ABSTRACT

This chapter concerns the logics of how practitioners and their clients use divination in their ongoing involvement with everyday life. It asks philosophical questions about the implications of praxis and suggests answers that philosophers might not expect. It distinguishes two aspects of divinatory usage: that concerned with the present or past, i.e. diagnosis, and that concerned with the future, i.e. prognosis or prediction.

Divinatory practice often contains both aspects, but the distinction helps explain how divination is used. Examples are given from Evans-Pritchard on Zande divination (oracles) and from my ongoing work on Mambila spider divination. Parallels are drawn with ambiguities in financial predictions, and how they are used to justify decisions about the systems they ‘measure’. Social predictions move similarly between styles of usage (exemplified by Merton’s ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’).

The concept of divinatory logics, taken from the sphere of philosophy, is applicable to the (admittedly less rigorously defined) sphere of social interaction, in which what counts as success may be that we have changed the world, so that a statement of fact does not obtain. In a world of counterfactual conditionals, the diviner, not the philosopher, is king.