Futures of Science (by Veli Virmajoki)

Introduction The scientific realism debate is one of the main debates in the philosophy of science. The issue is old, and sometimes it seems difficult even to tell how to distinguish between realism and antirealism. In a relatively new area of debate, there have been attempts to resolve this stalemate by analyzing whether the positions […]

What should we do in science? This is a question about pursuitworthiness of research programs. The question concerns which research programs we should develop further, i.e. which programs are worthy of pursuit. Analyses of pursuitworthiness are motivated by the need for an ability to respond to possible future changes and demands. These changes and demands […]

1. Introduction In this post, I discuss how time and temporal scales in the study of the future are intertwined with notions of possibility. I point out that the choice and determination of meaningful temporal scales depend on what is possible and how possibilities can be tracked, and not the other way around. In other […]

Here you can find the preprint of the paper, forthcoming in Journal of the Philosophy of History

In order to understand futures research, it is necessary to have different notions of possibility at hand. In what follows, I identify different notions of possibility and explain what I mean by them and why I think they deserve to be identified. In other words, I provide one way to understand different notions of possibility. […]

Later addition: In short, if relation R holds between events E and E* (where E* is later than E), to say that E gains new property at the moment when E* happens is to say that the Earth gains the property of being 384 400 km from the Moon at the location where the Moon is located. […]

Here you can find my paper that has been accepted for publication in European Journal for Philosophy of Science http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/21630/

It is often the case that, in historiography, we have two explanations for some outcome, and we wish to know when one is better than the other. We assume here that both explanations are true in the sense that they explain. Consider the following explanations: E1: Eddington observed gravitational deflection in 1919 because Einstein formulated […]

In this post, I explain how to explore issues in the philosophy of history. Here, I focus on the issue of causal explanation in historiography, the study of the past. I reserve the term “history” to the events, processes, and conditions in the past. The main question of such inquiry is what historiography needs to […]

In philosophy of causation, the notion of proportionality is important. It came to the philosophical literature from Yablo (1992) and has been extensively discussed since then. Woodward (2021, 15-16) characterizes the notion as follows: “Proportionality concerns the extent to which there is a match between the variation in the cause and the variation in the […]

In this post, I claim that focusing on timespans shorter than the traditional ones sheds new light on the study of the future. I argue that a microperspective on time can shed new light on issues related to future and futures research. Here is a summary of the differences between a microperspective and more common […]

In this post, I discuss how to assess the nature of a field of research and its differences from other fields. I focus on futures studies and discuss whether the approaches of futures studies are intellectually unified and whether there is some minimal unity in the field. I use the term “intellectual” to highlight to […]