A Defence of Minimal-Rewrite Counterfactuals in the History of Science – Prof Gregory Radick – University of Leeds

Abstract: What if,  at the 1927 Solvay conference, the causal interpretation of quantum mechanics had received a more sympathetic hearing?  What if Charles Darwin had died on the Beagle voyage and so had never lived to write On the Origin of Species?  What if the Oxford biologist W. F. R. Weldon hadn’t died of pneumonia in the spring of 1906 but instead lived to finish and publish his Mendelism-challenging book on inheritance?  The might-have-been pasts evoked by such questions are known as “minimal-rewrite counterfactuals,” because they invite us to suppose that just one element which could plausibly have been different in the actual past was different, with the consequences of that difference then reasoned through in the light of the evidence of what in fact happened.  In this talk I want to defuse two worries about the preference for minimal-rewrite counterfactuals among the historians of science prepared to “go there.”  The first worry is that there’s no justification for the preference; that is, there’s no good reason to ignore the wider range of possibilities opened up once one begins asking about alternative pasts.  The second worry is that the preference neutralizes the potential for criticism of present-day science from counterfactual reasoning, making it inherently conservative.

Bio: Gregory Radick is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds.  He has published widely on the history of the modern life and human sciences,  with books including The Simian Tongue: The Long Debate about Animal Language (2007), Disputed Inheritance: The Battle over Mendel and the Future of Biology (2023) and, as co-editor with the late Jonathan Hodge, The Cambridge Companion to Darwin (2003, 2^nd edition 2009). A former President of the British Society for the History of Science and the International Society for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology, he is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Metascience, which originated in New South Wales.