The idea of the future: a Bakhtinian theory of knowledge

Scientific knowledge changes and accumulates

For most animals, orienting to the world means adapting to it. For human beings it also means influencing the world and changing it. The human relationship with the world has a historical dimension and a value dimension, which other animals apparently largely lack. Humans have a sense of a plan and of influencing the future, while many other animals act on instinctive routines. So it has been believed, and even scientifically explained, but we may yet have to revise our views. At least humans still have a clear lead over other mammals in the ability to communicate, store and pass on knowledge, and to act in time by learning from history and building a better future. Humans also know how to use all their special abilities destructively.

The future is an epistemologically awkward object of knowledge, at least in the scientific sense, because valid knowledge is required to be certain, reliable and testable. From Aristotle comes the law of the excluded middle: a statement is either true or false, and there is no third option. Aristotle himself, however, noticed the problem. Is the statement "there will be a sea battle tomorrow" already true or false now? The truth value of a statement about the future is unknown at the moment of examination, and a thesis may moreover come true only in part. Even so, there is much in the future that would be useful to know. I unpack this puzzle first through Karl Popper's view of science and then through Mikhail Bakhtin's kinds of knowledge. With the help of these two thinkers, knowledge of the future finds a credible place, even though this requires extending two-valued logic and making it conditional.

There is no objective and final knowledge about complex and contested phenomena. The Delphi method's solution is to put different views to a public test: how possible, well-reasoned, desirable and probable are they? Even if certain knowledge is not attained, dialogue and argumentation help to arrange competing views so that sensible choices become easier. We need science for what we do not know as well. In this way science poses new questions, and the endless but ever-growing journey of knowledge continues.

The Delphi method's way of working is in line with Popper's philosophy of science. According to Popper, no scientific theory is final and complete; theories must be treated as conjectures, that is, hypotheses. From a hypothesis one can derive a prediction or a consequence that can be tested. In a Delphi study, the thesis, a question cast in the form of a statement, corresponds to Popper's hypothesis, and it is tested through discussion and argumentation. The difference from a hypothesis in the natural sciences is of course obvious. The certainty of a natural-science hypothesis is in a different league from the view of even the most competent expert panel on, say, the state of democracy in Finland in 2035.

According to Popper, even knowledge in the natural sciences is hypothetical, and its truth should not be declared final. Physics is a good example: it contains theories side by side that contradict each other yet are valid within limits. A theory can be shown to be wrong even after it has held up in countless experiments. Scientific progress rests less on confirming theories than on refuting them, which is why research must be open and continually reassessed. The idea can be hard to digest, because most theories seem to hold and few seriously believe that the law of gravity will be overturned next week. Popper's point is that for the scientific community as a whole it is useful to allow doubt about everything. It is a good vaccine against science steered by interests and power. As a by-product, a shared understanding arises that our knowledge is never complete, even though it keeps growing.

Scientific knowledge, imperfect as it is, grows continuously and cumulatively. The process stops if open testing is prevented. From Popper's view of science one can derive the demand for an open society. He opposed interpretations of history that present a particular social development as inevitable. In his view, thinkers such as Plato, Hegel and Marx fell into this trap, and doctrines predicting a particular course of development have repeatedly led to totalitarian systems. The Popperian conception of knowledge also binds the Delphi method to a democratic society, whose liberal form Popper called the open society.

Knowledge that things could be otherwise

Even more aptly than Popper, the world of ideas behind the Delphi method is captured by Mikhail Bakhtin, a multidisciplinary dissident thinker of the Soviet era. He is known above all for his literary studies of dialogism and polyphony, which were discussed in the essays The idea of dialogue and The idea of argument. A third well-known concept of Bakhtin's is carnivalism: the way people use language and culture to turn prevailing norms and values upside down. It shows, for example, in humour and irony, which challenge structures of power and taboos. What takes us right to the heart of the Delphi method, however, is a threefold division of kinds of knowledge and truth that can be read from his thinking.

The first is scientific truth. It is certain, or at least verified, but often fragmentary. Knowledge is formed, following the ideal of the natural sciences, through experience and testing. If we want to know what a bird is like, we can observe it and draw conclusions from our observations. Our knowledge deepens when we take the bird apart: we find eyes, a beak, legs, muscles, bones, a heart and wings with two kinds of feathers. After dissecting it, we know more about the bird, but not yet how it flies. Today science can explain that too. Long before scientific knowledge, people could describe the skill of flight, and their stories contained both right and wrong.

The second is artistic truth: unifying knowledge and understanding that has developed its own channels of expression, such as literature and the other arts. Literature clothes knowledge in fiction, yet uses real phenomena and actors as its material. A novel tells what happened, who fell in love and who was disappointed, and often why. Väinö Linna's The Unknown Soldier is not a scientific history of the Continuation War, but in a sense it is more. The novel has become a truth about the war widely shared by Finns, and its characters have become national archetypes. It is a foundation of national identity in the same way as the Kalevala, The Tales of Ensign Stål and Topelius's Book of Our Country were in their time.

The third truth is the most interesting for the Delphi method. Bakhtin calls it existential, by which he means a reality that does not yet exist but could. As a philosophical concept, existential usually refers to the conditions of human existence. In Bakhtin's usage, human existence extends into the future. In this sense Bakhtinian knowledge of the future is related to Paulo Freire's idea that each era raises themes and challenges whose resolution, or failure to resolve, tells of humanity's humanisation or dehumanisation. Both are possible, as the history of the twentieth century shows.

According to Bakhtin, not only relations between people but also human consciousnesses are dialogical. Dialogical people are inwardly inexhaustible, in the same way as Dostoevsky's characters. In a good novel, the characters' conversation breaks free of the author's intentions and each speaks in their own voice. Bakhtin calls this polyphonic narration. Its opposite is the homophonic novel, in which the characters are mouthpieces for the narrator. From Bakhtin's literary studies one can gather a set of features of the many-voiced search for truth that suit the Delphi method as they are:

• Dialogue is the basis of thinking and of the search for truth, and it requires engaging either with one's own thoughts or with other people.
• Syncrisis, the juxtaposition and comparison of different perspectives, is an important pedagogical way of encountering what is different and diverse.
• Anacrisis, provoking speech and challenging to debate, starts dialogues and gives discussion the energy needed to discover something new. In the same sense Socrates regarded himself as a midwife of ideas.
• Ideological heroes represent what is worth striving for and valuable in the search for truth. They present ethical perspectives and arguments about the past, present and future world.
• The testing of ideas takes place dialogically and by listening to the other, in a way related both to Popper's scientific testability and to Habermas's open speech.

The unknown future

Not all of the future can be identified. According to Popper, the unknown future arises from discoveries and innovations that have not yet been made. Since we cannot know in advance what scientific, technical or social inventions will be made or how they will affect society, our knowledge of the future is inevitably incomplete. Nor do we know how people will think and act tomorrow. Still, it is wise to try to prepare for the unknown. According to Anita Rubin, who built the knowledge base of Finnish futures studies, action and choices must continue even in times of upheaval, despite uncertainty, as boldly and curiously as the explorers of old.

The task of multidisciplinary futures studies is to devise, evaluate and propose possible and probable futures and to help people work through the alternatives so that they can decide what kind of future they want. Futures researchers draw on the results of different disciplines and look for so-called weak signals, barely noticeable signs that a course of development is changing or that a new one is emerging. From information about the present, conclusions can be drawn about the possible, probable and desirable futures ahead. In all scenarios, the conclusions must be justified carefully on the basis of real knowledge and understanding of the present. Otherwise one is writing science fiction or fantasy, which also has its own important place.

The future cannot be predicted, nor can it be studied directly in the way a bird's anatomy can. The future does not exist now in the same sense as the present, or as the past, which is present as documents, memories and objects. Instead, the future exists in the present as goals, aspirations and intentions, which we can study. We can also examine developments and phenomena that affect what is to come. The future is always a mixture of the consequences of a vast range of events, about which we can know little for certain, apart from the laws of nature.

The only way to make sense of the social and societal future is to observe the present and look in it for signs, processes and expectations that may affect what is to come. Yet people can influence the future through their actions and choices. That is why it is important to know what is possible, what is probable and what is desirable, and why discussion of values is essential when alternatives are considered. According to Rubin, this is everyday reality especially now, as we live through an ever faster transition between eras, in which the turmoil of actors, cultural conceptions and social reality makes choices harder.

Anticipation

Robert Rosen's theory of anticipation describes an anticipatory system, whether an individual or a community. According to Rosen, an anticipatory system has an internal model of itself and its environment, and on the basis of the future state that this model predicts, it changes its behaviour already now. Put more simply: a desirable future is imagined, and present decisions are aligned with it.

The idea conflicts with the Newtonian conception of knowledge, because in it a system's possible future affects its behaviour in the present. The conflict makes the difference between a reactive and an anticipatory system visible. A reactive system reacts to the present; an anticipatory one takes the past, present and future into account. Rosen emphasises the importance of anticipation especially in planning, decision-making and management as part of complex social systems.

The study of anticipation examines the internal and external processes by which an individual or community steers its activity towards a desired future. These processes are shaped above all by the prevailing values of society and individuals' interpretations of them. Hanna-Kaisa Pernaa and Aleksi Neuvonen have described anticipation as a learning process. Everyone is familiar with feedback, in which we learn from what has already happened for the future. Less well known is feedforward, in which action is organised in advance according to expectations of the future.

Such a process is at work, for example, in Peter Checkland's Soft Systems Methodology (SSM), which can be regarded as a future-oriented variant of action research. In organisational development especially, it is an excellent framework and companion method for the Delphi method, and systems modelling helps the researcher already at the stage of mapping the phenomenon.

Futures consciousness

The school is, and should be, a school of knowledge that values indisputable facts and respects truth. Being knowledge-based is not a problem, but it can become one if knowledge and truth are understood too narrowly. The school can also be seen as society's most important futures institution, because the results of its work become visible only far in the future. In the reality Bakhtin describes, we operate with three kinds of knowledge, and although only one of them is certain, all of them have influence. In a world of AI, the human task is increasingly to navigate amid uncertain knowledge and partial truths. The school is a natural place to learn futures skills and futures consciousness, which is not only knowing but also the ability and attitude to evaluate, anticipate and make a desirable future.

Bakhtin's kinds of knowledge also call for different ways of forming knowledge. The essay The idea of expertise described how the processing of expert knowledge has expanded from activity within the brain to the exchange of information between brains and further to the refinement of information outside the brain. The Delphi method is a technique for improving the quality of narrative knowledge and knowledge of the future. AI is increasingly clearly the next important resource in mapping a phenomenon, building the panel, facilitation and analysing the material. This is so even though the strength of language models is not the future: they draw their cleverness from data about the past.

In her doctoral research, the futures researcher Sanna Ahvenharju defined five dimensions of futures consciousness:

• time perspective that extends beyond the present
• agency, the belief in one's own ability to influence things
• openness to alternatives
• systems perception of how things are connected
• concern for others, both people and the environment.

Ahvenharju has developed an instrument for examining individuals' orientation to the future. Futures consciousness does not depend on the situation; it shows in different areas of life and in attitudes to global issues. Although it has relatively stable components tied to personality, it can be practised and developed at school.

A future-oriented actor anticipates what is to come, examines trends and their possible consequences, and on that basis acquires the resources and skills needed. Futures studies speaks of proactivity: the will and ability to take the future into one's own hands and make the best of it. A proactive actor does not merely prepare for change, but considers what could be done differently and better now so that the future that comes about matches their hopes.

One feature of the future is relatively certain: it is always to some extent different from the present, even if we do not know in what way. The further ahead we look, the clearer the differences become. A particular task of futures studies is to identify these discontinuities in future development.

The rest of the series

The last essay of the series, The idea of futures studies, presents futures studies as a field of knowledge and the views of a few futurists on what the big picture of the future might be. Finally, it considers how the Delphi method is developing.

Sources

• Ahvenharju, Sanna (2022). Futures Consciousness as a Human Anticipatory Capacity: Definition and Measurement. Doctoral thesis, University of Turku.
• Aristotle. On Interpretation, chapter 9. In Barnes, J. (ed.), The Complete Works of Aristotle. Princeton University Press, 1984.
• Bakhtin, Mikhail (1984). Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Trans. Caryl Emerson. University of Minnesota Press.
• Checkland, Peter (1981). Systems Thinking, Systems Practice. Wiley.
• Linturi, Hannu & Kuusi, Osmo (2022). Tulevaisuuksia ennakoiva Delfoi-menetelmä [The Delphi method for anticipating futures]. In Aalto, H.-K., Heikkilä, K., Keski-Pukkila, P., Mäki, M. & Pöllänen, M. (eds.), Tulevaisuudentutkimus tutuksi: perusteita ja menetelmiä [Introducing futures studies: foundations and methods]. University of Turku.
• Pernaa, Hanna-Kaisa & Neuvonen, Aleksi (2020). Antisipaatio – tulevaisuuden ja kompleksisuuden tuore liitto [Anticipation: a new alliance of the future and complexity]. In Vartiainen, P. & Raisio, H. (eds.), Johtaminen kompleksisessa maailmassa. Gaudeamus.
• Popper, Karl (1934). Logik der Forschung. Springer. In English The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959).
• Popper, Karl (1957). The Poverty of Historicism. Routledge.
• Rosen, Robert (1985). Anticipatory Systems: Philosophical, Mathematical and Methodological Foundations. Pergamon.
• Rubin, Anita (2012). Tulevaisuudentutkimuksen perusteet [Foundations of futures studies]. Metodix.