A delicious discovery. I missed something I was quite committed to attending because I was enthralled by this.

I’ve always loved MacIntyre (since undergrad exposure to After Virtue led to me writing a typically overwrought undergraduate thesis and (in the spirit of “A man’s work is noting but this slow trek to rediscover, thorugh the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened” Albert Camus quoted on the cover art for Scott IV), I seem to continually rediscover him in different aspects.

And this is just a reminder of what I, of all, people should know – that’s there’s nothing that’s really that new.

Here, with the simple thesis that you cannot predict in the social sphere in the way you might in the physical sphere, Alasdair Macintyre covers scientific approaches as applied to prediction in the social space, complexity, the Battle of Gettysburg, (un)predictability, retrospective sense-making, degrees of freedom and competition, pattern, nebulosity, framing, Gödel‘s theorem (albert incorrectly stated), and more. Touching on OODA loop like thinking, also multiplicity (or lack) of context. Almost like chaos theory. Seven years before Godel, Escher, Bach.. A tad different from the slightly-Hegelian worldview of his later years (and his early Marxim) but yeah… well worth a listen or a read, I’d say

Alasdair MacIntyre – the Sources of Unpredictability in Human Affairs (1972)

Alasdair MacIntyre – the Sources of Unpredictability in Human Affairs (1972) – YouTube

Predictability and Explanation in the Social Sciences – MacIntyre (1972)

(pdf) https://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1122&context=phil_ex

Blog (2012): https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2012/07/22/macintyre-on-social-science-and-fortuna/

New video link: