Causes, Conditions, and Causal Importance

The problem of clarifying what is meant by judgments which assign relative importance to the causes of particular results, and of explaining how such judgments may be confirmed, is important one for historians. Disagreement over relative causal importance is often a major point of controversy among historians who address the same explanatory problem (according to E. H. Carr, Every historical argument revolves around the question of the priority of causes'). And the ambiguous and poorly understood character of judgments which assign relative importance to causes frequently constitutes obstacle to the resolution of such disagreement. Although historians not unaware of the importance of this problem, they have devoted surprisingly little energy to solving it.2 And some historians seem content to dispatch simply by claiming that judgments which assign relative importance to causes subjective. Even among scholars who argue that such judgments themselves objective, there is some tendency to suppose that historians so incapable of adequately defending them that their commitment to them is little more than subjective preference. Ernest Nagel, for example, after arguing impressively that judgments which assign relative importance to causes often have an undeniably clear and verifiable content, stresses that it is doubtful in most cases whether such judgments supported by competent evidence and concludes that historians are therefore compelled, willy-nilly, to rely on guesses and vague impressions in assigning weights to causal factors.3 The goal of the present study is to defend analysis of causal weighting according to which judgments which assign relative importance to the causes of particular results can be objective. Part I is a consideration of what may be said for the claim that such judgments subjective. Part II is examination of a significant instance of causal weighting in historical studies. Part III contains my analysis.