Futures of Science (by Veli Virmajoki)

When it comes to the future trajectory of academic institutions, a noteworthy development has become identifiable: the growing tendency of universities towards increased specialization in specific fields. This post aims to analyze the potential ramifications of such a trend by drawing on concepts within the philosophy of science, specifically, the idea of localism. The objective […]

Futures research, despite being a dedicated field with unique goals, methods, and assumptions, carries a mystery. This specialized discipline delves into potential scenarios across all domains of life, every single one of which is also studied by another research field. Hence, the existence of futures research as an independent field poses a significant mystery: Why […]

Introduction Scientific realism, one of the main positions in the philosophy of science, is a stance towards the ontology of scientific knowledge. Philosophers such as Stathis Psillos articulate it as the view that the world described by our best scientific theories is a largely accurate representation of a mind-independent reality. Scientific realism stands on three […]

The Black-Scholes model provides a nice case study of performativity in financial markets. Performativity, as a notion, refers to how economic models and theories can shape the markets they aim to describe, influencing behavior and, in turn, the dynamics of the market itself. This post will discuss the rise and fall of the Black-Scholes model, […]

1. Introduction “Had Eddington lost his faith in humanity, the (amount of) gravitational deflection would not have been observed”. This statement is about events that did not happen. The antecedent is against the facts – it is counterfactual. The whole statement is a counterfactual conditional that describes how things would have gone, had something gone […]

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. […]