The Art of Conjecture

Bertrand de Jouvenel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138534315
• eBook ISBN: 9781351305662
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Commissions of experts regularly meet to reply to questions such as: What will be the population of the country, or even of our planet, in ten, fifteen or twenty-five years? In what proportion will production have increased, what modifications will its composition and utilizations have undergone? The attraction of efforts to forecast the future continues. That is a fact. How does it proceed? That is a problem, one on which de Jouvenel focuses on in this book.

The Art of Conjecture clearly explains what the "study of the future" can mean. De Jouvenel emphasizes the logical and political problems of forecasting and discusses methods in economics, sociology, and political science by which the future can be studied. More importantly, he discusses the fallacies to which the "study of the future" is peculiarly likely to give rise. The author argues that it is natural and necessary for the population to have visions of the future. Without this, he states, we would only be able to set one opinion of the future against another. If the origins and meanings of these predictions remained obscure, only the event could decide among the opinions.

If any man can be said to have created the serious "study of the future" in our time, it is Bertrand de Jouvenel. Futuribles, a periodical he created, continues to represent a major turning point in contemporary social science. Jouvenel aimed to show how "the art of conjecture" could inform prudential judgment and allow citizens and statesmen to detect troubles before they arise.

1

On the Nature of the Future

In Latin the ways of speaking about the past and the future present an asymmetry that is illuminating and useful: past events or situations are facta and future ones are futura. These past and future participles come from different verbs—facere (to do or to make) and esse (to be). Facere is used only to describe past events or situations: they alone are “done,” accomplished, completed, shaped. Esse is used for future events or situations. Everything that has not yet come about is opposed, in Latin, to what is. We can see this same opposition in the contraries perfectum and infectum. Something that is not an accomplished fact is designated much more clearly in Latin by the expression infectum (non-fact). An infectum becomes fact only if and when the event or situation occurs.

It seems to me that the Latin expressions help to contrast what is accomplished or achieved and has taken unalterable form with that which is in progress, still fluid, and capable of ending or being completed in various different ways.

There is a difference between the nature of the past and that of the future. It should hardly be necessary to emphasize that I am referring here to the difference that is perceived by the mind of an active human being.

With regard to the past, man can exert his will only in vain; his liberty is void, his power nonexistent. I could say: “I want to be a former student of the École Polytechnique”—but this is utterly absurd. The fact is that I did not go to the École Polytechnique, and nothing can change this fact. Imagine that I am a tyrant and that my authority is sufficient to have the school records changed so that they show me as a member of the class of 1922. This would merely record a falsehood, not a fact. The fact that I did not go to the École Polytechnique cannot be changed. The fundamental impossibility of changing the past accounts for those very important moral sentiments—regret and remorse.

But if the past is the domain of facts over which I have no power, it is also the domain of knowable facts. If I claim to be a graduate of the École Polytechnique, evidence is easily assembled to prove me a liar. It is not always so easy to determine whether alleged facts are true or false, but we always consider that they are in principle verifiable. The impatience and irritation we feel when faced with conflicting testimony bearing on the same fact are signs of our deep conviction that this factum is knowable. And in such a situation we do not hesitate to say that one of the witnesses who presented testimony must have been lying or mistaken, even though we may not know which one was actually at fault.

Now let us suppose that I say: “I will go to Australia.” Put into the past tense, my assertion would be a falsehood: it is not true that I have gone to Australia. But by using the future tense I have placed my assertion outside the domain of recorded, attested, and verifiable facta; I have projected my assertion beyond the domain of the true and the false, and this “beyond” constitutes another domain, where I can place images that do not correspond to any historical reality. An image of this kind is not a mere fantasy if I have the will and feel I have the capacity to bring about at some later time a state of affairs that corresponds to the image. The image represents a possibility because of my power to validate it in this way, and represents a project because of my will to do so.

Can an assertion of this kind be true or false? As a statement of intention it can, but it cannot as a statement of fact. I am telling an untruth if, when speaking, I have no intention of going to Australia; I am telling the truth if I have such an intention. (We shall see that the truth or falsity of statements of intention can be weighed—it is a matter of degree—and in this respect statements of intention differ from statements of fact, which are simply true or false.) On the other hand, my presence in Australia is not a factum, and so the question of the truth or falsity of a statement of fact does not arise.

Now let us put ourselves in the position of someone who is waiting for me to visit him in Australia. For this Australian my arrival is a futurum attended by a measure of uncertainty until I actually come. If he attaches some definite probability to the event, the judgment by which he does so is a personal one. What he arrives at is a “subjective probability.” Thus if two Australian friends of mine discuss this future event with one another, each may attach a very different degree of likelihood to the same futurum.

For man in his role as an active agent the future is a field of liberty and power, but for man in his role as a cognizant being the future is a field of uncertainty. It is a field of liberty because I am free to conceive that something which does not now exist will exist in the future; it is a field of power because I have some power to validate my conception (though, naturally, not all conceptions indiscriminately!). And indeed the future is our only field of power, for we can act only on the future. Our awareness of this capacity to act suggests the notion of “a domain in which one can act.”

On the other hand, the future is a field of uncertainty. What will be cannot be attested to and verified in the same way as an accomplished fact. When I say: “I saw Peter on my way here,” I am testifying, but when I say: “I shall see Peter on my way back,” I am making a supposition. If we are faced with two conflicting opinions regarding a past event, we try to determine which one is true; if we are faced with two conflicting opinions regarding a future event, we try to determine which one is more plausible. For, in the latter case, we have no way of arriving at certainty.

It seems, then, that the expression “knowledge of the future” is a contradiction in terms. Strictly speaking, only facta can be known; we can have positive knowledge only of the past.

On the other hand, the only “useful knowledge” we have relates to the future. A man wishing to display his practical turn of mind readily says: “I am only interested in facts,” although quite the opposite is the case. If his aim is to get to New York, the time at which a plane left yesterday is of small concern to him; what interests him is the takeoff time this evening (a futurum). Similarly, if he wants to see somebody in New York, the fact that this person was in his office yesterday hardly matters to him; what interests him is whether this person will be in his office tomorrow. Our man lives in a world of futura rather than a world of facta.

The real fact collector is at the opposite pole from the man of action. One erudite scholar might spend years establishing the facts about the assassination of Louis, duc d’Orléans, in 1407, while another might devote his time to tracing Napoleon’s itinerary day by day. Here are facta that could have no effect on our judgments concerning the future and on our present decisions.

For this reason these facta do not concern our practical man. If he is interested in certain facta, it is only because he uses them in presuming a futurum. For example, he may be worried about the departure time of his plane. Tell him that this flight has left on time for a long succession of days, and he will be reassured. He regards these facta as a guarantee of the futurum, which is all that matters to him. Now let us suppose that this man contemplates buying a business that holds no interest for him except as an investment. If the accounts show that sales have increased steadily every year, he will derive from these figures a strong presumption that this steady increase will be maintained in future sales.

The case of the business concern differs from that of the airplane in two immediately apparent ways: first, a much larger stretch of time is considered; next, and more particularly, the investor counts on the continuance of the same change, whereas the traveler counts on a simple repetition of the same phenomenon.

In both cases, however, the only use of the known facta is as raw material out of which the mind makes estimates of futura. The unceasing transformation of facta into futura by summary processes in the mind is part of our daily life, and thus the undertaking of conscious and systematic forecasting is simply an attempt to effect improvements in a natural activity of the mind.

2

A Need of Our Species

The scrupulous student of fact brands assertions about the future as intellectual “adventurism”: they are, he claims, the business of charlatans, into whose company the sober-minded scholar should not venture. Another, sterner critic admits that we must, perforce, divert some of our attention from intelligible essences to things as they happen to be, but proscribes speculation about their future aspects as too great a diversion. A third complains that our appreciation of the present moment is impaired when we cast our mind to the uncertainties ahead. In turn, a moralist warns against a concern with the future, lest the clear and immediate prescriptions of duty be supplanted by selfish calculations.

No doubt these objections have some foundation; but the representation of future changes is nonetheless a necessary factor in our activity. Because of our natural responsibilities as men, we need foresight—a view stretching, more or less deep and wide, into time. We are curious about the future because we have cares (or cures, in the now-obsolete meaning of the Latin curae).

One of the striking features of the biological world, in all its diversity, is that the perpetuation of a species becomes a more and more intricate problem the higher the species ranks on the ladder of beings. For simple organisms, the role of the adult is confined to the abundant emission of germ cells. Carried by water, air, or the blood of a parasitized organism, a sufficient proportion of the cells encounter the right conditions and grow up autonomously. Superior animals lack this capacity for autonomous development: they are born helpless and dependent—more so if they are called to a greater perfection—and their period of maturation is long in proportion to the excellence of the species.

Thus the efforts that parents must devote to rearing their offspring increase in intensity and duration right up the ladder of beings. And since physicists have introduced us to the notion of entropy—a tendency toward the dissolution of forms—we should not find it strange that more care is needed to ensure the complete development of a more highly structured, and therefore more improbable, organism. Without the development of the moral virtue of devotion to offspring, there would be no perpetuation of highly organized animals. For better protection of the young, a coalition of parents is required: this coalition can be dissolved if the first group of offspring reaches maturity before a second group is born. The coalition needs to be permanent if the time between births is shorter than the period of maturation. Thus, among our remote ancestors, there must have been a state of “sociality,” which preceded and prepared our own “humanity.” If moral attitudes—not only of devotion to children, but also of parental solidarity—had not developed, we would not have assumed the form of men. But these affective dispositions would have been ineffectual without the intellectual virtue of foresight.

Many human groups must have perished through improvidence, and without any doubt, the men who have increased, multiplied, and peopled the earth are the prudent ones.¹

Custom—a Guarantee of Foreseeability

Empirical psychologists represent the learning process as the progressive storing of procedures associated with favorable results. This is sufficient to explain why anthropological findings indicate that life in primitive societies is so largely ruled by custom. In a perilous world it is a fine achievement for a man if he lives to an uncommon old age, and having manifested their own prudence, the elders are now qualified to teach others the skills of prudence. What they inculcate are the well-tried procedures whose use should be continued. They pass on the recipes (“tradition” properly means “passing on”) and recommend “routines”—the trodden paths.

Routines help to save us efforts of foresight: if I have an operational recipe, guaranteed to yield certain results, all I need do is follow the instructions faithfully. Who would be so foolish as to waste time trying out ways of cooking an egg or solving a quadratic equation? It is scarcely necessary to point out that the vast majority of our actions—at present, just as in the distant past—conform to recipes. Accordingly, it should not be difficult for us to imagine a society tied even more closely to recipes. At school, when we failed to do a sum, the teacher would say that we had not done it the right way, meaning the way we had been shown; similarly, we can assume that, in the past, failure and misfortune were readily attributed to departures from or breaches of the “right” practices.

Since we cannot live except in a social group, nothing matters more to us than our relations with other men, and nothing is more important to foresee than the way other men will behave. The more their conduct is governed by custom and conforms to routines, the easier it is to foresee. A social order based on custom provides the individual with optimal guarantees that his human environment is foreseeable. It is hardly surprising that the maintenance of a familiar social order has always been regarded as a Common Good whose preservation was essential.

Hence, aberrations of conduct were condemned, and change was feared and regarded as a corruption. The idea of the security afforded by the routine and familiar was so deeply ingrained that even extreme reformers appealed to this notion, saying they asked for no more than a return to the “good old ways.” Thus, in calling for the redistribution of land holdings, Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus claimed, with some foundation, that his reform was designed to bring back a society of peasants who owned their own land and lived off their own crops. A rather fanciful theme dominated the long press campaign that helped to prepare the French Revolution: the advocacy of a return to the Frankish custom of the champ de mars or the champ de mai—assemblies of warriors at which decisions were taken concerning affairs of state. All this pseudoarcheology went to mobilize something that had never been, in the service of a leap into the unknown. And surely everyone knows that the Reformation, for all its radical innovations, was conceived and presented as a restoration of the practices of the early Church. The idea of “moving with the times” would have seemed abhorrent to the reformers, who wished, on the contrary, to “correct the abuses introduced over the centuries.” The examples I have adduced are sufficiently striking and it seems unnecessary to cite any more. They all bear witness to the power of that which has already been seen, tried, and experienced.

What a contrast with the spirit of our times! When de Gaulle wished to condemn the French regime in Algeria, he found no stronger way of branding it than Algérie de papa. Compare this with the references of the Romans to the “ways of our fathers” (mos maiorum). The attachment to the past which was once a sign of virtue and wisdom is now a sign of vice and folly: nowadays our positive value is change. This intellectual revolution is without precedent, and we owe to this new attitude an extraordinary progress in all the practical arts, which are no longer fettered by procedures handed down from generation to generation. But about human relations, our uncertainty is now greater than it had been in the past.

Foresight Becomes More Necessary

Our positive knowledge of our social environment consists of knowledge of the present state of affairs (or, more precisely, it is a composite image of more or less recent past states of affairs). It would remain valid in its entirety, and for always, if nothing ever changed, but this is impossible. However, the fewer changes we anticipate, the more we can continue to rely on our knowledge for the future. If society tends on the whole to conserve the present state of affairs, our present knowledge has a high chance of being valid in the future. On the other hand, the future validity of our knowledge becomes increasingly doubtful as the mood of society inclines toward change and the changes promise to be more rapid.

We are in the position of a tourist who is planning a journey with the help of a guidebook that is already out of date. Under these conditions, it would be imprud...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 On the Nature of the Future
• 2 A Need of Our Species
• 3 Terminology
• Part I Personal Destiny
• Part II Of Predictions
• Part III Ways of Conceiving the Future
• Part IV Quantitative Predictions
• Part V Toward the Surmising Forum
• INDEX