Prediction's Predicates

This course is organized around two related questions informing both the act or concept of prediction and its use-cases. (1) What do we do when we predict? (2) What do we do to our objects of knowledge and belief when we predict? The first question addresses the changing philosophical nature of prediction — when we say “predict,” we do not mean the same thing as our ancestors — and attaches it to changing technical practices of prediction.

The second question takes up the axioms that we must adopt in order to imagine that our world is predictable from the outset: if our world is predictable because it is wholly deterministic, this tells us something completely different about nature, time, and knowledge than an axiom that understands our world as predictable because it is wholly probabilistic. If we isolate only a given moment in the history of prediction, is there a coherent ontological framework across contemporaneous techniques and technologies of prediction or do they understand their objects differently and contradictorily?

Finally, this course is meant to trace changing orientations to time that accompany our shifting philosophical and technical senses of prediction. Has prediction always been oriented towards the future? Is it actually oriented towards the future today? A good reason we trust no oracles today is that one of the most profitable aspects of being a prophet is the outcome you might bring about in the present regardless of whether your statements will have been correct in the future.