From Extispicy to the Big Data Prophet: Prediction, Application and the Structure of Deciding

This article argues that prediction, in any of its historical substrates, is an operation upon the present that takes the form of a statement about the future. The demonstration is comparative: five practices separated by millennia — Mesopotamian extispicy, the prophetism of Israel, the calculated astrology of medieval Europe, the Enlightenment projection of a plannable future, and contemporary algorithmic prediction — are submitted to the same fourfold test: which sign speaks for tomorrow, who is authorised to read it, which present decision it releases, and what the practice does with it when it is disproved. The series displays the permanence of the relation between prediction and decision, and the capacity of interpretive practice to absorb disconfirmation without returning the decision to the uncertainty from which it arose, despite the complete transformation of signs, interpreters and techniques. Beneath this permanence lies a condition: the moment of the act is fixed by the world, and what would settle the question — the outcome — exists only after the act, whence the asymmetry between partial ground and integral authorship. Drawing on the Gadamerian thesis of application, it is argued that practical incidence is not a self-sufficient property of the sign; its disappearance at the moment of the case therefore means not elimination but the anteriority or sedimentation of the determination — with the consequence that execution may produce the act without reopening the situated question: the case ceases to be encountered and comes to be instantiated, the plea loses its addressee at the moment it would matter, and authorship is removed from the scene without being transferred.

DIETRICH, Pablo; DIETRICH, Maurília Gabriela da Silva. From Extispicy to the Big Data Prophet: Prediction, Application and the Structure of Deciding. In: Law and Society in Focus: Contemporary Studies in Legal Sciences. São José dos Pinhais: Seven Editora, 2026. DOI: 10.56238/sevened2026.035-012.