From MacIntyre's "After Virtue", chapter 8
"The Character of Generalizations in Social Science and their Lack of Predictive Power"
These are summarizing excerpts from chapter 8 of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1981).
Today I saw, via Venkatesh Rao on Twitter, a link to the first post in a newsletter by a certain Vaughn Tan, called “Varieties of the unknown”.
Tan, like MacIntyre, enumerates some sources of “unknown-ness” in human affairs. This quote in particular is a clear point of connection:
“In a world with innovation, entirely unanticipated outcomes are inevitable.”
By the way, it seems to me that this book as a whole ought to be of interest to David Chapman’s project about meaning, ethics, and rationality.
Italics are original; bold emphases are mine. Without further ado:
“That the social sciences are predictively weak and that they do not discover law-like generalizations may clearly turn out to be two symptoms of the same condition. But what is that condition?“
The Enlightenment as a peculiar darkness:
“It is because modern social scientists have seen themselves as the successors of Comte and Mill and Buckle, of Helvétuis and Diderot and Condorcet, that they have presented their writings as attempted answers to the questions of their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century masters. But let us suppose once again that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, brilliant and creative as they were, were in fact centuries not as we and they take them to be of Enlightenment, but of a peculiar kind of darkness in which men so dazzled themselves that they could no longer see and ask whether the social sciences might not have an alternative ancestry. “
On Machiavelli and Fortuna:
“Wherein does Machiavelli differ from the Enlightenment tradition? Above all in his concept of Fortuna. Machiavelli certainly believed as passionately as any thinker of the Enlightenment that our investigations should issue in generalizations which may furnish maxims for enlightened practice. But he also believed that no matter how good a stock of generalizations one amassed and no matter how well one reformulated them, the factor of Fortuna was ineliminable from human life.“
Unpredictability in human affairs; four sources thereof:
“I want to argue that there are four sources of systematic unpredictability in human affairs. “
1st source of unpredictability—radical conceptual innovation:
Predicting innovation makes no sense:
“Any invention, any discovery, which consists essentially in the elaboration of a radically new concept cannot be predicted, for a necessary part of the prediction is the present elaboration of the very concept whose discovery or invention was to take place only in the future. The notion of the prediction of radical conceptual innovation is itself conceptually incoherent. “
The future of science is unpredictable:
“What is important about the systematic unpredictability of radical conceptual innovation is of course the consequent unpredictability of the future of science. Physicists are able to tell us a good deal about the future of nature in such areas as thermodynamics; but they are able to tell us nothing about the future of physics insofar as that future involves radical conceptual innovation. Yet it is the future of physics which we need to know about if we are to know about the future of our own physics-based society. “
The future of mathematics is provably unpredictable, with reference to Church:
“Suppose that someone were to improve computing hardware and software, so that it became possible to write a program which would enable a computer to predict, on the basis of information about the present state of mathematics, the past history of mathematics and the talents and energies of present day mathematicians, which well-formed formulas in a given branch of mathematics—algebraic topology, say, or number theory—for which at the present we possess neither a proof nor a proof of their negation would receive such a proof within ten years. (We are not requiring that the computer identify all such well-formed formulas, but only some of them.) Such a program would have to embody a decision procedure whereby a sub-set of well- formed formulas, provable but not yet proven, were discriminated from the set of well-formed formulas. But Church has provided us with the strongest reasons for believing that for any calculus rich enough to express arithmetic, let alone algebraic topology or number theory, there can be no such decision procedure. Hence it is a truth of logic that no such computer program will ever be written and more generally therefore it is a truth of logic that the future of mathematics is unpredictable. “
Many areas of human discourse are unpredictable:
“It is of course worth noting that Popper’s argument holds of any area in which radical conceptual innovation takes place and not just natural science. What made the discoveries of quantum mechanics or special relativity unpredictable before they occurred also made unpredictable for precisely the same reasons the invention of the genre of tragedy at Athens in the late sixth century B.C. or the first preaching of Luther’s distinctive doctrine of justification fide sola or the first elaboration of Kant’s theory of knowledge. The striking implications for social life in general are clear. “
2nd source of unpredictability—each agent’s uncertainty of his own future actions:
“Another way of putting the same point would be to note that omniscience excludes the making of decisions. If God knows everything that will occur, he confronts no as yet unmade decision. He has a single will (Summa Contra Gentiles, cap. LXXIX, Quod Deus Vult Etiam Ea Quae Nondum Sunt). It is precisely insofar as we differ from God that unpredictability invades our lives. This way of putting the point has one particular merit: it suggests precisely what project those who seek to eliminate unpredictability from the social world or to deny it may in fact be engaging in. “
3rd source of unpredictability—the game-theoretic character of social life:
“Game-theoretic situations are characteristically situations of imperfect knowledge, and this is no accident. For it is a major interest of each actor to maximize the imperfection of the information of certain other actors at the same time as he improves his own. Moreover a condition of success at misinforming other actors is likely to be the successful production of false impressions in external observers too. This leads to an interesting inversion of Collingwood’s odd thesis that we can only hope to understand the actions of the victorious and the successful, while those of the defeated must remain opaque to us. But if I am right the conditions of success include the ability to deceive successfully and hence it is the defeated whom we are more likely to be able to understand and it is those who are going to be defeated whose behavior we are more likely to be able to predict. “
4th source of unpredictability—pure contingency:
“I turn now to the fourth such source: pure contingency. J.B. Bury once followed Pascal in suggesting that the cause of the foundation of the Roman Empire was the length of Cleopatra’s nose: had her features not been perfectly proportioned, Mark Antony would not have been entranced; had he not been entranced he would not have allied himself with Egypt against Octavian; had he not made that alliance, the battle of Actium would not have been fought—and so on. “
Unpredictability does not conflict with determinism:
“It is important to emphasize that not only does unpredictability not entail inexplicability, but that its presence is compatible with the truth of determinism in a strong version. “
Predictability makes life possible:
“It is at once clear that many of the central features of human life derive from the particular and peculiar ways in which predictability and unpredictability interlock. It is the degree of predictability which our social structures possess which enables us to plan and engage in long-term projects; and the ability to plan and to engage in long-term projects is a necessary condition of being able to find life meaningful. A life lived from moment to moment, from episode to episode, unconnected by threads of large-scale intention, would lack the basis for many characteristically human institutions: marriage, war, the remembrance of the lives of the dead, the carrying on of families, cities and services through generations and so on. But the pervasive unpredictability in human life also renders all our plans and projects permanently vulnerable and fragile.“
We want to predict the world but ourselves remain opaque:
“Each of us, individually and as a member of particular social groups, seeks to embody his own plans and projects in the natural and social world. A condition of achieving this is to render as much of our natural and social environment as possible predictable and the importance of both natural and social science in our lives derives at least in part—although only in part—from their contribution to this project. At the same time each of us, individually and as a member of particular social groups, aspires to preserve his independence, his freedom, his creativity, and that inner reflection which plays so great a part in freedom and creativity, from invasion by others.“
We might want to study predictive error itself:
“One of the problems created by the conventional philosophy of science is that it suggests to scientists in general and social scientists in particular that they should treat predictive error merely as a form of failure, except when some crucial question of falsification arises. If instead we kept careful records of error, and made of error itself a topic for research, my guess is that we should discover that predictive error is not randomly distributed.“
Totalitarianism is the attempt to create wholly predictable organizations:
“Since organizational success and organizational predictability exclude one another, the project of creating a wholly or largely predictable organization committed to creating a wholly or largely predictable society is doomed and doomed by the facts about social life. Totalitarianism of a certain kind, as imagined by Aldous Huxley or George Orwell, is therefore impossible. What the totalitarian project will always produce will be a kind of rigidity and inefficiency which may contribute in the long run to its defeat. We need to remember however the voices from Auschwitz and Gulag Archipelago which tell us just how long that long run is.“
Managerial effectiveness is a founding myth of modernity:
“The expert’s claim to status and reward is fatally undermined when we recognize that he possesses no sound stock of law-like generalizations and when we realize how weak the predictive power available to him is. The concept of managerial effectiveness is after all one more contemporary moral fiction and perhaps the most important of them all. The dominance of the manipulative mode in our culture is not and cannot be accompanied by very much actual success in manipulation.”
We live in a drama that imitates control:
“The effects of eighteenth-century prophecy have been to produce not scientifically managed social control, but a skillful dramatic imitation of such control. It is histrionic success which gives power and authority in our culture. The most effective bureaucrat is the best actor.”