Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Chance is pervasive in nature. Erratic events such as storms and fires can cause major damage to an ecosystem. Rare successful long distance dispersal events like a viable seed landing in just the right habitat can form the stepping stone for range expansion of a plant species. Illustrated with two examples we argue that in ecology chance events are scale-dependent. We show how random stochastic variation in species interactions may result in relative stability at a higher community level. In other systems the reverse may take place, in which deterministic interactions result in unpredictable chaotic dynamics. Analysing the processes and dynamics at these different scales has led to an increasing mechanistic understanding of the variation in ecological communities in space and time. Unambiguous identification of cause and effect relations from this work is of the greatest importance, as many ecosystems in the world are not amenable to experimentation. This work should form the scientific basis for identifying the threats to ecosystems and defining proper conservation and mitigation measures.

Historians try to interpret the past by analysing patterns in human behaviour in earlier periods of time. In some ways, that excludes ‘coincidence’ as a mode of interpretation. Most historians view coincidences as closely related events that lack causal relationship. That type of coincidence does not fit into a historical narrative, because historians tend to focus on causality, action, and consequence. This is noticeably linked to questions of historical scale: the choice for the scale of a specific narrative decides whether certain events are coincidental to the history which is being described, or causal factors within that history. This relation between historical coincidence and the scale of writing history is at the centre of this contribution. It focuses on different trends in writing history, and analyses the possibilities to use ‘coincidence’ as an interpretative tool in each of them. In doing so, this article discusses counterfactual historical analysis (‘what if history’), determinist views of history and their relation to speculative philosophy of history, ‘cliodynamics’ and ‘big history’. It ultimately argues for historical accounts that pay attention to both the large processes that are likely to lead to certain trajectories, and the enormous number of micro-causes that triggered the events as they happened. Coincidence might fall outside of the analysis of (macro-) historians who are looking for a comprehensive view of historical processes, but could still play a proper role in thinking about historical trajectories.

A leading idea under Roman private law and nearly all European legal systems is that an owner has to bear the risk of an accidental loss (). An accident is a circumstance for which a third party cannot be blamed ( or fault). A person suffering damage from an accident had to bear that damage himself. This idea has been subject to attack throughout history. Every once in a while, it is said that ‘bad luck must be righted’ (‘’). This position has not become the prevailing viewpoint among lawyers. Although it does not seem very realistic, ‘bad luck must be righted’ did form the basis of social security policies of the Netherlands and some other western countries after World War II: social security ‘from womb to tomb’. The scope of social security benefits has been reduced in many countries in the last decades of the twentieth century, because the costs were no longer affordable. The idea that a owner has to bear the risk of has withstood the test of time quite well. That accidental harm must be borne by the one suffering it, is legally and morally justifiable.

This paper focuses on chance and variability in language, and how the language sciences have dealt with that variability. After describing four types of variability found: (a) Inter-species variability, (b) Inter-language variability, (c) Variability in the linguistic signal within a given language, and (d) Inter-individual variability, the paper discusses the work of two pioneers who have tried to deal with this variability: Joseph H. Greenberg and William Labov. These near-contemporaries have tried to grapple with variability of types (b) and (c), as two separate enterprises. Thus these researchers have tried to separate pure chance or randomness from meaningful variability in two different ways, and in doing so have tried to tame the chaos. For them indeed the mission of linguistics as a discipline is to eliminate chance as much as possible, as the target of any scientific enterprise by definition is to isolate, separate or exclude what cannot be explained or understood. Nonetheless, chance and variability are key elements in language, and a proper understanding of language will take these as the point of departure. What does it mean to say that chance is an inherent property of human language? The paper outlines the beginning of answer to this question.