temporalités Revue de Sciences Sociales et Humaines Rédaction : Laboratoire Printemps – UMR 8085 47 boulevard Vauban 78047 Guyancourt cedex email : temporalites@revues.org Call for papers for the 24th issue of Temporalités (2016/2) “Temporalities and serendipity” Coordinated by Ghislaine Gallenga (AMU-IDEMEC) and Gilles Raveneau (UPO-LESC) Horace Walpole, drawing on a version written by Chevalier de Mailly (2011 [1719]) of a Persian tale, the travels of the Trois princes de Sérendip, introduced the word “serendipity” in 1754, a neologism refering to “the faculty for discovering things one is not in quest of, solely through accident and sagacity” (Catellin, 2014: 25). By doing so, he opens a space for ambiguity (accident versus sagacity) which has played an important role in the history of the concept and in the way it is understood. Following a period of abeyance, serendipity, from the 1930’s, in the United States, traveled from literature to the scientific vocabulary, however with a stress on accident at the expense of sagacity. Within the scientific world, Walter B. Cannon, a physiologist, made the concept popular by linking it to scientific intuition (1965 [1945]). Later on, the idea of serendipity (therefore at the confluence of literature and science) showed up in the process of institutionalisation of various kinds of scientific knowledge and practice implementing the interpretation of evidence, in different fields such as paleontology, medicine, psychoanalysis or semiotics (Catellin, 2014: 67). In France, the word came into use in psychology in 1968 and from there entered general dictionaries in 2011, only after Robert K. Merton’s researched the idea of a “serendipity pattern” (1945, elaborated upon in the posthumous work published with Elinor G. Barber, 2004 [1958]). Merton describes serendipity as the “discovery, by chance or sagacity, of valid results which were not searched for” (1997: 43). Once well established in social science, the concept travels through all fields of knowledge and spreads out through different social or professional groups of people. Each of which will grant it with new connotations, altering its initial definition until serendipity becomes synonymous with the ideas of accidental discovery, happy finding, coincidence… The development of internet and of new information technologies has led researchers to work on the possibility of programming serendipity. However, serendipity cannot be reduced to a simple reading of reality, for, as Bourdieu, Chamboredon and Passeron (1983 [1968]: 29) have emphasized: “by insisting on stressing the importance of accident in the process of scientific discovery, one takes the risk of reviving a most naïve vision of invention, summarized by the paradigm of Newton’s apple”. Thus, enters what Michael Polanyi calls implicit knowledge (2009 [1966]), which questions the positivist ideal of pure objectivity in the making of scientific knowledge. Because, as rightfully noted by Sylvie Catellin, “the finding occurs when an unexpected fact or an unanticipated anomaly are correctly interpreted” (2014: 133). Thus, the correct interpretation draws upon the implicit knowledge. Serendipity combines reflexivity and the realization of reflexivity. Also, it embraces the freedom which enables to take into account the unexpected within a research plan, and to redirect observations and change interpretation accordingly. For a few years now, in France, scientific literature about serendipity has mostly stressed strategic issues, in the form of the serendipian moment, which at some point along the way encourages a researcher to redirect his research. Published in 2008, directed by Pek Van Andel et Danièle Bourcier (2013), De la sérendipité dans la science, la technique, l’art et le droit. Leçons de l’inattendu has helped making this concept popular in France. Sciences Humaines, the journal, has even tipped it “word of the year 2009”. In this work, the authors set up complex typologies entirely dedicated to the outlining of the concept (positive serendipity, negative serendipity, pseudo-serendipity etc.). After which, they publish the