gaddis vocab

historical consciousness

a concept that deals with people's understanding of the relation between the past, the present, and the future; an understanding of how past, present, and future relate to each other in history. Also, how to stay aware and suspended within polarities.

selectivty

How historians decide upon which particular point in the point would be significant to research and write about

simultaneity

The ability to be at once in more than a single place or time

Scale

The ease with which hisotrians can shift the scale of the macroscopic to the microscopic

Heisenberg uncertainty principle

The act of observation alters what's being observed, which means that objectivity as a consequence is hardly possible, and therefore is no such thing as truth

continuities

patterns that extend across time

space

the location in which events occur

events

passages from the future through the present into the past

Sensitive dependence on initial conditions

Situations where an imperceptible shift at the beginning of a process can produce enormous changes at the end of it.

remote sensing

Identify what lies below the fog and represent what they find to persuade others, ensuring that the representation is reasonable accurate.

deductive act

The task to deduce the processes that produced it

induction

Survey evidence, sense what is there and find ways to represent it.

reductionism

method of understanding reality best by breaking it up into various parts

ecological approach

considers how components interact to become systems whose mature can't be defined merely by calculating the sum of their parts.

consilience

What insights from one field can tell you about another

conductionism

method of stressing the evolution of ideas and institutions

chaos

there is no clear relationship between independent and dependent variables, everything depended on everything else.

independent variable

Changes in one variable produces corresponding changes in the others.

particular generalization

the act of assuming things that would otherwise bog us down

generalized particularization

The application of some general theory of traffic jams to this particular one.

fractals

Self-similarity across scale- The complexity or simplicity is often the same whether you're observing from a microscope or a macro-scope perspective, or anywhere in between.

criticality

A system contains within it both sensitive dependence on initial conditions and self-similarity across scale.

rational causes

Lead to fruitful generalizations and lessons can be learned from them

accidental causes

Teach no lessons and lead to no conclusions

Principle of diminishing relevance

The greater the time that separates a cause from a consequence the less relevant we presume that cause to be.

general causes

Are necessary but are not sufficient to explain it

context

The dependency of sufficient causes upon necessary causes

phase transitions

Those points of criticality at which stability becomes unstable.

counterfactuals

Rerunning to produce different results

Rational Choice Theory

Reduces complexity to simplicity in an effort to forecast the future

character

A set of patterns within an individual's behavior that extend throughout his or her life

reputation

Some surviving structure that causes us to assign some special significance to the process that produced it

sensitive dependence

Matter of being in the right place at the right time

windows of oppurinuity

the circumstances that make individuals conspicuous; allows reputations to emerge