Qu’est ce que la prospective ? Is Foresight a Science, a Discipline or Neither?

There is obviously no science of the future.

Might foresight claim the status of human science on the same basis as history? Drawing on the seeds of the future in the same way as history draws on the traces of the past, foresight (in its ‘futures studies’ dimension) might be seen as constructing stories of possible futures that are akin to historians’ narratives about the past. Or basing ourselves on the fact that foresight represents an aid to decision-making, we might take the view that its theoretical and practical contributions form part of decision-making processes and it would then be a branch of management sciences, for example.

Cross-disciplinary by nature, is foresight destined to become a discipline as such? The question remains open. Nonetheless, foresight or futures studies is not currently recognized as a discipline in France. Yet, for some sixty years now, the study of the future has been developing, professionalizing and equipping itself with tools. There is a non-negligible corpus of theoretical studies and applications. All of that, taken together, might therefore properly be regarded as a subject field.

If foresight is not officially regarded as a discipline today, it nonetheless has all the attributes to enable it to be recognized as such.