Hay, Frederick George (2017) Explaining historical conflict, with illustrations from 'emergent' Scottish Jacobitism. PhD thesis. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/8479/ Copyright and moral rights for this work are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This work cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Enlighten:Theses http://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] Explaining Historical Conflict With Illustrations from ‘Emergent’ Scottish Jacobitism Frederick George Hay MA(Hons) University of Glasgow MLitt University of Glasgow Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Glasgow College of Arts School of Humanities Archaeology October 2017 © Frederick G Hay 2017 1 Abstract The connecting premise of this study is that the explanation of human action, much of which involves conflict in various forms, is distinctive. It must address the singularity of actions (their attachment to specific moments) and its contingency (that different actions could plausibly have been taken instead). Both stem from the involvement of time in human action, such that its explanation must adopt the form of historiography. Part One argues that the authority of explanation in the physical sciences does not extend to human action as it derives from successful physical demonstration in experiment or industrial replication, not from special epistemological warrant, processes inapplicable to human action; that the distinguishing involvement of human consciousness and the will to act introduces a particular awareness of the passage of time that confers timeliness to actions, while precluding full knowledge of the consequences of actions; that the social nature of human action involves the emergence of diverse groups that generate complex divisions between ‘we’ and ‘they’ that form the basis for conflict over the consequences of action; that resolving the conflict of warfare produces collective agreements to avoid future conflict; that this conflict can reach considerable levels of brutality and lethality even outside warfare; and that moral codes that might constrain such conflict have limited effectiveness. Part Two illustrates the relevance of perspectives in reducing the complexities of reality to facilitate action, referring to categories appropriate to the emergence of Scottish Jacobitism in the late seventeenth and early eighteen centuries: dynastic, religious, economic and military. It also suggests how contingency could be addressed through conjectures about the actions that might have been taken but were not. Part Three suggests a basis in the role of expectations for the tendency of human perspectives on their context of action to change radically, and for actions to change accordingly as situations are seen ‘in a different light’. At various points in the study use is made of an analogy drawn between the adversarial advocacies presented at a trial by jury and the general explanation of human action. This illuminates both the fact that different perspectives on the same evidence can yield contrary explanations and that all explanation of human action necessarily confronts a problem of reflexivity: the perspectives of agents have to be represented through the perspectives of those seeking to explain their actions. ii Contents Abstract ii Contents iii Acknowledgements x Author’s Declaration xi Introductory Outline 1 Part One: The Pursuit of Authoritative Explanation 1 Epistemology and Images of Explanation 6 1.1 The Problem to be Addressed 6 1.2 The Claim Developed. Stage One: Experimentation and Pragmatism 7 From Common Sense to the ‘Practice Turn’ 7 Experimental process as the scientific paradigm 9 1.3 Stage Two: Human Action Beyond Experimentation 9 The Explanation of Human Action 9 The ‘backward view’ of the past 10 1.4 Stage Three: No Privileged Epistemology 10 The Cartesian Agenda: The Primacy of Reason and Deduction 10 The challenges to deduction 11 The attempt to save deduction 12 Empirical regularity and human action 13 1.5 Stage Four: Responses 13 Conventionalism and social constructivism 13 Incommensurability of alternative explanations 14 1.6 The Pursuit of Authoritative Explanation of Human Action 15 ‘How?’ and ‘why? 15 Reliable Explanation of Human Action 16 The issue of ‘truth’ 17 The Reliable description of human action 18 1.7 Inference from Evidence and the Criterion of Plausibility 18 Plausibility and Pragmatism 19 1.8 The Bases for Historical and Archaeological Explanation 20 Time and Human Action 20 Historical sources and approach 20 Archaeological sources and approaches 21 iii The inter-animation of history and archaeology 24 2 Explaining the Singular: Explanation without Experimentation 26 2.1 Setting the Agenda 26 2.2 Three Facets of Singularity: 1. The Temporality of Self 27 Identity and the Timeliness of Action 27 Time boundedness 28 2.3 Three Facets of Singularity: 2. The Situatedness of Action 28 Historical situatedness 28 Spatial Situatedness 29 2.4 Three Facets of Singularity: 3. The Origination of Change 30 From Fictional ‘Act’ to Experiential ‘Event’ 30 Change: creation and destruction 31 The progressiveness of qualitative change 32 The relation between becoming and being 33 2.5 Singular Explanation 33 The Inapplicability of General Explanations of Human Action 33 Forensic enquiry and evidence 34 Laws of evidence 35 The purpose of evidence 35 Incompleteness and incoherence of evidence 36 2.6 The Quality of Argument 37 Rhetoric and the Imagination 38 2.7 Historical and archaeological explanation 38 Singular explanation and the past 38 Narrative: Viewing the Past from the Present 39 The incidental and limited nature of evidence 39 Material Evidence of Events 40 2.8 Narrative Construction: The Biography of Action 41 ‘Chapters’ in the Narrative? 42 The Direction of the Narrative 44 3 Explanation and Human Agency 45 Preamble 45 3.1 The human mind and will 45 Consciousness and understanding 45 The problems posed by neuroscience and cognitive science 45 iv Thought and interpretation 47 3.2 The historical inheritance of culture 48 Traditional social modes of thought 48 The fusion of past and present 49 The subjective image of present reality 50 3.3 Human action: originative and causal 51 The human will and imagination 51 Ideas, actions and experiment 52 The ‘creative destruction’ of innovation 53 The sequence of change 54 The problem of methodological individualism 55 3.4 Complexity, order and disorder in human affairs 57 Natural capacities and the presumption of order 57 The prospect of spontaneous order in human life 57 Functionality and structure as order 58 Human activity as an open system 59 Conjunction and disorder in human life 60 3.5 Change in human affairs: contingency versus necessity 61 Purposeful activity 61 Composition of human capacities 62 3.6 Human agency, reflexivity and explanation 63 The explanation of human failure 63 3.7 The social and moral dimensions of human action 64 Constituting society: The rules of the game 64 Social dynamics as causal 65 3.8 The composition of actions 67 Unpredictability of outcomes 67 Ignorance of unintended consequences 68 The inaccessibility of past minds 69 The prospect of social conflict 70 4 Explanation and Human Conflict 72 Preamble 72 4.1 The Sources of Conflict 72 Relational Contexts 72 Conflict and development 73 The norm of conflict 74 v 4.2 Conflict and ‘Scarcity’ 74 Reductionist accounts 75 Alternative approaches 76 Ethnological perspectives 77 4.3 The Interdependence of Contexts 78 Conflict and Constitutional Change 80 Conflict and Constitutional Order 81 4.4 The Evidence of Conflict and its Interpretation 84 Archaeological evidence 84 Historical evidence and Inter-state Conflict 85 Interpreting the evidence 87 4.5 Violent Conflict beyond Warfare 88 Slavery 88 Massacres and Genocide 90 4.6 Explaining killings of innocents 93 The insecurity of ‘humanity’ 93 Dehumanization 94 The political perspective 96 5 Human Conflict and Self-restraint 98 Preamble 98 5.1 Restraints on Conflict 98 Moral Authority 98 Reflecting on death 99 Death and Dasein 101 5.2 Morality, Kinship and State 102 5.3 The Limitations of Morality 103 5.4 The Elusiveness of Self-restraint 105 The problematic relation between ‘self’ and ‘other’ 105 5.5 Religion and Conflict 105 Religion, ‘Self’ and ‘Other 105 Religion and Virtue 107 Religion and Secular Authority 109 5.6 The State and Christianity 111 Heresy 111 Christianity and other faiths 112 Reasons of State 113 vi 5.7 The Limits of Self-restraint 114 Selective Restraint 114 Justification of retaliation 116 5.8 The response to violence 117 6 Authoritative Historical Explanation? 120 Preamble 120 6.1 From chronology, via narrative, to explanation 121 The challenge facing historiography 121 Historicity 121 The role of perspective 122 6.2 Perception of time 123 The spatial metaphor and its limits 123 6.3 Counter-historicals and authoritative explanation 124 Explanation as connectedness 124 Reconstructing the event 125 The ‘might-have-beens’ 126 6.4 Contingency, Explanation and Authority 131 Explaining action by action, perspective by perspective 131 Perspectives in advocacies 132 Part