A what if question

Some "what if" questions regarding history are interesting, because the absence of an historical event is plausible. Mostly, however, historical "what ifs" are ridiculous, because they ignore the inevitability of change.

Some "what if" questions regarding history are interesting--this is not one of those questions.

Can a highly industrialized society also be a slave-owning society?

Good question, Noddy. Slavery has been a characteristic of agricultural systems. But isn't it possible for an industrial society to fill its factories with slave labor? We are not so far from that in the Amermican run Mexican maquiladora factories along our southern border.
Set, your reference to the hypothetical absence of an historical event (the experimental removal of a conceptual variable) makes intellectual (qua hypothetical) sense. But philosophically speaking, it seems to me that historical "what if" questions are metaphysically meaningless due to the fact that "the past" seems "absolute," i.e., it cannot be changed except in our imagination, and hypotheses regarding the past are operationally meaningless insofar as history cannot be repeated for the purpose of testing of such hypotheses. What do you think?

Alternative History...What if Slavery never endend?
This is not in fact a racist question. I have asked it many times myself.

I believe that if slavery had never ended, That this country would still be divided into two parts. The United States of America, and the Confederate States of America. A lot of people think that the slave issue is what started the Civil War. But in fact, it was the different economies.

The North was based on an industrial economy. The South was based upon an agricultural economy, which rested on the backs of slaves. The North was trying to industrialize the South, and this threatened their way of life. So, let's pretend that the South won the Civil War. Which in my mind would be the only way that slavery in America would still exist. The South would still probably be largely agrarian, although technological advances in farming would exist. The North would probably be almost exactly the same as it is now, although some would own slaves.
Also, we could suppose that if slavery never ended some states possibly would not exist. Although that possibility is a very remote one.

Yeah, it's not a racist question.

The British abolished slavery, and I think that the Americans would somehow will. There is a lot of time in between the past and the future, heck the historical future of mankind may never end (that'd be good), and so there's really a lot of time for that kind of change to happen.

Ultimately though, it is a huge improbability to accurately predict a "what if" question regarding time events.

Karl Popper argued that one reason we cannot predict the future of human behavior is that, to a large extent, behavior reflects future knowledge, and because that "future" knowledge is not present knowledge, we cannot to that extent, make such predictions.

But such "thought experiments" can serve to sharpen our wits.

Oh hey, that's a good point. Just to clarify, so he means that our behaviours sometimes depend to a large extent on what we think will happen, and since we can't right now know what a person would think of what will happen when a certain thing did happen, we can't predict their behavior?

I think I misunderstood you somewhere.

No Ray, that's more or less right. What people THINK will happen depends largely on what they "know" or "belileve" to be true, i.e., the nature of things. Since future knowledge (and to a lesser extent beliefs) will be different in the future--and future knowledge is by definition not present knowledge--the behavior based on that future knowledge is beyond our present predictive capacity.
Almost always, I think, much of our predictions about future behavior (for an extreme example just watch Startrek) and our archaeological postdictions about the past are PROJECTIONS from our present awareness.

Speak for yourself, JL. I happen to KNOW the future. There will be some dark-skinned, very skinny cattle herders in a region of Africa that will be the only survivors of some major catastrophe.

And I predict their behavior will be that of your typical cattle herder, and that is to find some water and food for the cattle.

Of course where knowledge and conditions remain constant, Popper's proposition is irrelevant, but not refuted.