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SIGNIFYING NOTHING: TRADITIONAL HISTORY, LOCAL HISTORY, STATISTICS AND COMPUTING

SIGNIFYING NOTHING: TRADITIONAL HISTORY, LOCAL HISTORY, STATISTICS AND COMPUTING PETER LASLETT pursuit of history in all its modes, political, economic, religious, social, literary, aesthetic, scientific and so forth, is concerned above all with causal analysis and probability. It has to be known with the greatest possible degree of certainty what and why things happened as they did, why the condition of politics or of the arts or of literature or of society was as it was, what is the likelihood that things might have been different, the likelihood of a particular explanation being true or false. Yet in my experience traditional historians proceed as if causality and probability were topics irrelevant to them, with no place in the reconstruction of what happened in the past. They know next to nothing about causal analysis, or the theory of probability and their practical applications. Correlation and regression are closed books. Traditional historians are rightly concerned with significance. They are anxious that their own statements shall be accepted as significant, and not regarded as intuitive guesswork, such as a novelist or a journalist might produce. Journalists of course have always been the bugbear of established historical criticism. Many traditional historians, perhaps most of them indeed, are alive to the necessity http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing Edinburgh University Press

SIGNIFYING NOTHING: TRADITIONAL HISTORY, LOCAL HISTORY, STATISTICS AND COMPUTING

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Publisher
Edinburgh University Press
Copyright
Copyright © Edinburgh University Press
ISSN
1753-8548
eISSN
1755-1706
DOI
10.3366/hac.1999.11.1-2.129
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

PETER LASLETT pursuit of history in all its modes, political, economic, religious, social, literary, aesthetic, scientific and so forth, is concerned above all with causal analysis and probability. It has to be known with the greatest possible degree of certainty what and why things happened as they did, why the condition of politics or of the arts or of literature or of society was as it was, what is the likelihood that things might have been different, the likelihood of a particular explanation being true or false. Yet in my experience traditional historians proceed as if causality and probability were topics irrelevant to them, with no place in the reconstruction of what happened in the past. They know next to nothing about causal analysis, or the theory of probability and their practical applications. Correlation and regression are closed books. Traditional historians are rightly concerned with significance. They are anxious that their own statements shall be accepted as significant, and not regarded as intuitive guesswork, such as a novelist or a journalist might produce. Journalists of course have always been the bugbear of established historical criticism. Many traditional historians, perhaps most of them indeed, are alive to the necessity

Journal

International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing – Edinburgh University Press

Published: Jan 1, 1999

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