Foresight - Meinrad Calleja
INTRODUCTION
One of the distinguishing features of modernity was an assumption to
be able to precisely make certain predictions. The assumed efficacy of these
predictions was based on accurate empirical measurements of contextual/
ecological features, the conjoining of various ‘scientific’ interpretative disciplines,
and the assumed causal relationships and potential correspondences between the
findings. Such ‘tested’ empiricism was the basis of what is known as ‘forecast’
laws.
While ‘forecast’ is thus concerned with predictions, ‘foresight’ is
primarily about anticipating uncertainty. It involves dealing with ambiguity.
Foresight looks at the obstacles of ‘forecast’ scenarios and seeks to provide
contingency for their eventual elimination. While ‘forecast’ deals with
‘determinism’, ‘foresight’ deals with a/in/un- determined scenarios. In this
respect, certain mundane applications in financial markets (e.g. futures,
bonds, securities), trade (e.g. insurance, commodity provisions), commerce (e.g.
market analysis, advertising), security (e.g. Echeleon, intelligence
gathering), and industry (e.g. product design, technology) seem to rely on
forecast provisions, some of which seem to infer seminal premises abstracted
from foresight. Applications like silicon and nanotechnology are examples.
Foresight deals with intentional actions that are not necessarily
subject to empirical verification, causal laws, or rational deliberation.
Foresight is thus a participatory intuitive reasoning process. Foresight is
concerned with direction setting, determining priorities, anticipatory
intelligence, consensus generation, and advocacy. It is based on the
development, fusion, and cross-hybridization of technologies, consultation,
scenario creation (‘steep’), patent analysis, critical technologies, and
technological road-mapping. It focuses on hybrid approaches to innovation in market
and industrial research and development while seeking to engage stakeholders.
It is both a commercial as well as an educational tool. It may be applied for
social demographic planning. It is crucial to any knowledge-based deliberation
process.
A concrete application of ‘foresight’ would be
‘intelligent-foresight’ – a form of video monitoring that can scan anomaly
detection to check trend-spotting comparatively to alert specific anomalies.
Data warehouses use holography and quantum computers, with enhanced quantum
cryptography, activating IT-denominated ‘foresight’. Hind-casting algorithms
are used to make foresight scenarios. These often include cluster analysis of
diverse, even unrelated, individual molecular components. Such applications
have been used in meteorology and security intelligence. The development of telematics
or telephony business and IT denominated applications seem to have been
tangibly directed by foresight imperatives. Perhaps GM agricultural production
and its capacity for cross hybridization and polynisation may to a certain
extent be termed symmetrical with foresight derivatives. How do we demarcate
our perimeter between forecast and foresight?
This paper will discuss some fundamental issues concerning foresight
and the implications that orbit around its application and limitations. To
assume foresight is a supplement of forecast is quite inadequate and any attempt
to focus on foresight in this light actually defies the objective. Theoretically,
one ought to factor in the limitations and obstacles that forecast either
ignores outright or seeks to unsatisfactorily address through insufficient
determination. In this paper we shall explore some of the theoretical
underpinnings of foresight philosophy.
EPISTEMOLOGY MATRIX
Foresight critically addresses
two important features of ‘forecast’ - ‘professional impairment’ and
‘hyper-scientization’. ‘Hyper-scientization’ are ‘those approaches that stress
intellectual elegance and consistency to the seemingly permissible neglect of
‘reality’.’[1]
Reality includes ambiguity and uncertainty. Lindblom’s ‘professional
impairment’ is ‘the imposition of an alien perspective, disregard for the
knowledge of the observed, over concern with rigour, operationalisation and
coherence at the expense of insight into the context of action and into the
meaning with which actors endow situations.’[2]
Foresight privileges ‘context-insight’ and ‘meaning-endowment’ while to a
certain extent de-sacralizing rigidly configurated knowledge.
Foresight is an emancipatory
approach that probes virgin configurations of knowledge by broadening
boundaries, inverting cluster components, and redefining domains. Foresight is
orientated to de-formulate ideality and ideal goals. System dynamics are
dismantled and rearranged according to untested exploratory modelling. Scanning
scenario planning to generate ideas may involve the engagement of hitherto uninitiated
participants. Foresight enfranchises an a-credentialist perspective to
transcend ‘specialization’.
Foresight thus also deals with
knowledge analysis. Foucault has shown that ‘the possibility of a science of
empirical orders requires an analysis of knowledge – an analysis that must show
how the hidden (and as it were confirmed) continuity of being can be
reconstituted by means of the temporal connection provided by discontinuous
representations.’[3] Foresight
deals with this ‘discontinuity’. In this context we may already state that
foresight is crucial to steering epistemology by directing knowledge to move
from a mere configuration of tested reliability to a more hybrid approach.
Every truth-shift, even mere
paradigm shifts, are based on the constituent truth status of the knowledge-matrix,
even when such an undertaking revealed the errors in the former, as Kuhn has
shown us in theoretically mapping out all major scientific breakthroughs.
Knowledge, taken as a ‘taxonomy of truths’, is based on this consistency and
continuity, and ‘plausibility’. Occasionally errors are revealed; sometimes
they are only superseded by new errors. Kuhn insists that scientific change
occurs by ‘revolutions’ that make former assumed verities redundant. When a given
scientific matrix is assumed to be ‘true’ it is a ‘paradigm’. Can we determine
these errors? Sometimes, not even in retrospect. However, ‘foresight’ is
concerned with tentatively addressing this ambiguity. It may contribute to
innovatively and creatively designing qua knowledge.
In a scenario of accelerated
technological change one may be inclined to attach a transitory and ephemeral
value to technological innovation. While innovation management is concerned
with endowing end-users with skills to access technological applications and
the ethos they require to adapt to rapid change, foresight scans the
environment to detect anomalies that could potentially create disruptive
lacunae and rationality deficits to restore planning coherence and stability for
the future. However, this is not to say that foresight may be reduced to a tool
of transition that seeks to make a compensatory deposit to settle change or
bridge irreconcilable paths. Foresight ought to settle ambivalence by
disrupting neat boundaries and sedimentation to expose the despotism of
rational order.
Foucault has pointed out, ‘if
one wishes to undertake an archaeological analysis of knowledge itself [...]
one must reconstitute the general system of thought whose network, in its
posivity, renders an interplay of simultaneous and apparently contradictory
opinions possible. It is this network that defines the conditions that make a
controversy or problem possible, and that bears the historicity of knowledge.’[4]
Foresight attempts to focus on these ‘posivity networks’ to jettison
unnecessary stages, supersede sterile conceptions, and transcend obstacles.
Such a task requires the abolition of all mechanistic schema and template
diagrams.
Each conception of knowledge
seeks to create a body of knowledge that it defines as ‘objective’ and
‘scientific’, or, to put it bluntly, ‘true’ and ‘correct’. These discourses
attempt to establish an assumed unity of relations, or as Foucault calls it, a
‘discursive constellation’.[5]
Foresight assumes dealing with unpredictable clusters of uncertainty by
anticipating them and eliminating unnecessary consumption of resources.
EMPIRICISM
When we examine the rationality
governing empirically formatted ‘forecast’ we note that there was an attempt
to: (a) selectively isolate a number of variables, (b) assume correspondences
between them, (c) draw teleological aggregates from a ‘discursive
constellation’, (d) arrive at ‘axiomatic’ symbols, and (e) confer universally
valid truth status on formulae that help maintain this scientific/ professional
body of knowledge and their interpretations. This is done through the
conjunction of ‘taxinomonia’ and ‘genesis’. [Sociological] predictions based on
empiricism always represented the climax of these relations through
verification and confirmation. Foresight deals with disruption of order
scenarios. Using an analogy Popper makes, we may postulate that forecast deals
with ‘clockwork’, while foresight deals with ‘clouds’. Our physical laws have
shown reality is often a cloud reality. Newtonian science has allowed peeking
holes to alert us to these facts, many of which were rather naively relegated
to the periphery of inquiry as though they were mere exceptions that enforce
the rule, rather than demolish it.
Ambiguity and uncertainty are essential features of our ontological
primacy. Life, indeed human life, cannot be reduced to simplistic signs,
certainly not coefficient signs. Modern forecast empiricism seems to consider
the body of knowledge it assumes is its speciality or its exclusive sphere of
influence is subject to established applications and correspondences borrowed
from other areas. Often this is based on an over-determination of ‘science’.
MATEMATISATION
Canguilhem cites Koyre who stated bluntly that science is theory,
while theory is fundamentally mathematization. (‘La science est theorie et que la theorie est
fondamentalement mathematisation.’[6]) Canguilhem was critical of this over-determination. That is why we
are with Foucault when he states ‘all hasty mathematization or naive
formalisation of the empirical seems like ‘pre-critical’ dogmatism and a return
to the platitudes of Ideology.’[7]
Mathematics has become the proto-language of all science. Foresight addresses
this deficit by acknowledging contradictions and either adapting to them or
eliminating the contradictions outright.
Sometimes, mathematization ‘laws’ are shaped both a posterior and a priori. These laws may actually be totally random and they may
even defy certain rationality or logic. If one were to toss a coin, for
example, one would expect both sides to appear as equal, which is rarely the
case. The Monte Carlo fallacy, for example, is based on the anticipation of
equal tosses for ‘heads’ and ‘tails’ to the extent that when one side of the
coin appears more frequently than another, one is inclined to imminently expect
the other side to start compensating the deficit. This forecasting is fallacious.
Reality need not adhere to plausible ‘forecasts’. We cannot even ‘hindcast’ correctly.
Doctrines of ‘forecasting’ applied to policy design are often unwittingly based
on these calculations. However, we can also assemble arbitrary ‘laws’ and
‘forms’ based solely on a notion of ‘experience’ which would make our errors or
prejudices less obvious. Pathologies are based on such empirical
schematisation. This accentuates the importance of ‘foresight’.
Most of the sciences of sociology are corroborated by empiricism
that is based on mathematization stretched to its limits, often assembled
through a methodology akin to the Monte Carlo Fallacy. Criminology, for
example, was actually a branch of the ‘sociology of deviance’, but gained its
independence as an autonomous subject resembling a science when it extended its
mathematization, and conjoined other sciences like, for example, biology.
‘Mathematization’ is never neutral or innocent.
Karl Popper, in his ‘Conjectures and Refutations – The Growth of
Scientific Knowledge’, refers to the empiricism of ‘astrology’ to explain
how conjecture can not only claim to be ‘scientific empiricism’ but also appear
‘plausible’ and ‘rational’. Forecast technologies are often based entirely on a
sort of so called ‘astrologically-interpreted empiricism’[8]
as though we were accepting the language of ‘horoscopes’ as ‘scientific’. This
analogy to ‘astrology’ shows us that even reliably collated and rigorously
corroborated observations, - that are empirical facts - as occur in the case of
‘astronomy’, can be selectively ‘interpreted’ subjectively. These are simply
‘modes of rationality’ or ‘languages’ based on pure conjecture. What Russell
refers to as ‘logical fictions’.[9]
Roseanne Benn discusses the
contemporary ideological role of ‘mathematics’ in the light of recurring
ambiguity and uncertainty. ‘The relationship between mathematics and reality
became increasingly problematic and puzzling [...] Attempts to either picture
the world as it is or use a perfectly consistent neutral meta-language
ultimately failed. Indeed, in late modernity, mathematics appears to
deliberately deceive by masking even awareness of the absence of any reality.
Within the wider context of human thought and experience, the development of
mathematics can bee seen as the ‘grand narrative’ of academic Western
mathematics which pathologises inability to relate to this mathematics and
ignores or marginalises alternative or ‘other’ mathematics. Difference is
repressed, the central narrative is held as certain and the workings of power
are concealed.
This characterisation of
mathematics has provided an elaborate rationale and legitimisation for the
pre-eminence of academic Western mathematics and has contributed to the
dominance of certain cultural groups in society. The mathematical narratives of
subordinate groups have been denigrated or ignored. [...]. To question the
certainty of mathematics is to challenge the hegemony, irreversibility and
sweeping narrative of modernity.’[10]
The philosophy of foresight is concerned with questioning and challenging these
assumed verities and illusory synergy. Foresight is used in complexity research
that engages non-linear component parts to explore unpredictability and
inexplicability not otherwise ascertainable.
We know from Russell that ‘the mathematicians have constructed a
multiplicity of possible spaces, and have shown that many logical schemes would
fit the empirical facts. Logic shows that space is not ‘the subject matter of
geometry’, since an infinite number of subject matters satisfy any given kind
of geometry. Psychology disentangles the contributions of various senses to the
construction of space, and reveals the all-embracing space of physics as the
outcome of many empirically familiar correlations.’[11]
This irrationality is addressed by ‘foresight’.
Wittgenstein made it amply clear that ‘the propositions of
mathematics are equations, and therefore pseudo-propositions.’[12]
Foresight seeks to reveal the subjective, arbitrary, and ephemeral nature of
these pseudo-sciences, and their misuse in forecast-related discourses. Certainty
is not just questioned rhetorically, but it is actually translated as
uncertainty and ambiguity, and tentatively steered to become an opportunity. Foresight
illustrates alternative ‘language games’. Rather than alternative ‘rules’ we
may need to consider their abolishment.
On the question of ‘arbitrariness’ we can draw on Adorno who stated
‘the irrationality, in which the philosophically absolutized ratio perishes, confesses to the
arbitrariness of whatever seeks to eliminate the arbitrary.’[13]
However, we are not negating the arbitrary to privilege those interpretations
that are not arbitrary; rather we are merely accentuating this arbitrariness.
Adorno agrees that ‘mathematics is tautology also by the limitation of its
total dominance to what itself has already prepared and formed.’[14]
Here ‘foresight’ is elucidating this ‘total dominance’ as a ‘limitation’ that
is rigidly and mechanistically enforced in the hope that these ‘forms’ and
‘laws’ may be transcended.
DIALECTICAL APPROACH
Today we emphasise an assumed
ideal rationality that emphatically claims objective valence – hence
‘responsibility’- which is foisted as ‘scientific’. In the area of establishing
how ‘uncertainties’ occur, with the ontological implications related to
existential responsibility and free-will, the governing rationality claims to
have achieved an acknowledged degree of reliability and rigour, particularly
after the alleged breakthroughs of assumed unquestioned ‘certainty’ in DNA,
genetics, bio-technology, ITT control, satellite tracking and surveillance,
quantum computers, cybernetics, nanotechnology and forensic science. In the
field of understanding ‘why’ ambiguity occurred one may be tempted to assume
sociology, social anthropology, neuro-biology, psychiatry, psychology,
phenomenology, and hermeneutics have tendered plausible readings. However, this
has not settled issues of ambiguity or eliminated uncertainty. Plausibility is
in fact in some cases an obstacle.
Bachelard states that
‘phenomenology does not involve an empirical description of phenomena.
Empirical description involves enslavement to the object by decreeing passivity
on part of the subject.’[15]
Foresight ought to address both the issue of ‘passivity’ of the subject and
‘enslavement’ to the object. The crucial error is often dogmatic ‘methodology’.
Bachelard refers to ‘epistemological obstacles’ and ‘epistemological breaks’ in
this light.
As Gadamer puts it, ‘every event
of understanding […] is essentially dialectical.’[16]
If we ignore this dialect, we can only reach forlorn conclusions. ‘All modern
sciences possess a deeply rooted alienation that they impose on the natural
consciousness and of which we need to be aware. This alienation already reached
reflective awareness in the very beginning stages of modern science in the
concept of method.’[17]
We have to avoid what Gadamer refers to as ‘methodological sterility’,[18]
(which is not to be confused with Searle’s ‘referential opacity’). This is one
of the crucial aspects of foresight. Foresight ought to transcend this
sterility and address it.
DESPOTIC CYBERNETICS
Cybernetics, coined by Norbert Wiener in 1947, refers to systems of
communication that manipulate information by feedback and feedforward to
enhance the concept of control by taking account of these fluctuations.[19]
Karl Deutsch’s ‘cybernetic-reasoning’ uses the concept of [‘negative’ or
‘positive’] ‘feedback’ (entropy of ‘input’) as a measurement of communication.
‘The difference between the entropy of the input and the equivocation of the
input with respect to the output thus measures the capacity of the channel as a
reliable conveyor of information.’[20]
Our over-determination of empiricism is based on this modeling.
In his ‘Cybernetics and the
Philosophy of Mind’, Sayre quotes Tribus that ‘entropy only measures the
extent of our ignorance about the detailed behaviour of a system’.[21]
These initial obstacles sought to enhance empiricism by diverse fonts of
induction, and prognostic and agnostic deliberations that included a
reconfiguration of both subject and object depiction. Econometrics, simulation
and modeling were reformatted. We may be entitled to assume this is being done
to preserve the system’s ‘homeostatically’ protected parameter. This ensures
the system has ‘recovery’ powers or capacity. A ‘homeostatic’ system of this
sort maintains its structure through constant piecemeal change and incremental
improvements. In short, parameters can be changed.
Here we are experiencing a type of system ‘of feedback that works to
maintain the organism in a certain relationship with its operating environment,
rather than to sustain a certain internal state. […] ‘Heterotelic feedback’ which ‘differs from ‘homeostasis’ in directing the response of the environmentally
stimulated system back to the environment rather than containing it within the
system itself.’[22]
New contemporary modes of foresight rationality, that are also modes of
domination, are based on rendering these systems more controllable and
predictable. Systems of ‘foresight’ used in contemporary policy-making ensure
these forms of influence are always more efficient in not only controlling the
derivative context and predicting the future, but actually designing and
directing it to deal with uncertainty. This can only be done through innovation
management and codification that engineers this social process politically and
culturally through holistic dissemination policies.
While it is true ‘cybernetics’ is a ‘machine-based’ form of
methodology and not a ‘human’ application, its form of rationality does
permeate human reasoning. A machine does not desire and is thus an expression
of ‘absolute repression’ because it has been programmed a priori to exclude all human reasoning. It cannot experience
‘ressentiment’. But where does this leave ontology?
ONTOLOGICAL IMPICATIONS OF SOCIAL ENGINEERING
Foresight also deals with ethical and moral ramifications. Many
doctrines of radical social engineering (for example, genetic engineering, or
eugenics) are influenced by, or, perhaps, merely symmetrical with, cybernetic
reasoning applications or their cloned subsidiary derivatives. Discourses in
circulation seem to gradually influence these doctrines. Note how genetically
modified agricultural produce and human genetic cloning are gradually gaining
plausibility. They infiltrate and colonize neighboring domains. Euthanasia, now
known as ‘mercy-killings,’ for example, is accepted in some contexts. This
approach to human ontology is not only reductive and simplistic, but it is
amoral and unethical. So being alert to a potential epistemological
evolutionary trajectory that steers the ontological discourses engaged in this
existential ‘path-building’ process is not impractical. Foresight thus has an
ethical dimension.
I would like to mention only two illustrations of ‘feedback’. ‘Sentient feedback’ is exhibited in a
system when ‘its behaviour is governed in part by changes in variables that can
withstand wide fluctuation without system impairment, but which would be
followed by states detrimental to the system if corrective activity were not
quickly forthcoming.’[23]
Foresight anticipates the corrective activity. It may even eliminate its need
outright.
This is the first ‘type’ of feedback that fits our purpose. This
type of feedback responds to stimuli after
their occurrence. It takes place as an adjustment. This is how the dynamics of ‘ambiguity’
and ‘uncertainty’ occur in a scenario of the logic of emergency (e.g. responses
to 9-11, or even meteorological catastrophes and climate change). The
deficiencies in the system are corrected through ‘sentient feedback’ that
corrected policy errors to ensure the system was not impaired. The preservation
of the ideal system is the primary objective of all initiatives. Sometimes
goals are redefined. Yet one notes little radical change. Often, evolutionary
change is slow and cumbersome.
Another form of feedback serves to pre-empt deficiencies in systems
by responding to threatening states before
they occur by basing judgments on antecedents. These may be referred to as ‘anticipatory feedback’. [24],
Protecting the system from impairment is one of the primary goals of these
methodologies. Doctrines of preemption or deterrence, or even risk management
or incapacitation, related to, for example, terrorism are reliant on these
principals. A concrete prototypical system directing international trade could
be the IMF-WTO et al cluster. Such a system would be structured by its own
restricted language. The strict adherence to the pre-established criteria would
stifle creativity and innovation. Potential foresight would be transformed to
goal-directed despotic sanctions. Foresight transcends this mechanistic
approach.
The concepts born of, restricted by, dependent on, or attached to,
‘cybernetic-reasoning’ - and so ‘feedback’- are to our knowledge the cause of a
latent epistemological obstacle, restriction, or contradiction. This sort of
deductive or empirical method can receive erroneous interpretations. Moreover,
aggregating atomised indicators does not give an accurate account of each
individual component along its
trajectory, nor does it take into account such liabilities as ‘digressions’ or
the spatio-temporal reality beyond or outside the controlled area and its
predetermined optimal status.
This system groups together aggregates bound by the definition of
its goal; but it ignores any concept of ‘ontological primacy’. As the flows are
led in predetermined patterns we rest our analysis on reading the flow charts
born from ‘feedback’. Intermediary interruptions are not always taken into
account. Reading F.H. George’s ‘Philosophical
Foundations of Cybernetics’ one immediately notes that this theory is far
too flexible in jettisoning criticism.
This ‘method’ may reduce essentialism or metaphysics, but to a
certain extent it is mechanistic and deterministic. It may serve
social-psychology to examine and predict consumption profiles, for example, but
it does not necessarily explain the existence of these consumers. There can be
no ontology based on this schema. It can be used to gauge or profile subjects
or objects being dominated; it cannot be used to liberate or emancipate them.
Its temporalizations are not ‘supra-dimensionalised’, ‘a-dimensionalised’, or
‘a-temporalised’. This is why ‘foresight’ is so important. It liberates
language from morphological, grammatical and syntactical enclosures, (that are
also conceptual boundaries), to probe and generate untested possibilities. Foresight
transcends both diachronic and synchronic approaches by radically deploying
innovative conceptual tools not bound or defined by rationality templates.
Broadly speaking, cybernetic-reasoning consists of piecemeal
temporalizations that are laboriously assembled. It can be useful to interact
with environmental stimuli, but it cannot operate outside its predetermined
‘rationality-template’, not matter how complex and versatile the ‘template’ may
appear in any set of possible permutations. Two computers using Artificial
Intelligence and cybernetic reasoning could play master-class chess. Winning
would simply be a matter of mathematical value. They would not experience any anxiety,
stress, excitement, or pleasure. The opposing player (a computer) would be
classified according to former ‘pattern-formations’. Neither system could
distract the other or use any form of psychological deliberation. All games
would be [pre] determined. This exemplifies the difference between ‘forecast’
and ‘foresight’ and excludes the possibility of assuming they are ‘incongruent
counterparts’.
The cybernetic-reasoning schema of feedback (and ‘forecast’) is a
form of ‘classified thinking’. Bachelard states that ‘concepts are drawers in
which knowledge may be classified; they are also ready-made garments which do
away with the individuality of knowledge that has been experienced. The concept
soon becomes lifeless thinking, by definition, it is a classified thinking’.[25]
Can we transcend these neat positivist schemas, this lifeless thinking, this
classified thinking? Foresight seeks to address this dilemma.
Bachelard is critical of ‘correspondences that have been examined
too empirically’.[26]
He speaks of a ‘need to ‘dephilosophize’ to shun the allures of culture to
place ourselves on the margin of convictions acquired through long
philosophical inquiry on the subject of scientific thinking. Philosophy makes
us ripen quickly, and crystallises us in a state of maturity’.[27]
Foresight partially resolves this
creativity seizure. Wild card management systems, for example, attempt to exit
from this classified thinking.
CONCLUSION
Restricted resources are often subject to regulatory controls that
attempt to secure smooth exchange transitions. Commodities that are exposed to
volatile environmental conditions either in production or distribution are
protected by networked underwriting and secure reserve provisions. These
mechanisms are so swift and efficient in securing contingency, that one can
accurately forecast allowances for indemnity. Futures markets, re-insurance,
and even some aspects of stock markets are indicative of this reliability. The
fact that we can even talk of indemnity, demurrage, insurance, or contingency
illustrate our appraisals confirm a degree of subjectivity, unpredictability
and inexplicability that we cater for. Meteorology is perhaps one area of
recent interest testing; terrorism another. All very impressive.
Discussing the volatility of dependency on fossil fuels both for
consumers as well as for producers, former Saudi oil minister and OPEC
delegate, Shiek Yamani, succinctly stated that people did not leave the ‘Stone
Age’ because of a lack of stones. In spite of deceivingly accelerated
technological change, our dependency on fossil fuels epitomizes the fact that
we seem unable to address this creativity seizure or exit from this impasse.
Foresight can assist innovation management address these problems.
Forcing human behaviour descriptions or observations to fit neat
schema and dismissing misfits as pathologies has proved to be costly and
unethical. Attempting to forcefully direct the future according to
predetermined goals has wrecked havoc and depleted strategic resources.
Maintaining complex structural infrastructure has not settled disparities or
justice. Reconciling consumption with production, experience with theory, or
the past with the future, cannot be met without the analytic discernment of
reality. Uncertainty and ambiguity are recurring features of this reality. In
the past such discrepancies were addressed by the deployment of historicism,
myths, irrational values, faith and belief systems, all to a certain extent
still prevalent today. Some contexts have re-structured their plausibility
structures or value-definitions to facilitate uncertainty and ambiguity.
Foresight can be developed to steer the future more coherently.
Research and development of foresight need hybrid approaches that engage
participants willing and able to transgress, explore, and innovate creatively.
New knowledge clusters need to be designed and assembled to tri-dimensionalise
time to look at the future free from the misconceptions of the past.
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[1] Wagner,
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Routledge, p 147
[1] Wagner,
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Routledge, p 148
[1] Foucault,
2003, The Order of Things, London ,
Routledge, p.80
[1] Foucault,
2003: The Order of Things, London ,
Routledge p.83
[1] Foucault,
2002: The Archaeology of Knowledge, London Routledge, p74
[1] Canguilhem, 1989, Problemes et
Controverses, Paris, Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, p.14
[1] Foucault,
2003: The Order of Things, London ,
Routledge p.268
[1] Popper,
1989, Conjectures and Refutations, The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, London : Routledge, p. 34
[1] Russell, 1994, Logic and Knowledge, London
[1] Benn, 1997,
Adults Count Too, London ,
NIACE, p 29
[1] Russell, 1994: Logic and Knowledge, London
[1] Wittgenstein, 1997, Tractatus
Logicus Philosophicus, London Routledge, p.65
[1] Adorno, 1982, Against Epistemology, Oxford
[1] Adorno, 1982: Against Epistemology, Oxford
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[1] Sayre, 1976, Cybenetics and The
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[1] Sayre, 1976, Cybenetics and The
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[1] Sayre, 1976, Cybenetics and The
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[1] Bachelard, 1968 The Poetics of
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