PrepTest 153, Section 4, Question 27

Working the answers

• A

  The author explicitly hopes the alternative perspective can provide narrative satisfaction. Giving up inevitability therefore doesn't mean giving up a coherent, satisfying account of events.

• B

  Avoiding contingency is the opposite of the recommendation. The author wants historical explanations to include particular and unrepeatable details. Difficulty predicting an event wouldn't justify removing those details from the study of history.

• C

  The author allows the possibility of laws that constrain, but doesn't establish a set of experiences common to everyone as their foundation. This supplies an argument for universal laws that the discussion never makes.

• D

  The nineteenth-century qualification makes this more tempting: the author allows that Freud and Marx offered plausible accounts of phenomena preceding them. But that is not a recommendation to adopt their deterministic perspective for studying nineteenth-century events. Recognizing some explanatory value is different from endorsing the approach the author ultimately urges us to replace.

• E
  Correct

  Forcing particular events into an inflexible universal progression prevents an explanation from doing justice to their distinctive features. The author recommends incorporating those features instead. This criticism concerns imposed, fully determining patterns; it doesn't require abandoning every general principle or every law that might constrain events.