Prediction is never neutral but serves the predictor’s programme

Evidence

But it is absurd to think of a purely “objective” prediction. Anybody who makes a prediction has in fact a “programme” for whose victory he is working, and his prediction is precisely an element contributing to that victory. This does not mean that prediction need always be arbitrary and gratuitous, or simply tendentious. Indeed one might say that only to the extent to which the objective aspect of prediction is linked to a programme does it acquire its objectivity: 1. because strong passions are necessary to sharpen the intellect and help make intuition more penetrating; 2. because reality is a product of the application of human will to the society of things (the machine-operator’s to his machine); therefore if one excludes all voluntarist elements, or if it is only other people’s wills whose intervention one reckons as an objective element in the general interplay of forces, one mutilates reality itself. Only the man who wills something strongly can identify the elements which are necessary to the realisation of his will. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 723

Categorization

• XREF: Directly prefigures the critique that ‘objective’ social science on Islamophobia posits a false impartial spectator — prediction and knowledge are always interested. — connects to: Hegemony does not turn definer inputs into predictable outputs