She outlines her intention concisely in the first pages of her book when she writes that her essay starts from a historical observation: "Probability theory and the novel emerged almost simultaneously. Based on the works of Pascal and Fermat, probability theory is thought to have been born in the second half of the seventeenth century, while Madame de Lafayette's 1678 novel La Princesse des Clèves is considered to be the origin of a variant tradition of fiction" (7). According to Esposito, this chronological proximity cannot be a "mere coincidence"; rather, both "fiction and probability" express entirely "new conceptions of reality" (7). In both cases, it becomes clear that "in the 17th century a historically new relationship to reality" emerged (8).
The emergence of "fictional literature" and probability theory, dated by Esposito to the second half of the seventeenth century, is reconstructed by her as a conceptual attempt to solve a historical crisis situation : the "uncertainty that became palpable in the age of the Baroque" (19) and the "general unrest that shook the age of the Baroque" (27) demand new patterns of orientation and forms of structuring:
In the 17th century, fierce disputes were fought over different concepts of reality. The century only gradually freed itself from the turmoil, the dilemmas, the agonies, puzzles and experiments caused by the breaking of the relationship between appearance and substance, which had not been questioned before. [...] Then, at the end of the century, some answers crystallize [...]. Only slowly, in the apparent chaos of arbitrariness and boundless contingency, one made out criteria of regularities that allowed orientation in the thicket of uncertainty. These included fictional literature and probability theory, which can be seen as related in this respect. (10f.)
The "availability of fictional worlds" makes it possible to "distance oneself from the real world, to look at it 'from the outside' and to contrast it with alternatives" (18). "Fictional literature" enables contingency reflection through contingency production. In this way, "fictional literature" (18) becomes a "mirror in which society reflects its own contingency" (56).
Criticism
The functional determination of the social orientation services of "fictional literature" that Esposito develops from a systems-theoretical perspective refers exclusively to the state of literary-theoretical discussion reached by Hans Blumenberg and Hans Robert Jauß, which certainly does not adequately reflect the state of research that has been achieved in literary studies in the meantime. Furthermore, the plausibilization on the basis of historical evidence, which is necessary due to the high level of abstraction of this functional determination, is missing. In her essay, Esposito largely succeeds in avoiding the impositions of argumentative speech. On the whole, cultural-historical justifications for the fact that "fictional literature" has been able to provide "orientation in the thicket of uncertainty" since the second half of the 17th century are dispensed with. Occasionally, the essay makes sweeping references such as "one thinks only of Shakespeare" (16), "We are thinking here of La Princesse des Clèves, but also of the works of Daniel Defoe or of Richardson's Pamela" (17, note 10), or "one thinks only of Pascal" (40); but neither is it explained here exactly what the reader is supposed to think of, nor are the passages named that the author had in mind. Literary historical assessments are at best on the level of nonspecific statements such as "Even at the beginning of the era of the 'bourgeois novel,' Walter Scott allowed himself to use historical facts to create fictions, and the historical novel has always worked very well" (77).
It is not immediately clear which concept of probability Esposito uses, even though she places the fictional character of the probability calculus at the center of her essay. The two main interpretations of the concept of probability are commonly called the "subjective" and the "objective". They understand "probability" either as (a) "subjective" hypothesis probability, i.e., as the degree of plausibility of epistemic statements (in the sense of different degrees of agreeableness of knowledge claims), or as (b) "objective" event probability in the meaning of the relative frequency (representable by a fraction) of occurrences of events. However, the concept of probability finds application in quite different contexts of discussion beyond this, e.g., in rhetorical and poetological contexts. A short list of common uses of "probability" would include, in addition to "subjective" hypothesis probability and "objective" event probability: (c) a rhetorical concept of probability, for which "probability" is the credibility of a statement in the sense of the confirmation of the statement by generally accepted and authoritatively supported opinions; (d) a poetological concept of probability, for which "probability" is the correspondence of a literary representation to our (scientific, anthropological, historical, etc.) knowledge of the world; (e) a poetic concept of probability, for which "probability" is the correspondence of a literary representation to our (scientific, anthropological, historical, etc.) knowledge of the world. ) world knowledge; (e) the decision-theoretical concept of probability, for which "probability" in the context of a theory of rational action is a degree of reasonable subjective conviction.
Esposito's essay is uninfluenced by more recent debates on the concept of probability and skips the relevant research literature of the last 20 years. She does not compensate for this lack of information by originality, since her argumentation is oriented over long stretches to reference authors who are introduced as authorities (e.g., by referring to the fact that they were awarded a Nobel Prize, cf. 96, 98) and used as argumentators.4 Esposito's reconstruction of probability theory, which is based primarily on the research of the 1970s and 1980s, is one-sidedly oriented to the subjectivist interpretation of probability theory by the Italian Bruno de Finetti. There is no adequate discussion of complementary or competing interpretations of probability theory.
The subjectivist interpretation of probability theory is then associated with Niklas Luhmann's concept of probability. In his oeuvre on systems theory, Luhmann repeatedly uses the concept of probability in a distinctive way that is primarily interested in forms of improbability and culminates in formulations about the "paradox of the probability of the improbable. "5 Although the compatibility of the conceptions of probability of their two reference authors De Finetti and Luhmann is not obvious, there are no attempts in Esposito to argue for the plausibility of this connection.
Wie sich im Laufe der Lektüre herausstellt, folgt Espositos Parallelisierung von »fiktionaler Literatur« und Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung einer polemischen Intention:
While in the realm of fiction the awareness of the unreality of fictional reality [...] is widespread, this awareness seems to be much less pronounced with regard to probability. One knows that, like Don Quixote, one should not confuse the world of fictions with the real world, and this is what we want to teach our children. But if someone says that something is objectively probable, we are unlikely to think him naive, even though the status of this objective probability is quite similar in our eyes. (71)
The parallelization of fiction and probabilism aims at a critique of probability theory, though Esposito often does not distinguish her critique of probability theory from her critique of the application of probability theory in diverse social contexts. Esposito's notion of "probabilistic fiction" (86) points out that the results of probability theory are as fictional as the fictional world constructed in a novel. Economic theory, in particular, would be subject to a "probabilistic fiction" if it did not recognize that "statistics and stochastic[] procedures" are, like fictional texts, "themselves forms of fiction" (121). According to Esposito, the "fictionality" of the results of probability theory, which is largely obscured in the economic and social sciences, leads economists in particular to confuse the world of probabilistic "fictions" with the real world and leads to an overestimation of the probability calculus and to exaggerated expectations about the predictability and plannability of social developments.
Starting with the distinction between "present future" and "future present," to which an entire chapter is devoted in Die Fiktion der wahrscheinlichen Realität (the fiction of probable reality) (50-67), Esposito notes that projected future and realized future need not coincide: "one can never be sure that the [...] predictions of the probability calculus will actually come to pass" (35). The proverb concurs: Sometimes things turn out differently than one thinks. But why is this fact an argument for the fictional character of the probability calculus? The everyday examples Esposito employs in this context do not make it any easier for the reader to follow her reasoning about the fictional character of probability theory: "A hungry diner who orders half a chicken in a restaurant and then gets an empty plate while his neighbor is served a whole one is likely to be annoyed, even though he could tell himself that, statistically speaking, they are both sitting in front of half a chicken" (10). Of course, if the probability of getting a chicken at Esposito's restaurant has a value of 0.5, this does not mean that the restaurant patron should expect to get half a chicken on his next visit: If an objective probability of 0.5 is meant, then he has no good reason to be sure; and if a subjective probability is meant, then "0.5" means nothing more than that the diner gives the arrival of his broiler a fifty-fifty chance.
Conclusion
At the end of her essay, Esposito summarizes her argument:
The argument that ran through this essay like a red thread takes up semantic material [sic] again that had already been formulated in the 17th and 18th centuries with regard to reality, probability, and fiction. [...] These considerations concerned both the reality status of explicit fiction, that is, of novels or fiction in general, which had to emancipate itself from the semantic environment of lies and hallucination in a protracted process, and the reality fiction of probability theory as the first attempt to develop a science of uncertainty. (120)
The common thread that promised to link fictional literature and probability theory cannot be discerned in Esposito's essay.
These linking performances are mostly supposed to be guaranteed by a type of argumentation that believes to be able to convert historical coincidences into functional equivalences without further ado: formulations like "Is it a mere coincidence..." (7), "Presumably it was not a coincidence..." (22), "It was no coincidence that..." (25) can at best insinuate the plausibility of such a conversion.
Unfortunately, the common genesis of fictional literature and probability theory, which was supposed to be embedded in the framework of an "investigation of the early modern concept of reality" (13), is not told.
-- Dr. Carlos Spoerhase, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, Institut für Neuere Deutsche Literatur und Medien
~
SPOERHASE, Carlos, 2009. Eine verpasste Chance [Elena Esposito, Die Fiktion der wahrscheinlichen Realität, 2007.]. JLTonline Reviews. Online. 5 March 2009. No. 0. [Accessed 30 January 2023]. Available from: http://www.jltonline.de/index.php/reviews/article/view/21