Abstract
Social predictions (as well as social classifications, regulations, and criteria), due to their inner characteristic of being published, may have an influence on their own subject matter and, in return, on themselves. On the basis of this assumption, in the context of a discontinuous debate, the consolidated distinction between self-fulfillingness and self-defeatingness has been developed, distinguishing between predictions that come true thanks to their dissemination and others that, for the same dissemination, become false. The aim of the essay is, primarily, to investigate the rationale underlying this distinction. In an innovative manner, it will be stated that self-fulfillingness always rests on some causal unawareness, because the definition of the situation – originally inadequate – does not take place as a consequence of the subject’s beliefs. In fact, “inadequate” means that it would not come true if it were not for the subject’s behavior, which originates from fear, hope, misconception, and social fatalism, not from an adequate understanding of the situation; in this regard, it is no coincidence that self-fulfilling prophecies always have a commonsense background. Conversely, a self-defeating outcome invariably involves voluntariness and careful deliberation. The prediction fails as a consequence of the renewed intentions of the subjects, who modify some aspects of their behavior in response to the new awareness, preventing the prediction from happening. This new awareness is caused by the prediction itself and is related to its validity: if the subjects would not have been familiar with the prediction, this latter would not have been undermined – in this sense, it is a suicidal prophecy. From this perspective, this essay shows how the self-defeating process, far from being something to avoid, is instead something to aspire to: and this has been so since the original Merton’s definition of the self-fulfilling prophecy, which purpose was precisely to falsify itself, in order to break the vicious cycle of self-fulfillingness.
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Notes
- 1.
Not to mention the fact that the American Sociological Association (as well as regional and subdisciplinary US-based sociological societies), for a number of years now, regularly organizes (within their annual meetings) mini-conferences and panels specifically dedicated to the issue of public sociology.
- 2.
As has been argued, Burawoy’s manifesto is indeed also “a strategy for getting our foot in the door that has been closed to most sociologists, [a strategy for] thinking about why we are left out, and what can be done about our marginality” (Turner 2007: 264).
- 3.
In fact, in the “Methodological Note” that prefaces their masterpiece, it is stated – in plain terms – that “from the method of the [sociological] study itself all practical considerations must be excluded if we want the results to be valid,” supporting so an approach to scientific investigation “which is quite free from any dependence on practice” (Thomas and Znaniecki 1920: 7).
- 4.
Which are tasks that can be viewed as necessarily related to social forecasting: “the characteristic problems of the social sciences arise only out of our wish to know the unintended consequences […]. We wish to foresee not only the direct consequences but also these unwanted indirect consequences” (Popper 1962: 164, italics added).
- 5.
In other words: “concepts and theories invented by social scientists can, in turn, be fed back into the social world. They become constituting elements of that very subject matter they were coined to characterize; by that token, they alter the context of their application” (Weinert 2009: 228).
- 6.
In that respect, in fact, this debate is perfectly in keeping with the Neo-Kantian’s (Dilthey, Windelband, Rickert, etc.) concern about which parallels and discrepancies can be found between geisteswissenschaften (“moral sciences”) and naturwissenschaften (“natural sciences”) – namely, a primarily philosophical concern, and not yet a strictly sociological one.
- 7.
It is not even a coincidence that Merton’s essay has drawn on examples that invariably involved the perpetuation of racial stereotypes and out-groups segregation, whereby self-fulfilling prophecies end up constituting an authentic “vicious circle” (Merton 1948: 208), a kind of “self-hypnosis” (ibid: 200).
- 8.
All of this, however, leaves open a well-known methodological/experimental problem, the question of whether an antecedent (supposedly causal) condition is also a necessary one, namely, an essential element of the causal chain (for an authoritative reference, see Campbell and Stanley 1963). In this sense, in self-defeating prophecies, it would have to be determined – on a case-by-case basis – whether the spreading of the prophecy can be considered a necessary condition (or at least a significant one) for the change of the forecasted trend/effect.
- 9.
It is just seemingly paradoxical given that Merton was particularly familiar with the concept of “self-exemplification” that refers to “an idea (concept, hypothesis, or theory) that applies to its own content or is exemplified by its own history” (Merton and Barber 2004: 231). It is not that surprising, therefore, that when Merton wrote of self-fulfilling prophecies, he would actually prevent self-fulfilling prophecies from happening, with what was a full-fledged self-defeating analysis.
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Sabetta, L. (2019). Self-Defeating Prophecies: When Sociology Really Matters. In: Poli, R., Valerio, M. (eds) Anticipation, Agency and Complexity. Anticipation Science, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03623-2_4
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