Steps Toward an Explicit Ontology of the Future

During the past fifty years, futures studies have assumed an increasingly explicit professional nature. Practices have become more tailored to the needs of customers and methods have become more robust. On the other hand, theories able to support and guide practice have remained somewhat underdeveloped, as shown by the finding that most practitioners still adhere to the distinction between facta and futura drawn by Bertrand de Jouvenel in the 1960s (de Jouvenel, 1967). While the difference between facta and futura has the merit of signaling a clearly perceivable difference, we shall see that it is seriously problematic. The issue is not only that the facta/futura dichotomy is too primitive a distinction to provide a basis for the field of futures studies, but also that it wrongly suggests that the future is only a matter of mental habits, be these positive expectations or fears. Wendell Bell's subsequent articulation of the facta/futura distinction adds 'dispositions' to futura (Bell, 2003). Dispositions are situations that may become actual if properly activated. With the introduction of dispositions, futura are no longer confined to cognitive, mental and emotional attitudes, they also become a problem of reality. Futura are thus split between futura connected to expectations, images, hopes and fears – in short, cognitive aspects – and other futura conAbstract