The philosophical stack: in praise of social theory for futures practitioners

I believe it’s important for people who work in futures and foresight to read widely in the social-theoretical literatures, not in order to acquire any particular philosophy, but rather to cultivate a philosophical habit of mind, while also collecting a range of ways of looking at the world.

This essay is an extended argument for that position, as well as a trailer for my first “semester” of deep reads here at Worldbuilding Agency, in which I’ll be going back to some books that have shaped my own thinking and approach, and digging out what I believe to be the most important aspects for those of us whose work involves thinking about times yet to come. If you’re in a hurry, the list of eight books that I’ll be covering over the months ahead is at the bottom of the piece—but I invite you to take ten minutes to understand why I’m doing this, and what value it might offer you.

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Now, what do I mean by social theory? I’m casting the term a bit wider than its formal academic definition, perhaps, but it’s a famously fuzzy category to start with, and I think it’s the best way to bundle up writing and thinking about the dynamics and function of human societies. A big chunk of the resulting category is basically history, but that’s not at all to demean it—quite to the contrary! The rest ranges from anthropology to urbanism, and (in my case at least) looks toward ethnography, Science and Technology Studies, Actor-Network Theory, social practice theory, philosophy-of-tech and philosophy-of-science, with a preference for work that blends some empirics with its hypothetics: I want to read how people think things work, but I usually want those arguments illustrated with interesting examples.

“But hang on, Paul,” you may be thinking, “futures and foresight has theories of its own, does it not?” To which the answer is yes, it does—but most of them sit at the bottom end of what we might call the philosophical stack.

Futures and foresight burgeons with frameworks: handy bundles of thinking tools through which you might work with the world you’re studying. However, you also need to have some ideas about that world itself in order to think about it in useful ways, for reasons I will explain.

Let’s start by getting some scary-seeming words onto the table, and explaining them as simply as possible. What I’m calling the philosophical stack comprises four layers:

• ontology is the matter of what there is;
• epistemology is the matter of what we can know about what there is;
• methodology is the matter of how you’ll approach and acquire that knowledge; and
• method is the nuts-and-bolts matter of the actual actions you’ll take to do so.

(In practice, of course, all these terms are contested to a greater or lesser degree—because what would academia be without things to argue about? But this is how they were nutshelled for me, and it’s a good enough place to start.)

Most foresight frameworks operate at the level of method and methodology. This is entirely fitting, given the practical and pragmatic orientation of much work in the field: gathering data of various types, sorting and analysing and structuring it, bringing together a wide range of ideas and perspectives, and running collaborative processes through which these goals are to be achieved. Method is what you actually do, and methodology is how you understand what you do to be justified.

But you nonetheless need to have some sort of explicit epistemology and ontology—not least because, if you don’t make it explicit, then you’re operating on the default ontological and epistemological assumptions of the context in which you were raised (which, it’s well worth noting, may well not be the same as the default assumptions in the context where you’re doing the work).

Lacking a theory-stack is an obstacle for any rigorous research practice, but perhaps particularly for work in a field where the central concern is change: if you’re not thinking about what there is and what can be known about it, then you’re missing a big part of the picture. That having been said, a lot of what you’re missing is what an artist might describe as negative space: in ontological terms, you need to know what isn’t, as well as what is. (Or, in epistemological terms—and with apologies for invoking the baleful shade of Donald Rumsfeld—known unknowns are preferable to unknown unknowns.)

But most importantly, perhaps, you need to appreciate not only the bigger picture, but the changeability thereof. This is why history is important, not just for foresight folk but also more generally. What there is and what we can know about it is changing constantly—although with regard to the former, you might reasonably argue that what there is never changes, only our understanding and/or appreciation thereof. (If you found yourself thinking that, or something similar, then give yourself a pat on the back, because you were making an onto-epistemological argument!)

That’s also why both theory and history should be held lightly: both are perspectival, laying (for the most part) no claims to the supposedly objective truths of the physical sciences, at least in more recent work. Theory and history are fundamentally interpretive, which is to say subjective; they rely at root on the assembly of facts and interpretations into stories as a core aspect of analysis and synthesis. To put it another way, they are forms of sensemaking—and as that word implies, sense is never found, only made; no object can be made sense of without a subject for it to make sense to.

The subject/object dichotomy, just discussed, is a core problem of metaphysics, and has been for arguably the entire history of western philosophy. To return to our list from earlier, metaphysics is that which lies above (or beyond) ontology—or, some would argue, the tree of which ontology is a mere branch. Philosophy at this level can be fun, or it can be infuriating, or it can be both at once—but it’s rarely practical, which is why I’m not going to to cover much of it here, if any.

My own extremely janky take on the distinction between philosophy and (social) theory is that the latter wants to understand the world in order to intervene in some way, while the former just wants to understand for its own sake. Social theory is more practical, in other words—though I’ll concede that may be hard to swallow when you’re wading through the writing of Judith Butler or Deleuze or whoever.

Unless you’re a devotee of the RAND-descended schools of positivist operations research—which I find unlikely, as you’d probably not have bothered reading this far—then you probably already understand foresight to be a sensemaking discipline, albeit one that faces in the other direction: history and theory tell stories to make sense of what has already happened, while foresight tells stories to make sense of what may yet happen. At the very least, then, reading history can provide you with examples and inspiration for that work of storytelling: by way of analogy, a good musician should listen to lots of different music, including stuff that’s well outside their usual genre and era. (Otherwise you’ll end up sounding like the one-chord wonders of Big Consult, competing to churn out a slightly more compelling version of what all the others are already playing. Yawn.)

But it’s not (just) about tone and style; it’s about trying to explain how things happen. Not because this will enable you to predict anything—although you can start talking about predetermineds, which are less glamorous than predictions, while also being more important and useful—but because it will enable you to hypothesise about outcomes by drawing on a range of different theoretical models.

Thanks to my good friend and colleague Andrew Curry, I have become a devotee of an aphorism ascribed to the late statistician George Box: “all models are wrong, but some models are useful”. The more models you’ve seen in action, the more options you’ve got to hand, and the more facility you’ll have for grabbing one by instinct and getting a usable analysis quickly.

I really want to emphasise that theories should be treated as swappable. That is tantamount to blasphemy in some disciplines—which is the reason we call them disciplines; as Foucault observed, they’re all about keeping you in line with the liturgy. But I tend to argue that futures isn’t a discipline, but rather a field: a horizontal plane, if you like, rather than a vertical. Outside of academia, at least, you’ll not get into any trouble for shopping around. You’ll also be a more adaptable thinker, which means you can do better work for your clients or bosses.

Think of theory, then as strong opinions, weakly held. I’m very fond of the analogy of the optician’s trail frame: your array of theories is like the tray of lenses and other gizmos that the optometrist can click in and out of the apparatus. “Does it look clearer like this… or like this?” At first the differences are coarse and obvious, but eventually you get to a point where neither option looks better, just differently imperfect… and as my fellow middle-aged people know all too well, one set of lenses might be very helpful for seeing smaller things at a great distance, but only at the cost of making it much harder to see larger things close by!

There are always trade-offs, in other words, and even “perfect” 20-20 vision has its limitations—not least of which being that we can only see ahead of ourselves and not behind. But we can compensate and readjust, and we can use not only the theoretical equivalent of spectacles but also microscopes and telescopes. With time, and a willingness to try lots of different options, you’ll eventually develop a prescription of lenses that allows you to do your day-to-day work, plus perhaps another set for driving, or for reading the small print of more technical texts. This is good and practical—but it’s important to get your eyes tested on the regular, and to experiment with new lenses you’ve not tried before.

(And this is where the analogy breaks down, because I doubt there are many accredited opticians who would recommend that you test your own eyes at home and collect as wide a range of weird and wonderful lenses as possible. But as the optician in this overstretched metaphor, that’s exactly what I would recommend nonetheless.)

I believe that curiosity is a prerequisite for doing useful work in this sector. I remember that Jamais Cascio, when asked what sort of person is best qualified for futures work, used to respond “an easily-distracted generalist”. There’s a tendency, particularly among specialists, to dismiss generalism, but that dismissal ignores the restlessness implied by the first part of Cascio’s formulation: a generalist is not someone who merely knows the general things a member of the general population might be expected to know, but rather someone whose constant hunger for knowledge is unconstrained by disciplinary boundaries.

I see significant merit in generalism thus conceived, partly due to it being my own point of vantage; however, I am also aware of its shortcomings, for much the same reasons. I have found the following metaphor quite helpful over the years: academic disciplines are verticals in the field of knowledge, and very necessary, but futures and foresight is a horizontal practice that exchanges breadth for depth. Much as with the dismissal of the generalist, it is tempting to assume that breadth is the easy option, even the lazy option—but nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, I might even argue that it’s the harder option, for one has to read and research very widely, without the map of classic routes that a discipline provides, and indeed while drawing one’s own map.

But my final and perhaps most honest argument in favour of reading widely is quite personal: I simply don’t trust knowledge workers who don’t seem very interested in knowledge, just as I wouldn’t trust a carpenter who didn’t seem very interested in wood. If you’re just nodding along to whatever’s trending on LinkedIn this week, then what do you really know? There’s no evolutionary advantage to following if the rest of the herd decides that the best grazing will be found over the edge of the nearest cliff.

OK, then—every second Wednesday for the rest of this year, I’ll be sharing what I believe to be the most futures-relevant ideas from the following books:

• 16th September 2026: Staying With The Trouble by Donna J Haraway
• 30th September 2026: The Shock of the Old by David Edgerton
• 14th October 2026: The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Tsing
• 28th October 2026: Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan
• 11th November 2026: Comfort, Cleanliness & Convenience by Elizabeth Shove
• 25th November 2026: In The Long Run by Jonathan White
• 9th December 2026: On the Origin of Stories by Brian Boyd
• 23rd December 2026: Sacred Economics by Charles Eisenstein

I reserve the right to change this list as I work my way through it; please consider it a prospectus rather than a promise. I’d be delighted if you’d like to read along with me, and if you want to publish your own readings, I would be glad to link to them from mine—think of it as an online reading group, if you like, which you can join for just one or two titles or the whole run.

(In fact, I’d be happy to host an online discussion session for fellow theory-heads; if that sounds like you, drop me a line and we’ll see if we can set something up.)

Thanks for your attention, as always; I hope you’ll be back in a fortnight’s time for a look at Haraway’s much-cited (but perhaps rather-less-read?) Staying With the Trouble.