Security and the incalculable

In this article, I explore a specific relation between mathematics and security calculations. Recalling the confrontations between the mathematician Alan Turing and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in the 1930s, I am interested in the relationship between intuition and ingenuity. During Wittgenst...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Security dialogue 2014-10, Vol.45 (5), p.423-439
Main Author: Amoore, Louise
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Algorithms
Analytics
Calculus
Combinatorial analysis
Conflict
Data security
Decision making
Decision trees
Earthquakes
Foundations
Grammar
Grammars
Intuition
Lectures
Mathematical analysis
Mathematical relations
Mathematics
National security
Numbers
Philosophers
Prediction
Risk
Science
Security
Terrorism
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Summary:In this article, I explore a specific relation between mathematics and security calculations. Recalling the confrontations between the mathematician Alan Turing and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in the 1930s, I am interested in the relationship between intuition and ingenuity. During Wittgenstein’s 1930 lectures on the foundations of mathematics, Turing interjects in order to insist upon the capacity of number: ‘one can make predictions’. Wittgenstein replies that mathematics ‘makes no predictions’, but instead is a form of grammar: ‘taken by itself we shouldn’t know what to do with it; it’s useless. But there is all kind of use for it as part of a calculus’. It is just such a formulation of a calculus or grammar – ‘decision trees’, ‘event trees’, ‘attribute-based algorithms’ – that characterizes contemporary security. As for Turing, the logic comprises ‘two faculties, which we may call intuition and ingenuity’. The intuitive realm of imagination and speculation reaches toward a possible solution, while the ingenuity seeks arrangements of propositions. The advent of ‘rules-based’ and ‘risk-based’ security decisions, then, are always already political because they precisely involve combinatorial possibilities whose arrangement has effects in the world.
ISSN:0967-0106
1460-3640
DOI:10.1177/0967010614539719