This project falls in the area of decision making under uncertainty and aims to develop a framework to understand how actors construct the space of hypothetical future events they use to guide their choices between alternative actions. This framework will provide criteria to analyse the reliability of existing knowledge and the potential for surprising events to emerge in different social contexts, and could therefore be of considerable importance in times of rapid and often unpredictable change.
The project is grounded in conceptual work. It aims to recast a problem in economics and decision theory within a social theory framework, and to address this problem drawing on insights from the philosophy of time consciousness and social-theoretic analysis of social positions and action within them.
This research contributes to the ISRF goals in several ways. First, interest in the imagination of the future is building and converging from several disciplinary viewpoints, as reflected in the ISRF workshop in Amsterdam and in two issues of the Bulletin. Second, the opening up of economics to methods and insights from other social sciences is a core objective of ISRF, and the Political Economy Research Fellowships seem to be pivotal for that objective. Third, this project is unlikely to be funded by other bodies, for at least three reasons:
it does not aim to provide an incremental contribution to an established debate, but to define a new problem and devise a suitable analytical framework;
it proposes an interdisciplinary approach to a problem in economics, relying on conceptual analysis rather than mathematical modelling; and
instead of trying to subsume insights from the social sciences under an economics framework, as is often the case with economists’ attempts at interdisciplinarity, it aims to address a problem in economics by casting it within a broader social-theoretic framework.