Anticipation and the Normative Stance

Abstract

The connection between anticipation and norms is that anticipation has causal power to change social norms and social norms have causal power in framing anticipation. In the stabilization or transformation of social norms, anticipation can be seen as a causal mechanism. I take further Rosen’s characterizations of anticipatory systems as having “almost an ethical character” to suggest that in the domain of the social, ethics, as values inherent in inferential judgments, act on the disposition to anticipate. The agent’s disposition to anticipate creates dynamic activity guided by the modeling relations between agent and environment. Modeling relations are intersubjectively formed. Judgments about desirable or undesirable effects of environmental change, relative to the agent (i.e., relative to values), lead to anticipatory action. Following a critical realist methodology (Bhaskar, Archer, Elder-Vass, Sawyer), the causal effects of such individual actions within a group tend to stabilize and amplify emergent change or extinguish short-lived (ephemeral) emergent properties. Modeling relations are emergent. Anticipation is a key framing activity in social emergence and therefore in human self-emancipation.