First-Year Interdisciplinary Seminar: Predicting the Future

Catalog description

The future is ephemeral, uncertain, and always seems just within reach. Cultures all around the world have developed a dizzying array of tools for divining the future, from reading goat entrails to calculating carbon dioxide concentrations. Prediction spans religious systems, political policy, business trends, and scientific theories. This course examines a variety of practices of prediction from different cultures, historical eras, and academic disciplines. We will assess the kinds of arguments used in prediction, and how evidence is marshaled to know the unknowable. Claims of prediction have high stakes: what we think about the future changes how we act in the present. Readings may include B.F. Skinner, Karl Marx, Nate Silver, the I-Ching, Claudius Ptolemy, Pierre Simon de Laplace, and Max Weber.