Yemima Ben-Menahem
Abstract
The paper provides a new characterization of the concepts of
necessity and contingency as they should be used in the historical
context. The idea is that contingency (necessity) increases in
direct (reverse) proportion to sensitivity to initial conditions. The
merits of this suggestion are that it avoids the conflation of causal-
ity and necessity (or contingency and chance), that it enables the
bracketing of the problem of free will while maintaining the
concept of human action making a difference, that it sanctions
tendencies without recourse to teleology, and that it recasts the
controversy between historicists and anti-historicists in less
dogmatic language.
Philosophers and logicians often make use of the distinction
between necessary and contingent truth. A common way of
distinguishing the two notions is by means of possible world
terminology. A statement is a necessary truth if it is true in all
possible worlds, and contingent otherwise. The historian has
little use for that distinction the truths she is after are clearly
not true in all possible worlds, that is, they are contingent in the
logical sense of the term. And yet, it seems quite natural to say of
a historical event, a defeat for instance, that it was necessary,
inevitable, etc., or, by contrast, that it was unnecessary, could have
been prevented and so on. It might also be of some historical
interest to find out which of the two descriptions of the defeat is
more plausible. But if all historical truths are contingent in the
logical sense, what do we mean in this context by the distinction
between the necessary and the contingent? One possibility is that
this is just a careless use of language, that the distinction has no
real content in the historical context. Another is that while these
terms lack cognitive content, they are used intentionally for
rhetorical or other pragmatic purposes. For example, we may
present the defeat as inevitable when we do not want it to harm
the reputation of the commander. A third possibility is that neces-
sity and contingency should be understood in terms of the
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notions of causality and chance: on this suggestion, the view that
the defeat was necessary actually means that it was caused, or
predetermined by other events, whereas the view that it was
contingent regards it as a random event. Although both careless-
ness and rhetoric figure amply in human speech, and although
the notions of chance and causality have been used interchange-
ably with contingency and necessity (respectively) by some writ-
ers, I find neither of these replies fully satisfactory. In what
follows I draw the distinction between the necessary and the
contingent in terms of the degree of sensitivity to initial condi-
tions, and argue that this characterization captures the meaning
of these notions in historical discourse.
We tend to speak of necessity when we think that what
happened had to happen, and of contingency when we think
things could have happened differently. My suggestion is to
understand this contrast as follows: what we mean by necessity is
that the same type of final outcome results from a variety of
different causal chains. In the extreme case, all possible chains
(possible, say, in terms of the laws of nature and certain initial
conditions) lead to the same type of result. For example, we may
think of death as necessary in this sense since a wide variety of
possible courses of life ultimately lead to death, and, so far as we
know, there is no possible path that does not. Similarly, thermo-
dynamic equilibrium will follow from a wide variety of initial
conditions, and under certain circumstances it will follow no
matter what the initial conditions. But it is perfectly acceptable to
speak of degrees of necessity with reference to less extreme cases,
as long as the final outcome is relatively insensitive both to initial
conditions and to potentially disruptive intervening events. In
this type of case, the result seems necessary to some degree, since
even were the earlier conditions different, and even were addi-
tional factors to have intervened in the causal process, the
process would probably still have resulted in the same kind of
outcome. We can say, for example, that quarrels between couples
are virtually necessary in the sense that there are many different
courses of events that lead to quarrelling, even if there is no
reason to think that all possible courses in fact do so. In contrast,
a type of outcome is contingent if there is only one course, or at
most, a few courses, that could possibly lead to it, and there is
sensitivity to initial conditions and intervening factors. Returning
to our defeat, when we say it was unavoidable, we mean that it
would have occurred even if the commander had used different
100 YEMIMA BEN-MENAHEM
Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1997
tactics, the weather had been different and so on. If, on the other
hand, we are of the opinion that these, and many other factors
could indeed have changed the course of the battle, we see the
defeat as contingent. Note that the distinction here is not that
between causality and chance, since in both cases the defeat is
the result of a causal process. Speculations about how history
might have differed had Cleopatras nose been longer vividly
illustrate this sense of contingency.
Schematically, we can represent the difference between the
two cases in the following way:
HISTORICAL CONTINGENCY 101
Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1997
Contingency: Necessity:
Similar causes lead Different types of causes
to different types of effects lead to similar effects.
High sensitivity to initial Low sensitivity to initial
conditions. conditions.
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