The Greatest Mystery of Futures Studies

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.