User:Amy Suo Wu/new thesis outline

Reclaiming uncertainty - A plea for alternative ways of knowing

abstract = 100 words (what is the story - what is the narrative?) (also make relation to project)

intro. instability of perception

-Historical perceptions on reason and intuition. A brief history of the use of the terms 'divination' of Latin origin (divinus) meaning divine and 'mantic' of Greek origin (mantike) meaning madness, raving, insanity or inspiration(Tedlock). In contrast to another Greek term, oionistic, which referred to the inductive art of the uninspired and sane who inquire purely from human reasoning, madness was believed to have sprang from god and the other from mere men. Later in the 19th century, a time that was dictated by doctrines of progress, perception towards reason and intuition becomes inverted. What was once seen as dull and an uninspired way of inducing a conclusion came to be understood as acceptable knowledge guided by reason, while intuitive forms became deemed as 'superstitious'.

-Understanding discourse, knowledge and truth as historically grounded concepts; regimes of truth (Foucault, Hall) A brief history of the changing definitions of 'superstition' in reflecting how acceptable knowledge changed according to hegemonic ideas in 19th century England when social reformers advanced to marginalize superstitious thinking by replacing it with respectable 'useful knowledge' in an effort to establish authority on scientific rational knowledge. (Perkins)

-apophenia/pareidolia (meaning, pattern, random,)

The world is fundamentally 'unpredictable'

- On uncertainty. The notion of uncertainty is perhaps the least well understood concept in science. In the public parlance, uncertainty is a negative thing, implying a lack of rigor and predictability. In the field of meteorology, uncertainty is something that is to be contained so that it provides a measure of control over it. Similar to the stock market and population growth in ecology, the weather is a chaotic dynamic system which even though is deterministic, the highly sensitive nature of this system inherently evades the possibility of prediction. The irrational behavior of these systems even escape highly advanced computing technology and reasoning. - On irrationality. In the early 20th century mathematicians (David Hilbert, Bertrand Russel) hoped to resolve the internal contradictions of the fundamentals of science by constructing a solid foundation based on few axioms. These basic axioms could build up all branches of mathematics for example, topology, geometry, and algebra. However, when one mathematician, Kurt Godel, came and took a few of those basic axioms and showed that one could reach complete contradictions with them, the discussion of fundamentals closed (Von Franz). What Godel showed was that the basic axioms on which mathematicians depended on contain an irrational factor which could not be eliminated. Godel wasn't focused on numbers per se, but on reasoning itself, using numbers to reason about the nature of mathematics. In a similar way Marie von Franz talks about the basis of divination as an irrational means to to grasp the irrational – a paradoxical self-referential loop of reasoning.

- On probability. (The process of eliminating chance) In order to deal with this irrationality, science thus needs to project it onto the background of possibility or probability. As the single event (number) is always irrational, one needs to projects them by a specific procedure onto the background of infinite possibilities to cope with them, and this is what modern mathematicians do – they ignore the individual and simply deal with it as a class, a group. The secret in probability is repetition: the more repeats, the more accurate the probability.

Unconscious and divination. Understanding the irrational with irrational means

-German mathematician, Herman Weyl believed that the fundamentals of numbers were so simple, as man had constructed them, and yet so abysmal (irrational) which we cannot grasp. According to Marie von Franz, it for the very reason in which Weyl thinks numbers are a mere rational and transparent invention, that he experienced and tried to grapple with such contradiction. She suggests that numbers are possibly from the unconscious, a place of irrational, spirit, autonomous. "..numbers are entities which the human mind can posit and manipulate, but we manipulate only the derivative. The original thing which inspired one to make counting sticks, is autonomous and belongs to the creative spirit of the unconscious." von Franz

-Non-number divination Almost all non-number divination techniques are based on some kind of chaotic pattern, which actually is exactly like the modern psychological Rorschach test. One stares at a chaotic pattern and then gets a fantasy, and the complete disorder in the pattern confuses one's conscious mind. We could all be mediums, and all have absolute knowledge, if the bright light of our ego consciousness would not dim it. The unconscious is described by as having three characteristics, or dynamism of the unconscious; *spirit contains a spontaneous psychic principle of movement and activity; *secondly, that it has the quality of freely creating images beyond our sense perception (in a dream one has no sense perception the spirit or the unconscious creates images from within, while the sense perceptions are asleep); *and thirdly, there is an autonomous and sovereign manipulation of those images. e.g dream

-Number divination Dr. von Franz speculates that counting probably originated first with counting aids or reckoning aids (pebbles, stones, sticks..etc), which were a way for human consciousness to get a hold of number – probably the first system to investigate reality developed after non-number divinations such as dreams and instinctual unconscious hunches. For primitive man, they owned as far as they could count and then the rest would be infinity - the godhead. For many tribes the concept of the group or 'many' covers the concept of the infinite. Nowadays, through mathematics and advance technology, we have more means to handle the many, the infinite. However, if man believes that he can handle an infinite series of natural numbers, that is an inflation, an identification with the archetype of the Self, or of the godhead. She compares this to making the same fatal mistake of thinking that a statistical truth is the truth, for we are really only handling an abstract concept and not reality itself, and into that thought then sneaks identification with the godhead in which one secretly believes that they can master nature and find the truth about everything. In the same way, historian, Luian Boia also tries to emphasize that we are tempted to confuse 'existing reality' with the 'virtual reality' of (scientific) models, as they are "…simplified, coherent and synthetic versions of a certain dimension of reality or determined process. They are extremely useful as long as we remember that they are not the real thing: they are methodological fictions"

-The role of the medium

Reason and the continuity of predictive practices. Taming irrational with (western) rational means.

- Western scientific attempts to deal with uncertainty. The phenomenon of prediction, once belonging in the realm of magic and prophecy, still has crucial importance to modern secular society. The sheer popularity is one that reflects how this tradition has not survived, a term that carries connotations of a persistence of old forms, but rather continued, a term which denotes new meanings and new boundaries. For example, prophecy being replaced by political and economic forecasting and science fiction, and weather prediction metamorphosed into weather forecasts issued by government meteorologist.

- Rational prediction as social control. According to Max Weber(Perkins), accurate prediction lay in the heart of rationalism. The principle of development inherent in the process of 'civilization' was driven by the use of calculation as a strategy of social action. What this implies is that prediction as a consequence can be mobilised to cause action in the present. If we consider forecasting through Bruno Latours' sociological view on the scientific discourse as producing its 'facts', then one can say that through the projection our desires, we prepare the environment in which to facilitate it, allowing for our interpretations of the future to become possible. This also reflects Foucault's conception of knowledge as having the power to make itself true. As such, rationalism, another credo of the 19th century reform movements, set the chasm between what was considered a rational way to 'calculate' and the superstitious way (faulty understanding of nature, a definition in the late 18th century ) to predict. Statistical calculations superseded and marginalized older superstitious forecasts about the future. 'The rise of a culture of planning, is, in fact, a form of secular prediction'. The suicide of Robert Fitzroy, the first head of the new governmental department of meteorology in England, was caused by disastrously wrong weather forecasts in the newspapers. As a result, the sensitivity towards such terms as prognostications, prophecy, or forecasts were tainted due to the association of practicing 'superstition'.

- Meteorology as a social process. Occupational futurework () Weather prediction is defining, controlling and presenting uncertainty as confident knowledge. Public prediction as a social process and four elements are necessary:

• 1) gathered data. acquiring empirical data by technological devices and the implications of dependency. machine agency (latour)
• 2) disciplinary theory. models of knowledge are essential to allow for extrapolation of gathered data
• 3) historicized experience. learning from patterns by comparing between past and present data.
• 4) institutional legitimization. how the prediction is validated. on construction of power and knowledge. reflections on discursive practices (foucault, Perkins, latour)

Bibliography

Books:

• The Reform of Time. Magic and Modernity, 2001, Maureen Perkins. Pluto Press, London.
• Visions of the Future. Almanacs, Time and Cultural Change 1775-1870. 1996, Maureen Perkins. Clarendon Press, Oxford
• On Divination and Synchronicity : The Psychology of Meaningful Chance Studies in Jungian Psychology by Marie-Luise von Franz, 1980. Inner City Books, Canada.
• Chapter One: "The work of representation” in Representation: cultural representations and signifying practices by Stuart Hall. 1997, London: Sage.
• Authors of the Storm, Meteorologists and the Culture of Prediction. 2007. Gary Alan Fine. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London

Articles:

• Divination as a Way of Knowing: Embodiment, Visualisation, Narrative, and Interpretation. By Barbara Tedlock. Folklore, Vol. 112, No. 2 (Oct., 2001), pp. 189-197 published by Taylor and Francis, Ltd
• CONSCIOUSNESS, PERCEPTION AND SYNCHRONICITY: SCIENTIFIC LIMITS AND THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ART, 2010. Edward A. Shanken