The Weak Protagonism of Nations

I want to begin my remarks by steaming, as a philatelist would a coveted stamp, a single word off the envelope of Catherine Gallagher's Telling It Like It Wasn't . The word occurs in the introduction, where Gallagher is establishing the boundaries of her subject by offering a sample counterfactual-historical premise: “If John F. Kennedy had not been assassinated in 1963 and had lived to be a two-term president, the war in Vietnam would have been over by 1968.” The Kennedy premise, Gallagher goes on to say, “is not attempting to call the assassination into question or to imply that we should look into it more deeply; it is simply asserting that but for the assassination, history would likely have taken a different path. Insisting on this definition of ‘historical counterfactual’ at the outset should not only clarify the topic but also emphasize that the works under discussion are hinged onto the actual historical record, usually at a juncture that is widely recognized to have been both crucial and underdetermined.”

Counterfactual thinking · Epistemology · Linguistics · Premise · Subject (documents · Term (time · Word (group theory · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Australian History and Society · Computer Science · History · Philosophy