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vii The French edition of Foresight and Knowledge was published in 1944
viii While parts of the book have appeared in English, it is only now, half a century later, that a translation of the book in its entirety is available.
p.7-8 from a window I watch two cars moving in perpendicular directions; these cars are at the same distance from an intersection and their speeds seem to be almost equal... I anticipate the collision, first as threatening, then as inescapable... We do not say the careless drivers asked for their misfortune... we may be held responsible for accidents that we should have been able to predict.
[JLJ - The Holy Grail of game theory is to come up with a way to diagnose the potential of our position, against both the known or predictably forseeable, and the unknown or the accidental emergence of an effect which initially appeared to be of no critical concern.]
p.14 Practical thought wants to know what we have to do in order to attain our ends, what we should have done in order not to fail of our ends, and what we must do in the future in order to stay along the path that leads to our ends.
[JLJ - Yes, but practical thought cannot begin without first executing a scheme for reducing what appears to be to what probably is via tricks that usually work, and cannot manufacture such tricks out of nothing but thin air. It appears that practical thought must begin with an experienced repertoire of tricks that often work, and a plan to reconfigure (using adaptive capacity) as the world and reality change due to the continued impact of our tricks that often work in confronting other tricks that often work.]
p.17 What then is the origin of the being that comes into existence? ...we must conclude that its origin... is a possibility of being, a being in potency, a potency distinct from nonentity and distinct from actuality.
[JLJ - ...of more practical interest is the origin of consciousness... but who says that things have to have origins...? Beings are simply what are produced as output by a process which produces beings. Perhaps we should argue about the origin of the process that produces beings, rather than the origin of the thing/being produced by the process.]
p.17 consider the shape that clay receives under the hands of the potter. Where does this shape come from? Neither from the shape that clay possessed before, nor from nothingness, but from an ability to change shape, from an ability to receive the shape actually imposed by the artisan... The being that is this or that in potency alone, absolutely speaking, is not this or that. It is able to become this or that, no more.
p.18 The being that becomes, the being that moves from the possibility of being such and such to the act of being such and such, undergoes this transition by virtue of an agent distinct from itself. Whatever is in motion is moved by something else.
[JLJ - ...unless 'whatever' decides to move itself?]
p.18 the origin of the being that comes into existence... it comes from being in potency... Actual being, indeed, is more of a being than being in potency.
[JLJ - As above comment from p.17, beings are simply what are produced as output by a process which produces beings. Perhaps we should argue about the origin of the process that produces beings, rather than the origin of the thing/being produced by the process.]
p.19 It is obviously impossible to achieve any kind of work unless one bears in mind an idea or pattern, no matter how vague, of the work to be achieved... Let us consider an action at the time when it emanates from the agent and produces its effect... how would it come from the agent if it were not, in the agent, pre-existent to action? ...Operations are the expression of pre-existing natures.
p.20 If becoming is real, if the passage of time brings genuine novelty, if the future is not reducible to the past and the past to an everlasting present, there must be in the present (loaded with the past) a tendency to engender the future, a tendency that perpetually drives the present into the past. The theory of finality implies no more than this
p.26 Between the essential tendency of a thing to cause such and such a proper effect and the essence of that thing, there is only a virtual distinction... between the essence of a certain thing and its tendency to bring about such and such an effect there is real identity, when we see that this essence and this tendency are but two distinct aspects of one and the same thing.
p.28 the transition from the "simple" to the "very great number" brings about the substitution of statistical laws for laws of causal description. Now, the integration of chance is what basically characterizes statistical law.
p.29 The point of departure for Aristotle is none other than the Heraclitean universe in perpetual change.
p.30 in the line of discovery... the apparent order - that is the observable regularity - leads to the intelligible order. Correspondingly, in the descending and synthetic way, which is that of established science, the intelligible order - that is, the necessary relations of abstract possibilities - accounts for the apparent order.
p.44 the possibility of predicting is qualified by two reservations: a chance event cannot be safely predicted unless the nonunified system of the initial data from which it results is exhaustivelyknown; moreover, interference by a factor foreign to the system of the initial data can invalidate even a well-grounded prediction.
p.51 To explain is to identify. If we are concerned with change, to explain will consist in showing that underneath appearances which involve novelty there is something which remains identical.
[JLJ - To explain is to offer an opinion, as to why things are the way they are, perhaps backed by the results of an experiment or theory, perhaps by offering a myth or long-told story, or perhaps backed by philosophical argument.]
p.52 In Saint Thomas's words: "...the large number and variety of causes stem from the order of divine providence and control. But, granted this variety of causes, one of them must at times run into another cause and be impeded, or assisted, by it in the production of its effect. Now, from the concurrence of two or more causes it is possible for some chance event to occur, and thus an unintended end come about due to this causal concurrence... there are some fortuitous and chance events among things."
[JLJ - ...all the more reason to have an adaptive capacity in the ready, for the unexpected, when it occurrs...]
p.53 [Bossuet] "...What is coincidence to our uncertain foresight, is concerted design to a higher foresight, that is, to the eternal foresight which encompasses all causes and all effects in a single plan... it is only because we fail to understand the whole design that we see coincidence [JLJ - chance] or strangeness in particular events."
p.54 Because potency is unintelligible in itself and is intelligible only in relation to act, we will always be tempted to reduce potency to a kind of act, to an act enclosed, "basically identical" to what it will be when a process more apparent than real will have unfolded.
p.58 We must therefore either dismiss all general formulae, or say: weighty bodies tend to fall.
[JLJ - Elsewhere https://johnljerz.com/superduper/tlxdownloadsiteWEBSITEII/id524.html (Rescher, Complexity, 1998) this has been expressed as a quasi-law.]
p.58 Mill says: "These facts are correctly indicated by the expression tendency. All laws of causation, in consequence of their liability to be counteracted, require to be stated in words affirmative of tendencies only, and not of actual results."
p.61 to foresee or foreknow is to see or recognize a thing in its cause... But, on the other hand, this multitude of factors is beyond the comprehension of any created mind, so that with regard to a finite intellect the future contingents of which we are speaking are not in themselves foreseeable with certainty.
p.62 "Concerning future contingents, it should be said that considered in themselves, there cannot be scientific knowledge of them, but on the conditions that they are considered in their cause, there can be scientific knowledge about them, according as some sciences recognize the causes as being certain inclinations to specific effects." Saint Thomas Aquinas, Commentary in De memoria et reminiscentia, lect. 1.
p.65 [Alfred North Whitehead] "Every philosophy is tinged with the colouring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its trains of reasoning. The Greek view of nature, at least that cosmology transmitted from them to later ages, was essentially dramatic..."
[JLJ - All philosophy is an intelligently constructed guess, based on experience, the times, what has been said before, and what has been read and pondered.]
Science and Systematic Knowledge, p.67-73
p.67 Sorel remarked that research about nature can be directed toward two quite different ends. Sometimes it is intended to predict phenomena with an approximation sufficient for the needs of action; sometimes it is intended to "connect scientific abstractions by laws independent of any possible conditions of real appearance." The second approach is that of rational science; as to the first, it is characteristic of a discipline, quite far removed from the genuine scientific type, which Sorel designates by the felicitous term systematic knowledge.
p.68 Science, to the extent to which it conforms to its ideal, considers lawful processes in an isolated state, and the statements that it utters concerning these processes sheltered from chance have only a strongly conditional predictive value... As to knowing whether in fact some disturbing influence will intervene in such a way as to modify the results, whether the eventuality of such a disturbance will be frequent or rare, the theoretical formulation has nothing to say at all. Concrete prediction is outside the realm of pure science.
p.68-69 "Physicists," he [Sorel] writes, "are quite far from being able to furnish constructors with the data which are necessary for them to take into account the phenomena occurring in the equilibrium of real bodies; they succeed only in treating very special cases of elasticity and preoccupy themselves with materials prepared only with their experiments in mind, materials having a much simpler structure than that of materials used in practice."
p.69 in the complex conditions of everyday life... it is generally impossible, or exceedingly burdensome, to establish an exact count of the factors at stake. Then the mode of scientific prediction gives way to the mode of systematic prediction... as a consequence of the eventuality of encounters between lawful processes, whose initial formulations cannot be exhaustively established.
p.69 All in all, we have three modes of prediction: [JLJ - numbering added for readability]
- abstract scientific prediction bearing on an isolated factor...
- concrete scientific prediction bearing on an ensemble of factors... which would be absolutely exact in the extreme case in which the factors of the system would be exhaustively defined...
- systematic prediction bearing on an ensemble, certain factors of which do not allow a scientific definition and can be included only in a practical solution.
p.70 Sorel [JLJ - D'Aristote a Marx, p. 99] analyzes the procedures of systematic knowledge in passages that constitute a remarkable contribution to the theory of practical knowledge. While the scientific solution is related to the development of a lawful line... systematic knowledge states the solutions that include at once the lawful processes, calculable encounters, and disturbances that cannot be predicted in a determinate way. Systematic knowledge allows us to definitely predict, or at least to reduce the chances of failure to a minimum, thanks to an enclosure sufficiently broad that the least predictable disturbances cannot compromise the result sought. The dimensions of this enclosure and of the field left for unpredictable disturbances are a matter of practical sense... rather than of scientific understanding. "It is observable... that many circumstances cannot be scientifically defined... The practical solution should not be a mathematical solution... Practical sense consists, above all, in the appreciation of the characteristics of enclosure; it is a sense that can be only acquired by a long and meticulous experience of things."
[JLJ - Yet there is no practical sense in the exploitation of a new technology for business advantage... IBM in the early days, Apple, Amazon, Walmart, all rose to the top of their respective fields by being first to market a new and usable technology or system of product transport. Their approach consisted of a guess, a vision of a successful product and product lines, and the application of investment and marketing, and a consuming public who agreed and paid for their product. Focus begins with an enclosure, a determination of what in the universe at this moment deserves our attention, and what does not and therefore can wait, and a passion, which either causes the mission to succeed or fail.]
p.74-75 a sign is that which makes something other than itself present to knowledge. Nothing is the sign of itself. Every sign is essentially related to the object signified, which is the measure of the sign.
Sometimes the sign is a thing that is made known to the mind before making it know the object that the sign signifies. It is in this way that smoke is the sign of fire, that the flag is the sign of the country... Let us call them instrumental signs... Words belong to the order of instrumental signs.
p.75-76 [Aristotle]... words are the signs of ideas which are themselves signs of things.
p.76 Every positive scientist is on the wrong track when he uses a term whose meaning cannot be reduced to observable data. Every philosopher is on the wrong track who uses a term whose meaning cannot be reduced to being
[JLJ - So... if we can extend the concept of playing a complex game of strategy to some form of being, the proper approach to playing such a game is one of philosophy, rather than of science. The player of a complex game of strategy has freely - at least for the present moment - chosen to substitute the reality of the position in the game for the reality of the life world, and so must use an experienced system that works, much as in life itself, in order to 'go on'. The player also needs a philosophy of being in this game-world - which can be anywhere from a relaxed attitude of casual amusement and partial-effort, to that of a fierce competitor spirit seeking win-at-all-costs. Of course we can at times be scientific in our pursuit of such a system for playing the game - we will seek rules of thumb which can be used again and again in typical situations, and which resemble 'tricks' that simply 'work.']
p.81 Logical deduction "makes us aware of all that we have implicitly asserted - on the basis of conventions regarding the use of language."
p.85 The pragmatic conception of the truth remains and Hahn adheres to it: "the truth of a proposition [consists] in its confirmation." A statement is true insofar as the prognostications that it implies are confirmed.
[JLJ - Yawn. In my philosophy there are no truths, merely truth claims. You can confirm it all you want, it is still a truth claim. Or why not simply call it an apparent truth, or a tentative truth, and move on to other things?]
p.92 Socrates's dictum remains always true: the great superiority of the learned over the ignorant man is that the learned one knows that he does not know
p.101 is it not the case that the object of the intellect is being?
[JLJ - The object of the intellect ought to be to contribute to the management of our predicament, or in other words, to come up with ideas for how to 'go on' in both the short and long term, since it appears at the present moment that one is a living being, of a certain sex, age and with an expected lifespan, in a predicament of sorts and with certain potentials, underway in the world, executing existing plans of some kind, certain commitments and investments having been made, and there being a certain situation in front of us that is probably generally understood and unfolding in a generally predictable way, and that we ought to do something now according to the demands of the situation, which might in fact begin with a pondering, a scheming, or an execution of an ethical, practical and effective trick that usually works, and which likely and therefore, can/ought to be done again and again.]
p.106 The environment of our daily experience is pervaded with intelligible and practical meanings. We completely turn our attention to these meanings because we are intelligent and in a hurry... our sensory environment is a current that never stops and never repeats itself... The inherently sensible, the object of pure sensation, is itself a complex reality.
[JLJ - Is it not instead that our attention is drawn to certain cues in our environment, cues which are related to essential features of 'going on,' and from these attention saccades we construct meaning, we construct/improvise a story to ourselves which explains what we see feel and hear, and from this story we adjust our plans to 'go on' within our current predicament.]
p.114 Now, there is no explanation without a preliminary analysis that takes apart contingent connections and sorts out relations of essential causality which alone are explanatory.
[JLJ - Yes, but this must usually be done as part of a scheme constructed in order to 'go on' within our current predicament. Why do anything? Our predicament - which is usually complicated - often suggests to our intellect that certain common situations require a preliminary analysis in order to 'explain' what is happening, and in order to make/manage/adjust effective plans to 'go on.']
p.117 There is nothing astonishing about the fact that the man of action generally shows no interest in the problems studied in the psychology of the traditional school; they are theoretical problems, not his problems.
p.118 Unlike what occurs in physics, chemistry, and biology, psychological facts are for the most part familiar to common sense.
[JLJ - Yes, but open to interpretation.]
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