Prediction and Futures Studies | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

Prediction and Futures Studies

Prediction and Society

Meaning. Prediction (previsione) is "seeing beforehand" how the future will be; that is, the situation that will come about in the short, medium, and long term. This, however, is a "seeing beforehand" that is not content with simply knowing what the final situation will be but it is also concerned with knowing with how it will be reached. It is concerned not only with the end-point but also with the process that the present situation will undergo to transform itself into (or remain as) the end-point. This two-part nature of prediction (end-point and development/process) enables us to take prediction into a scientific dimension, because the process by which the end-point is reached is comprehensible by means of the elaboration of a standardized method of identifying variables and their positions in a model of relationships that connect the before to the after, and carry the before to the after, and lead from the starting point to the end-point. Without this scientific attention to the passage from the former point to the latter, prediction could simply be a matter of taking the present and reading its evolution by means of an external "operator," such as a magic formula, casting stones, or the interpretation of animal innards.

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