible to incorporate into fundamental scientific explanations. They are facts not about what is (the actual) but about what could be (counterfactuals). According to physicist Chiara Marletto, laws about things being possible or impossible may generate an alternative way of providing explanations. This fascinating, far-reaching approach holds promise for revolutionizing the way fundamental physics is formulated and for providing essential tools to face existing technological challenges--from delivering the next generation of information-processing devices beyond the universal quantum computer to designing AIs. Each chapter in the book delineates how an existing vexed open problem in science can be solved by this radically different approach and it is augmented by short fictional stories that explicate the main point of the chapter. As Marletto demonstrates, contemplating what is possible can give us a more complete and hopeful picture of the physical world.

Download or read book Forbidden Fruit written by Richard Ned Lebow and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-07 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Could World War I have been averted if Franz Ferdinand and his wife hadn't been murdered by Serbian nationalists in 1914? What if Ronald Reagan had been killed by Hinckley's bullet? Would the Cold War have ended as it did? In Forbidden Fruit, Richard Ned Lebow develops protocols for conducting robust counterfactual thought experiments and uses them to probe the causes and contingency of transformative international developments like World War I and the end of the Cold War. He uses experiments, surveys, and a short story to explore why policymakers, historians, and international relations scholars are so resistant to the contingency and indeterminism inherent in open-ended, nonlinear systems. Most controversially, Lebow argues that the difference between counterfactual and so-called factual arguments is misleading, as both can be evidence-rich and logically persuasive. A must-read for social scientists, Forbidden Fruit also examines the binary between fact and fiction and the use of counterfactuals in fictional works like Philip Roth's The Plot Against America to understand complex causation and its implications for who we are and what we think makes the social world work.

Download or read book Counterfactuals written by David Lewis and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-05-28 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Counterfactuals is David Lewis' forceful presentation of and sustained argument for a particular view about propositions which express contrary to fact conditionals, including his famous defense of realism about possible worlds.

Download or read book Counterfactuals and Scientific Realism written by Michael J. Shaffer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-08-13 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author attempts to show that scientific realism is compatible with the presence of idealization in the sciences. His main contention is that idealized theories can be treated as counterfactuals about how things are in worlds that are similar to but simpler than the actual world.

Download or read book A Historical Introduction to English Law written by Russell Sandberg and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-04-30 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Designed for those studying law for the first time, this book explores where the English common law came from.

Download or read book Plausible Worlds written by Geoffrey Hawthorn and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1993-11-18 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examples through history used to examine the role of possible worlds in explanation and practical judgements.