Coincidence: A word with two meanings for explaining and predicting the future

Abstract

Connecting the critical realist morphogenetic model to insights made by Nicholas Rescher, this paper argues that our predictions are always subject to chance and contingency but nevertheless ineluctably useful for both practical and scientific inquiry. Contingency results from the causal openness of the world, including the causal openness of our own decision-making. On the other hand, as Rescher notes, human interaction would fail without a degree of stability, which makes the predictions of morphostatic relations if not lawlike at least predictable in a practical sense. Nor is it just habit that makes for morphostasis. Human agents strive reflectively to produce in morphostatic ways the human goods they have created by their interaction. And beyond individual actors, there is, from the critical realist point of view, the combined effects of structure and culture inclining at least in the short-term to reliably predictable if not lawlike outcomes. With that background, the paper reflects on the dual role of coincidence in social theory, on the one hand signalling contingency and the other on what, according to the active causal mechanisms, generally co-occur.