External

Steve Fraser
Title of Abstract: " America’s Dream Palace: A Cultural History of Wall Street"
This is to be an examination of the many ways Wall Street has made an impact on American culture from the time of the American Revolution through the 1990’s. It will emphasize the Street’s influence on the country’s political culture, its conceptions of equality and democracy, its notions of economic right and wrong, its moral beliefs about work and wealth, and shifting popular attitudes about risk and chance. It will draw on a wide variety of source materials including cartoons and movies, novels and political tracts, journalism and poetry, memoirs and economic treatises.

Rochelle Gurstein
Title of Abstract: "Of Time and Beauty: Varieties of Aesthetic Experience"

Today we find ourselves in the strange predicament of occupying the same physical space with "classic" works of art, which, because of circumstances of time and chance, no longer speak to us. A gap has opened up between past and present and such works now seem stranded on the other side. What did past art lovers see that we no longer see? And what are the repercussions for the continuity and durability of culture if classic works do not transcend their time and place—the dream that has captivated the aesthetic imagination since the eighteenth century. My subject is the history of taste and sensibility—how people have actually experienced and argued about particular works and aesthetic notions at particular moments in time. One of my primary concerns is to reconsider terms central to aesthetics such as the timeless vs. the contingent, the permanent vs. the chance occurrence, the aesthetic vs. the extra-aesthetic: why did they emerge when they did and how have they come to exercise such a powerful hold on contemporary disputes about culture? It is my hope that this history will illuminate why our recent "culture wars" are sterile and interminable, but also why our present moment has come to feel so unbearably weightless and temporally provincial.

Graduate

Steven Holochwost
Title of Abstract: "Chance, Chaos, and Control"

My proposed research project is an interdisciplinary study of the role of chance in music composition and theory, and specifically an investigation into how the laws of chance – fractals – have served as an organizing principle in music. Benoit Mandelbrot, who in the 1970s codified the concept of fractals, asserted a decade later than the music of the composer Charles Wuorinen is organized in an explicitly fractal fashion. Proceeding from Mandelbrot’s assertion, I will examine the overt role of fractals and chance in Wuorinen’s music and the music of his immediate predecessors (Babbit and Schoenberg), as well as the more subtle presence of fractals in Western art music throughout its history. Finally, I will address the paradox of the dual role of chance in 20 th century music, wherein chance was used to by some composers to undermine narrative form, while concurrently being used by other composers to re-invent it.

Bernard Molyneux
Title of Abstract: "A Humean Model of the Human Chance Management System"

Recent researchers have suggested that the degree of belief an agent has in a proposition is to be identified with the subjective probability of that proposition for that agent. Hence an agent who has too strong a belief in both a proposition and its negation has a worldview which violates the laws of probability and the agent is open to exploitation. I want to explore the further possibility that the agent’s occurent beliefs are to be identified with the Humean vividness of the agent’s perceptions. A consequence of this is that an agent can have her perception of chance manipulated by changing the vividness with which she perceives a certain scenario. In this way, it is suggested, that salesman and politicians are able to manipulate their audience’s perception of the chance of a scenario by increasing the vividness and regularity of its description.

Brian Page
Title of Abstract: "The Romance of Dispossession: Paul Auster and Narrative Chance"

Paul Auster’s various poetic, fictional, and cinematic texts participate in a political withdrawal from unifying thought and totalitarianism. Survival guides for those wandering among the Babel of the postmodern condition, they employ philosophical models of language, writing, and ethics in a contemporary re-examination of the American Romantic rhetoric of progress, expansionism, destiny, and freedom. Informed by a range of literary traditions of chance and accident (including DADA, Surrealism, and the OULIPO), Auster’s improvisational fictional zones trace the effects of managerial tyranny in what gets called late, millennial, messianic, or casino capitalism. Not a belated existentialism, Auster’s is a high-wire art of chance that wanders through the structuralist anthropological matrix with an extra something that at lucky turns illuminates the path ahead and opens to a redemptive order. Auster seeks to dispossess the neoliberal emphasis on consumption and preserve an art of hunger, an ethic for a creative confrontation with the other in the communities to come.

Jennifer Pettit
Title of Abstract: "The Messy Closet and the Magic Wand of Beauty: The American Individual and the Uncanny of Chance"

In the 1920s and early 30s, many interior decorators and tastemakers contributed to a widespread campaign to rehabilitate the American home. This popular interest in modernizing and beautifying the home intensified during a period of rapid social, political, and cultural transformation. Revitalizing the home promised to control the course of change, reassert a collapsing social order, preserve the nation’s ideological foundation, and shore up the Individual – the rational, self-determining agent of national progress and preeminence. The subjects of this project endeavored to protect the Individual as well as liberalism’s balance between social harmony and personal liberty by prescribing the "better home’s" design and décor. Yet, in their struggle to enhance the home’s aesthetic appeal and reclaim its status as the foremost site of emotional fulfillment and visceral pleasure, these domestic advisors necessarily acknowledged and even called forth the elements of contingency, indeterminacy, yearning, and perceived irrationality haunting the liberal imagination.

Alexander Zarechnak
Title of Abstract: "Chance and Physics: Does God Play Dice?"

Is our world fundamentally governed by deterministic laws of physics, or is there an irreducible element of chance in nature? This is a famous question connected to the theme, Chance. Many thinkers have cited theories of physics to support their particular answer to this question. My research next year will largely be related to the foundations of quantum mechanics, a theory that famously contains, from an orthodox point of view, an irreducible element of chance. Studying the foundations of quantum mechanics can be regarded as trying to understand quantum mechanics in a way that goes beyond the usual textbook formulation, which is notoriously noncommittal about what is actually going on at the atomic level of reality. The research in this field is considered by most physicists to be philosophy. The questions of "what is actually going on" at the atomic level, and other questions that arise in this connection, have a very philosophical character, and are relevant to the question of whether or not there is an irreducible element of chance in nature. This, in turn, has obvious implications for the role that chance plays in our worldview.

Faculty

Lee Clarke
Title of Abstract: "Chance and Worst Cases: Living and Dying in an Age of Probabilism"

In the modern day probabilistic thinking has come to be equated with reason itself. But worst case thinking can compliment probabilistic thinking. Academic and political argument about risk, danger, and catastrophe is almost always cast in a probabilistic tone: it’s irrational to worry about airplane crashes because the chance of being in one is low, people shouldn’t smoke because it increases the chances of contracting dread disease, the chance of getting cancer from toxic chemicals is vanishingly small. Thinking in terms of worst cases emphasizes consequences over chances: what if terrorists commander four airplanes at the same time, what happens if the plane goes down, how many might die if the chemical plant explodes? I am presently writing – and propose to finish during a CCA fellowship – a book called Worst Cases. A key theme of the book is that the equation of probabilism with reason misses other ways of reasoning. Worst Cases is about the social organization of the worst-case imagination. Notions of "the worst" permit investigation of how imagination is shaped by cultural influences and institutional contexts. Designations of the worst involve both prospective and retrospective social constructions. As such they tell us about people’s orientations toward the past and the future, as well as toward self, others, and society.

Ann Fabian
Title of Abstract: "Measuring the Dead"

My project explores efforts by craniologists to pin down with certainty the extent of the range of variation in human cranial capacity. The chapter is part of a larger study on the collection, display, and representation of human remains. My work next year will focus on the play of chance and certainty in the collection of statistics on human skulls. I am particularly interested in the dilemmas of measurers who were constantly frustrated in their efforts to eliminate chance, uncertainty, and indeterminacy from their measurements. That death was a certainty, they knew for sure. But they could not get death’s heads to lend certainty to the puzzling variety they saw in the human species.

Michael Geselowitz
Title of Abstract: "Tinkerers Ever to Chance: Engineers, Control, and the Rise of Probabalistic"

I propose to re-examine the standard historical narratives of the history of computing and of the large control systems that have come to be largely (if not entirely) on computers in the fresh light of the topic of the seminar – Chance – a topic missing from traditional approaches. The whiggish tale tends to equate science and technology, and to view techno scientific progress as the story of increasing control over Chance. I hope to illuminate where historians of computing may have missed the impact of the changing nature of probabilistic thinking in other areas of society on the trajectory of the technologies that they study. At the same time, by interacting with the cutting edge research of the other seminar participants, I hope to become aware, and to make them aware, that the changing technological base of society presented both new challenges and new tools that had a profound on society’s relationship with Chance.

Jochen Hellbeck
Title of Abstract: "Life and Fate: Chance in Soviet and German Narratives of Stalingrad"

I propose a comparative investigation of Soviet Stalinist and Nazi German conceptions of chance in a particular setting: the battle of Stalingrad. Chance loomed large in the illiberal formulations of modernity that the Stalinist and the Nazi regimes stood for. As part of its attempt to regulate social and individual life according to rational and purposeful standards, the Soviet regime discarded chance as an autonomous force. The Nazi regime operated without the historical certainties that inspired the Soviet system and underpinned its claim to a vanguard role. Nazi ideological formulations were shaped by rupture and catastrophe, rooted in the experience of the First World War. A combined sense of danger and opportunity fueled the Nazi movement. The field of possibility that opened up in war and destruction represented Germany’s destiny, which demanded to be seized. In contrast to the Soviet regime, the Nazi regime extolled chance as a positive value. Yet with respect to their individual followers, both regimes were alike in that they pressed for necessitarian notions of citizenship and made mobilization the centerpiece of their social policies.

Stalingrad was an ideological battleground of the first order, embraced by both political regimes as the essence for which they fought. Amidst the extreme conditions of the battle and the perennial specter of death, combatants in Stalingrad were certain to think about the vagaries of life, about chance and fate, luck and bad luck, about what it was worth living and dying for. How did personal narratives of life and fate relate to official representations of the battle and model soldier behavior? Where and how did official and vernacular narratives intersect? Was the necessitarianism and determinism inherent in Nazi/Stalinist ideological formulations embraced or rejected by soldiers locked in the deadly standoff? How were personal crises connected to issues of loss of control, and how were such crises worked out, on both sides of the front? How did soldiers on the Soviet and the German side respond differently to challenges that seemed to be identical in many ways? In what ways were the different responses also a function of different conceptions of chance inherent in Nazi and Stalinist cosmologies?

Xun Liu
Title of Abstract: "How Daoists Chance It: Inner Alchemic Pursuits in the Late Imperial China"

I propose to explore the history of the notions of destiny and chance, and their relationship to the Daoist self-cultivation and healing practices in late imperium of China. My approach is historical, focusing on how Daoist inner alchemists like Cao Heng (fl. 1623) conceived of the notions of destiny and chance, how their constructions were influenced by historical conditions, and how their pursuits of self-cultivation came to define and reshape the notions of destiny and chance. This study will contribute toward our understanding of the general Chinese attitudes toward fate and luck.

Barry Loewer
Title of Abstract: "Chance in Physics and Philosophy"

Many of the most important scientific theories we have contain laws that predict and explain events by specifying their chances. But despite the centrality and importance of chance it is far from clear exactly what chances are and what determines the truth-values of statements that attribute them. My project will be an investigation of attempts to clarify the metaphysics and epistemology of objective chance as it appears in physics and the special sciences. I am especially interested in the nature of the probabilities that occur in quantum mechanics and in statistical mechanics. There are well known and much discussed problems understanding the chances that each of these theories posit. This is especially true in quantum theory whose interpretation more than eighty years after its formulation is still a matter of controversy. Among the central issues concerning the nature of chances are the relations between chances and laws of nature, the compatibility (or incompatibility) of objective chances with determinism, how we can know or have reason to believe claims about chances, and why chances with and beliefs about chances should be a guide to rational action. There are also interesting relations between chances, causation, counterfactuals, and the metaphysics of free will. My proposal is to continue developing an account of the meaning and ontology of chance that advances our understanding of these issues.

Paul McLean
Title of Abstract: "The Threat of Fortuna and the Management of Chance in Renaissance Florence"

This project will provide a detailed examination of how fortuna pervaded popular consciousness in Renaissance Florence – a society in so many ways (political, economic, artistic, psychological) critical to the emergence of modernity. I will examine political and philosophical writings, such as those of Machiavelli and Alberti, but will focus my attention mainly on patronage letters – letters sent by ordinary Florentines to their rich and influential confreres, requesting favors such as political office, economic assistance, tax relief, or personal recommendations. By studying these I expect to obtain a richer sense of how Florentines construed chance in various spheres of life, and how they crafted strategies for the management of chance across these different spheres. These management strategies include the standardization of gestures and other practices, the development of individual attributes to tame chance, and the erection and maintenance of social networks as insurance against unexpected setbacks.

Barry Sopher
Title of Abstract: "Social Learning in Decision Making Under Uncertainty"

In many of the decisions we make when faced with uncertainty we rely on the advice of others. Although some advice we get is from professional experts, most of the time we make our decisions relying only on the relatively uninformed word-of-mouth advice we get from our friends or neighbors. In this project I will conduct experimental work concentrating on decision making under uncertainty under the influence of advice. My past research on this topic has shown that advice is a very powerful force in shaping the decisions that people make and tends to push those decisions in the direction of the predictions of the rational theory. I will examine both individual decision making under uncertainty, where the "state of the world" is stochastic, and interactive strategic decision making ("games"), where, in addition, the actions that will be taken by other players in the game are stochastic.