Individual man

It is, I claim, nonsense to say that it does not matter which individual man acted as the nucleus for the change. It is precisely this that makes history unpredictable into the future.

Gregory Bateson

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Unpredictable process

We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own necessary construction.

Stephen Jay Gould

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Another way

Everybody has to be reminded that there's another way to be. Another more mysterious, unpredictable way to be that's not necessarily based upon contrivances.

Stanley Crouch

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Like Colombus setting sail

This is largely the methodology I've used throughout my career - that is, starting with a question as to what might be the properties of a set of compounds that could be invented which were unusual and unpredictable. Many times I've felt a bit like Columbus setting sail.

Donald Cram

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Unpredictable and anticipation

We cannot predict the specifics of disasters, but we can anticipate them.

Hence, businesses take measures to protect themselves against hurricanes in Miami and earthquakes in Tokyo. The valid assumption, based on prior experience, is that, given enough time, bad things will happen.

But, what of events that are so infrequent and unpredictable that it would be uneconomic, if not foolhardy, to take prior action against them? The likelihood of two airplanes demolishing two of the largest structures in the world is so small as to be indiscernible, but it did happen. No one could have predicted that (with the exception of the terrorists, but they were not talking), but the impacts could have been foreseen.

The impacts, in this case, are meant to be those related to business. Sadly for those who died, no degree of predictability would have sufficed. But businesses, both those in the Twin Towers and those nearby, should have been able to predict destruction of premises and the simultaneous unavailability of premises, transportation and telecommunications. Companies could have planned for the impacts, if not the causes of such an event.

So the question to ask is not how probable an event is, but rather what the response would be to the failure of any of the necessary conditions for running a business, such as access to and use of buildings, computer systems or vital records, availability of people, ability to communicate or travel, preservation of health and safety, etc. We may not know what will make a failure of these things occur, but a company is derelict in not recognizing, prioritizing and mobilizing in the face of predictable surprises.

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Unexpected discoveries

We are indebted to the English author Horace Walpole for the word serendipity, which he coined in one of the 3,000 or more letters on which his literary reputation primarily rests.

In a letter of January 28, 1754, Walpole says that "this discovery, indeed, is almost of that kind which I call Serendipity, a very expressive word." Walpole formed the word on an old name for Sri Lanka, Serendip. He explained that this name was part of the title of "a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip: as their highnesses traveled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of...."


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Links you don't know

Within text, some links highlight a key phrase, others a verb, and many prefer the very literal, "for such-and-such an article go here," with the "here" being the blue, underlined, linking word.

Still others prefer that links live within graphic elements: a picture, a drawing, a logo. Sometimes you don't know where a link is until you roll your mouse over the spot.


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Problem of induction

Observing an event once does not predict it will occur again in the future.

This remains true regardless of the number of observations one adds to the pile. Or, as Taleb, recapitulating David Hume, has it: the observation of even a million white swans does not justify the statement "all swans are white." There is no way to know that somewhere out there a black swan is not hiding, disproving the rule and nullifying our "knowledge" of swans. The problem of induction tells us that we cannot really learn from our experiences. It makes knowledge very problematic, if not impossible. And yet, humans do behave -almost without exception- as though they believe that experience teaches us lessons. This is forgivable; there is no better path to knowledge. But before proceeding, one must account for the limits that the problem of induction places on our claims to knowledge.

And humans seem, at every turn, to lack this critical self-awareness.

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Predictable spot

In refusing to predict the inventive accommodation that allows for communication, proponents of paralogic hermeneutics do accommodate the nebulous nature of hypertextual movement.

When I surf the web, I rarely end in a predictable spot.

Therefore, I find myself paying closer attention to my path and the connections between seemingly disparate web texts. This attention to the connections often helps me to recognize patterns that would otherwise go unnoticed. More traditional texts, in attempting to control "drift", may try to keep readers moving along a certain track, but if an individual traces her own path toward understanding a concept, there are inevitably twists and turns that create a road to knowledge that no other mind would, or could re-create.

While the challenge of hypertextual drift may prove too much for some literary theories, paralogy and, in particular, paralogic hermeneutics seems well equipped to deal with the phenomenon. There are differences between the old way and the new, but Kent shows that a theory which informs paper-based technology helps to accurately describe the reality of matching author, text, and reader in the world of hypertext as well.


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Unpredictable Hypertext

If we consider the act of writing a hypertextual document from a rhetorical perspective, the author faces the classic issue of definition of purpose, but must align the new potential for contextualization or decontextualization due to the capabilities of hypertext technology.

The ways to move through data are essentially similar to what they have always been, but the speed and ease at which connections or digressions may occur, cause renewed consideration of the intent of the author and the power the author is able to exercise in trying to communicate a particular conclusion to an audience by using traditional forms of hierarchical thought.

In fact, the word "digression" which means to depart from, often carries the connotation of an unfortunate move to a less important topic. I prefer to use the term sidegression, particularly when referring to hypertextual moves, because they often provide important contextual clues or may bring to the reader information which is pertinent in light of that reader's path. If an author cannot always predict what group of information will be sufficient for a particular reader to "get" a concept, then the tendency toward hierarchical arrangement of information can be relaxed. After all, is one part of the information really more important than another? It is most likely that an author, in the course of exploring a topic, takes many paths, u-turns, sidegressions, to come to a conclusion. In an effort to facilitate the journey for others, an author (authority) tries to organize information so that a reader can reach the same destination more easily. But, it is likely that despite the efforts of the author, the reader must still negotiate their own perfectly imperfect path.
Exploration of a topic on the Web clearly demonstrates the perfectly imperfect paths that readers take. When teaching freshman composition, I have in-class exercises where I tell my students to locate information about a topic by surfing the Web. Rarely do two students make the same series of moves, but often they end up at the same sites regardless of their level of surfing experience.

Some hypertext theorists take an extreme view of the notion that readers should be expected to move by example or paradigm. A group of theorists calling themselves only "The Critical Art Ensemble" argue,

the tyranny of paradigms may have some useful consequences (such as greater efficiency within the paradigm), but the repressive costs to the individual (excluding other modes of thinking and reducing the possibility of invention) are too high. Rather than being led by sequences of signs, one should instead drift through them, choosing the interpretation best suited to the social conditions of a given situation . 8

Again, paralogic hermeneutics is remarkably prepared to agree. Kent states that the piece of communication (icon, sentence, utterance) is forever separated from the consequence of its existence. Kent revisits Derrida on this subject:

Our inability to reduce every use of language to one hermeneutic strategy come about because of the iterability of the sign or sentence; as Derrida phrases it, 'the sign possesses the characteristic of being readable even if the moment of its production is irrevocably lost and even if I do not know what its alleged author-scriptor consciously intended to say at the moment he wrote it, i.e., abandoned it to its essential drift'.

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