Social prediction depends on social rationality, not just method
Evidence
Only when society was. more rational would it be possible for the social scientist to foretell the future. Vico’s insight into the ability of man to understand his history because he made it had yet to be realized, because men do not make their history in the current era. The chances for scientific prediction were thus determined as much socially as methodologically. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 300
Categorization
- XREF: Vico’s understanding-history-by-making-it idea connects to Horkheimer and to standpoint theory debates. — connects to: Expecting rationality yields better predictions of behavior than expecting irrationality.; Big data correlations alone cannot deliver causal knowledge to prediction systems — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 930; Social categories like class and race may be replaced by behavior-based demographic prediction — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1363