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The case against divination: an examination of Cicero's De Divinatione

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2013

Nicholas Denyer
Nicholas Denyer
Affiliation:
Trinity College, Cambridge
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Ancient divination had something of the status of modern science. Diviners, like scientists, were expected to offer public comment on all manner of subjects, from strange meteorological phenomena to proposals for military campaigns, from shooting stars to Star Wars. In both cases this public responsibility is based upon a supposed expertise in prediction. And the arguments of those ancient philosophers who attempted to justify such a status for divination run in some ways remarkably parallel to those of modern philosophers who have attempted to justify such a status for science. Thus we are told both by Stoics and by modern Scientific Realists that the world forms a single and unitary physical system, with nothing outside it to prevent the course of events from unfolding in accordance with the adamantine regularities which are the laws whereby nature operates. This determinism, and its consequence that the entire future of the world is already prefigured in the current state of things, makes it possible for us now to tell what will happen later. And that possibility is realised. Scientific predictions, we are told, may not be uniformly correct, but they are correct too often for that to be due to chance. The predictions of diviners, one must likewise concede, are not uniformly correct: nonnumquam ea quae praedicta sunt minus eueniunt (Cicero, De Divinatione, 1.24).

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society (Second Series) , Volume 31 , 1985 , pp. 1 - 10
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s). Published online by Cambridge University Press 1985

References

NOTES

1. See e.g. Smart, J. J. C., Philosophy and scientific realism (1963)Google Scholar.

2. Boethus, and Posidonius, (Div. 1.13, 2.47Google Scholar) may be partial exceptions to this, if they did indeed attempt to offer meteorological explanations for the predictive reliability of certain omens. Nevertheless, we have no reason to believe that they would have thought scientific explanations available for every apparent omen, nor any reason to doubt that they would have thought such explanations for every apparent omen tantamount to explaining divination away.

3. There is a similar belief among some modern scientific realists that the failure of determinism in quantum mechanics requires a modification of our customary logic. See e.g. Putnam, Hilary, Philosophical Papers I (1979) 174–197Google Scholar.

4. Grice, H. P., ‘Meaning’, Philosophical Review 66 (1957) 377–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Grice's ideas have been much elaborated in Schiffer, Stephen R., Meaning (1972)Google Scholar. Blackburn, Simon, Spreading the Word (1984) 110–18Google Scholar has shown how to cut through many of the complexities found in other developments of Grice's ideas. In this paper I intentionally avoid all such complications, since what I have to say can stand with appropriate modifications however Grice's insight may eventually be spelled out.

5. See Sorabji, Richard, ‘Causation, laws and necessity’, in Schofield, Malcolm and others (eds.), Doubt and Dogmatism (1980) 250–282Google Scholar.

6. On the adjustment, typically mutual, of the expectations of speakers and their audiences, see Bennett, Jonathan, Linguistic Behaviour (1976) 176–202Google Scholar.

7. This paper derives from talks I have given at the Institute of Classical Studies, London, the University of Western Australia, Perth, and the Philological Society, Cambridge. Kind audiences on each of the three occasions have been responsible for many improvements.