The Things They Carried Re: Rove and Wolfowitz's role

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Sun Feb 23 18:28:28 PST 2003


I just finished _Structure of Evolutionary Theory_ yesterday (I've been plugging away, with a few interruptions from eye surgery, since Aug. 13). The final chapter, pp. 1296-1343, is entitled "Tiers of Time and trials of Extrapolationism, With an Epilog on the Interaction of General Theory and Contingent History."

That epilog provides a pretty good title for the distinction I started out to make some days ago in commenting on the distinction made by the CPC between "theory" and "thought."

One of the points he emphasizes toward the end of the work, but which is implicit throughout, is that historical sciences, unlike physics and chemistry, are _not_ predictive sciences. They can explain events _after_ the fact, but they cannot predict events. This would seem to be equally true of social as of biological history.

Incidentally, the _Observer_ article on the Iraq war is not an explanation; it is a fine and detailed description of what needs to be explained. The strength of fundamentalist religion in the u.s., for example, is an important phenomena which history will have to explain, but it is not itself really an explanation of anything. This is one of the differences between journalism on the one hand and history or historiography on the other hand.

Carrol



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