The self-fulfilling prophecy and the sciences of man.

In my blog one week ago I presented the example of the global warming deniers – or the “climate deniers” as they are often called – as an instance of the Pinocchio paradox. It’s a pragmatic instance of a pragmatic paradox. However, in a sense, global warming denying (namely that it has been caused by the behaviour of men) can also be seen as an instance of a self-defeating prophecy. You’ll know that a self-defeating prophecy is a prophecy that prevents itself from happening. For example, your daughter spends a lot of time on playing football, so you warns her: “If you go on in this way and don’t spend more time on preparing your exam, you’ll not pass it.” It makes your daughter think about it and from then on she gives more time to her study and doesn’t go so often to her club anymore, and she passes her exam. What climate deniers do is a bit like this, but then the other way round: They have been warned that, if they go on ignoring the effect of their behaviour on global warming, the global warming that they denied will happen. So the reverse of what they say that will happen, will happen. It’s a pragmatic reversal of a pragmatic prophecy, which is quite paradoxical. But that’s how things often happen.

Once we talk about the self-defeating prophecy, it’s only one step to the self-fulfilling prophecy, the phenomenon that a prophecy becomes true just because it has been made. In my example it can also happen that your daughter realizes that she must make a choice. She is a good football player and she sees already a career as a professional before her eyes. Or she can opt for an academic career. She decides to choose for a sports career. As a consequence she doesn’t pass her exam. By her decision, your daughter makes that the prophecy comes true.

When I thought of examples of the self-fulfilling prophecy, immediately Oedipus popped up in my mind. It wasn’t a really original idea, for a bit browsing on the Internet learned me that the Oedipus myth is often mentioned as an instance of this prophecy. In case you don’t know it, here it is, very briefly (which I copied from the Wikipedia for practical reasons): Warned that his child would one day kill him, Laius abandoned his newborn son Oedipus to die, but Oedipus was found and raised by others, and thus in ignorance of his true origins. When he grew up, Oedipus was warned that he would kill his father and marry his mother. Believing his foster parents were his real parents, he left his home and travelled to Greece, eventually reaching the city where his biological parents lived. There, he got into a fight with a stranger, his real father, killed him and married his widow, Oedipus’ real mother. Never try to escape your fate, is what the Greek want to say here. In this blog the relevance of this story is how Oedipus fulfilled a prophecy that he tried to escape just by his behaviour.

Because of this Greek myth, Karl R. Popper called the self-fulfilling prophecy the “Oedipus effect”, a term which he introduces in The Poverty of Historicism (although he had used the idea already in The Open Society and its Enemies). In his intellectual autobiography Unended Quest he says about it (pp. 121-2 in my 1980 edition): “One of the ideas I had discussed in The Poverty was the influence of a prediction upon the event predicted. I had called this the ‘Oedipus effect’, because the oracle played a most important role in the sequence of events which led to the fulfilment of its prophecy. … For a time I thought that the existence of the Oedipus effect distinguished the social from the natural sciences. But in biology, too—even in molecular biology—expectations often play a role in bringing about what has been expected.” It’s a pity that Popper doesn’t say which cases in biology he had in mind, for the essence of the distinction between the social sciences and the natural sciences is not simply in the way as Popper interprets the self-fulfilling prophecy. As far as I can remember, Karl-Otto Apel has made this clear, but I couldn’t find the passage where he does, but this is how I see it. In the “Oedipus interpretation” of the self-fulfilling prophecy it is so that Oedipus knows about the prophecy and just by his try to escape it, it is fulfilled. But actually it is not Oedipus himself who fulfils the prophecy, but that the prophecy comes true happens to him. Not knowing that his foster parents were not his real parents, he could not intentionally realize or prevent the fulfilment of the prophecy. However, in my example of the father who warns his daughter that she’ll not pass her exam, if she goes on to spend so much time on playing football, the daughter has a real choice and she takes a conscious decision. This conscious decision makes the case of the daughter different from Oedipus’ case. It’s true that Oedipus consciously left his foster parents, consciously killed a stranger and consciously married the stranger’s widow, but he didn’t consciously kill his father and consciously marry his mother, for had he known who they really were, he wouldn’t have killed the stranger and married his widow. So, it’s not the Oedipus effect, and the self-fulfilling prophecy in general, that distinguishes the social from the natural sciences, but it is the possibility to influence predicted effects in a conscious way that makes the social sciences different from the natural sciences. And this phenomenon doesn’t make only the social sciences different from the natural sciences but it holds for all sciences of man.