The Greatest Mystery of Futures Studies

ABSTRACT

Futures studies has long lived with a puzzle: every domain the field investigates is already studied by some special science. Three familiar replies—that futures studies extracts insights, takes a longer view, or includes lay perspectives—each capture something real but do not, on closer inspection, individuate the field at the level of its object. A proper object, we argue, is the possibility space , a structured field that is, in essence, constitutively modal, multi‐domain, anchored in contested presents, and reflexively shaped by accounts of itself. Futures studies and the special sciences are, probably, doing complementary cognitive labor rather than competing.