Relationships with our futures:
anticipation, post normality and
scenarios
Ted Fuller
University of Lincoln, UK
tfuller@lincoln.ac.uk
Improving Scenario Methodology: Theory and
Practice
Warwick Business School, UK
December 2015
www.lincoln.ac.uk
Scenarios
“Cartesian
Anxiety”
Bernstein 1983
Attempts to explore alternative states of
being, separated from the present by some
temporal movement and from each other
by a turn in logic or reasoning.
Looking ahead…
Purposeful as ‘the future(s) of X’
Address uncertainty… tending toward risk
(Cf. F Knight)
Assume a significant level of ontological
security (belief in certainty of knowledge)
about the present and its relationship to the
future
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Methodology: conceptual or
theoretical basis for methods to
discover and interpret knowledge
To come:
Anticipatory systems (Rosen)
Post-Normal Science (Funtowicz
and Ravetz)
Intersubjectivity and Affect (e.g.
Husserl, Appadurai)
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IGNORANCE
(an absence of known knowledge)
Generated exponentially from new
knowledge
Contributes to a sense of uncertainty and
frailty of what is known (ontology)
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Ontological ephemerality and frailty
Ontological
“security”:
Have a reliable
sense of ‘knowing’
and therefore
anticipatory
capacity in
relation to the
environment and
resolutions of
disharmony
Asymmetric social knowledge production
Awareness of unrecognisable patterns and
inter-connections
An unfounded confidence in (fallible)
‘scientific’ knowledge
A state of anxiety over “unknown unknowns”
Ontology: what we take as knowledge
Ephemeral short-lived, temporary
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Intersubjectivity
Psychological relation between people...
…shared (or partially shared) divergences of
meaning
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Ontological tensions
Natural Worlds
Socio-cultural worlds
The inter-subjectivity
of disciplines
Explaining
phenomena by
causal extraction
Worlds of dynamic
information and agency;
reified self-interest
producing risk and
uncertainty through open
multiple performances
expectations
Worlds of reified
knowledge;
conceptualised into
submission and used
as ordered
centralising power
disruptions
The inter-subjectivity of
actors perspectives
Experience of
Worlds of Wicked
Problems, of ‘postnormal’
science/times**
Explanations ‘attached’ to
phenomena themselves
“chaos”
“contradictions”
“complexity”
** Ravetz, J. R. (1999), Ravetz, J R and Funtowicz, S O (1999),
Sardar, Z (2010)
Re-adjusting perspectives
Natural Worlds:
what it means to
control nature,
as if humans had
no
intersubjectivity
Knowledge
about futures
Socio-cultural
‘human’ worlds:
what it means to be
human and
massively
intersubjective
Relationships
with futures
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Foresight as anticipatory system
“An anticipatory system is a natural system
that contains an internal predictive model of
itself and of its environment, which allows it
to change state at an instant in accord with
the model’s predictions pertaining to a later
instant” (Rosen 1985, p341).
Rosen, R. (1985). Anticipatory systems : philosophical, mathematical and
methodological foundations. Oxford: Pergamon.
Modeling Relations
- Relations between model, effector and
whole system, which includes the model
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Anticipatory System (Rosen 1985, Louie 2010)
MS is a composite system
M is a predictive model – by looking at a
present state of M, one obtains information
pertaining to a future state of S.
M is equipped with a set E of effectors that
Input
operate either on S itself or on the
environmental inputs to S, in such a way as
to change the dynamical properties of S.
An anticipatory system S entails the
following:
S possesses a model subsystem M;
there is an orthogonality between the
model M and the collection of observables
of S ~ M;
the rate of change (the adaptation) of
observables of S ~ M depends on M;
the effect of the model M creates a
discrepancy – S would have behaved
differently if M were absent.
Modeling
Relations
M
E
S
Output
“An anticipatory system
is a natural system that
contains an internal
predictive model of itself
and of its environment,
which allows it to
change state at an
instant in accord with
the model’s predictions
pertaining to a later
instant” (Rosen 1985,
p341).
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Modelling relationship
Foresight as explicit anticipatory
system
Environment
System (with
natural ‘models’)
Representative
Models
Sensing
Effectors
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Foresight as anticipatory system
What are the modelling relationships?
Scenarios????
What are the effectors?
All systems, have a distinct quality
called organization [which…] has to do with more than
purely structural or material aspects. For example,
organization includes all relations between material parts,
relations between the effects of interactions of the material
parts, and relations with time and environment, to name a
few.
From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Rosen_(theoretical_biologist)
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Frank H Knight
“Risk, Uncertainty and Profit”
http://www.econlib.org/library/Knight/knRUPCover.html
Published 1921
Boston, MA: Hart,
Schaffner & Marx;
Houghton Mifflin Co.
Based on awardwinning dissertation
essay.
“The net result of
the inquiry is by no
means a defense
of the existing
order. On the
contrary, it is
probably to
emphasize the
inherent defects of
free enterprise. ”
(Author’s Preface)
”the exact science of inference has
little place in forming the opinions
upon which decisions of conduct are
based […] We act upon estimates
rather than inferences, upon
"judgment" or "intuition," not
reasoning, for the most part.” (III.VII.36)
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Post Normal Science
(science for policy)
The difference between normal and postnormal is […] mainly epistemological, and
related with ‘situations where the lines
between science and politics, facts and
values, truth and perspective have become
blurred’ (Farrell, 2005, p. 3).
In these situations ‘quality, explicitly
comprising ethics and morality (...) become
the organising principle of post-normal
science because the old ideal of scientific
truth is no longer attainable or relevant for
policy’ (Funtowicz & Ravetz, 1994, p. 204).
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(Carrozza 2011)
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Post Normal Science
(science for policy)
• Irreducible complexity, deep uncertainties, a
plurality of legitimate perspectives, value
dissent, high stakes, and decision urgency
(Funtowicz & Ravetz, 1991, 1992, 1993a).
• Uncertainty and values embedded in
technology require critical citizenship (Hauge
et al)
• Reflexivity - continual reflective negotiation of
normativivity (Konig et al) through (Funtowicz
and Ravetz)’ concepts of “extended peer
communities” and “extended facts”
• Quality, Reflexivity, Humility (Pereira et al)
• Situational: generating different uncertainties in
scientific, social, institutional, proprietory , legal,
moral domains
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Post Normal Science
(Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993, Ravetz 1999)
An early but
still relevant
approach to
complexity…
and fallibility
… complexity of policy problems corresponds to the
complexity of the relevant knowledge. The
maintenance and enhancement of quality, rather than
the establishment of truth, is the key problem for
science in the post-normal age.
Accomplishing this requires […inter-alia…] mutual
respect among participants in a dialogue, and a
recognition that no side necessarily has a monopoly of
truth or morality”
Ravetz 1999, p653
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High stakes, high uncertainty
A Chair in PNS was
established at
University of Bergen
in Dec 2014.
An interpretation of
PNS “Post Normal
Times” is being
developed by
Sardar, Sweeney et
al after Sardar 2010.
Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993, p745
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Operationalising PNS as Post Normal
Times
Sardar and Sweeny (2016)
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Operationalising PNS as Post Normal
Times
Sardar and Sweeny (2016)
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Dispositional realism
…”the world is an open system consisting of
things possessing causal powers or
potentialities and liabilities in virtue of their
intrinsic structures…”
(Introduction to Bhaskar’s Realist Theory of Science by Mervyn
Hartwig (p xvii) in 2007 edition
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Dispositions
“… states and dispositions may
properly be said to be causes. This
the possession of a reason
conceived as a more or less longstanding disposition or orientation to
act in a certain way, may itself be a
cause.”
Bhaskar, PON 1978 p93
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Dispositions as a form of Anticipation
Disposition are not in themselves
deterministic because the conditions in
which they produce action are emergent,
and therefore what is produced by
dispositions is emergent.
Understanding the ontological manifestation
of conditions and dispositions is important to
understanding reasons and causes, i.e. what
‘real’ causal mechanisms are at work in a
given situation.
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Intersubjectivity
Psychological relation between people...
…shared (or partially shared) divergences of
meaning
Plays a role in establishing the truth of
propositions, and constituting the so-called
objectivity of objects.
Affect is a prime organizer of experience
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The Future as Cultural Fact*
Affect
(emotions,
sensations
feelings…
“Three notable human preoccupations that
shape the future as a cultural fact […]
imagination,
anticipation and
aspiration…”
“… We need not only to examine the
emotions that accompany the future as a
cultural form but also the sensations that it
produces: awe, vertigo… [p237]”
*Arjun Appadurai (2013), The Future as Cultural Fact, Essays on the Global Condition,
Verso
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Anticipation as process…
… mediates (between) knowledge
and action, and hence has causal
power.
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Anticipation as causal …
What if:
Creativity
Stability
Instability
Anticipatory
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Anticipation
Anticipation as part of the temporality of
being (Cf Heidegger)
Anticipation gives absence meaning
Anticipation causes effects and stability
Values and the anticipation of value is
central to the relational model.
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Re-adjusting perspectives
Ontological
Knowledge about
futures
Complexity
and Systems
Ethical
Relationships with
futures
Anticipatory process
Responsibility
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What kinds of ‘foresight’ knowledge in these parallel
worlds?
Stable-Informational
Unstable- Creative
Anticipatory
Cognitive:
Reification of
knowledge and
wisdom;
Zeitgeist of
authoritative fixed
points, powers and
routines, changed
through challenges
to authority
Experienced:
Reified mashing
and quest for
novelty of
experiences
Zeitgeist of
heterodox
relationships,
regulated by
(emergent) usable
standards
Anticipated: Reified
multiple
simultaneous
possibilities and
quest for metapatterns?
Zeitgeist of
emotions and
sensations of
discovery
Knowledge (in)security:
Models of futures
Scenarios
Stability and
Variation
Experiments
Anticipations
Flows and
temporary
structures
Cultural fact
Affect
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1.Stability and variation:
Scenarios as models of an evolving
‘knowledge world’
Generating
Representing
Curating
Narrating
Knowledge / understanding
Constructed fallibilities?
- risk rather than uncertainties
- Conceptually and evaluatively framed in existing boundaries
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2. (Social) experiments as models of
an emergent Creative World
Acting
Failing
Connecting
Reconceiving
Practices, dispositions
modified boundary conditions
Fallible constructions?
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3. Anticipated Futures
Imagination
Anticipation
Aspiration
Affect: emotions, sensations
Futures as cultural facts
(Appadurai)
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The ‘scenario’ issue;
Design of anticipatory capacity
“Organisation” as Anticipatory System
The modelling relationships
Cartesian (un)certainties
Affective / dispositional
Experimental practices
Construction of anticipations
Desires, expectations, prospects
Business models
Value models
Resilience models
Ethics and responsibility
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спасибо
tfuller@lincoln.ac.uk
©2015 CC-BY-NC-SA Ted Fuller
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University of Durham Institute of Advanced Study
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