Futures Research Rethinks Knowledge Itself for a Pluriversal World

Futures research has long wrestled with a deceptively simple question: how should we know the future? A new essay published in the European Journal of Futures Research argues that the discipline’s conventional Western epistemologies are no longer sufficient for an era defined by the Anthropocene, the artificial intelligence revolution and the post-colonial reckoning, and it proposes an ambitious alternative: a pluriversal foresight epistemology, complete with a schematic designed to hold many ways of knowing at once.

The article, authored by Raphaële Bidault-Waddington and published on 15 October 2026 as an open access research essay, emerges from a doctoral research project on futurescaping, a methodology the author is developing to address the future amid radical uncertainty and unprecedented change. The investigation is framed as the foundational epistemological groundwork for that larger project, and it will be beta tested on concrete topics, starting with the future of museums, knowledge institutions the author describes as deeply entangled with Western modernism and highly exposed to current transitions.

The method at the heart of the essay is deliberately retrospective and reconstructive. Bidault-Waddington revisits and extends Inayatullah’s seminal 1990 essay Deconstructing Reconstructing the Future, a post-structuralist critique of Western foresight epistemologies that also gave rise to his Causal Layered Analysis methodology. Inayatullah distinguished three epistemological categories in futures thinking, which the new essay renames Predictive, Cultural and Post-structural to avoid terminological confusion, and each is systematically reviewed, confronted with contemporary challenges and enriched with more recent theoretical inputs.

The first category, predictive epistemology, encompasses positivist and post-positivist approaches that assume reality exists independently of human observers and can be observed, described and explained through empirical protocols, models and, increasingly, algorithmic tools augmented with artificial intelligence. The essay notes that prediction has been a contested core question in futures research since the field’s emergence in the 1950s, with some scholars defending it as a legitimate purpose and others rejecting it, and that non-predictive epistemologies prevail in the field today. It also highlights a modern tension: the opacity of AI-driven methods jeopardizes the explainability principle at the core of positivist science.

Yet the essay resists a simple dismissal of prediction. Drawing on recent scholarship, it observes that positivist epistemology can consolidate climate change awareness and policy making in directions quite opposite to the pro-capitalism stance targeted by Inayatullah’s post-structural critique, and that positivist science is an open knowledge ecosystem, not owned by any central body, capable of serving a diversity of political and ideological prospects globally. Predictive countries such as China, Saudi Arabia and Iran now massively invest in environmental technologies, bio-engineering and AI models, raising the question of which worldviews and value systems are embedded in these globally distributed tools. The essay concludes that predictive epistemologies should remain a valid inquiry track and proof regime within a pluralistic foresight approach.

The second category, cultural epistemology, covers hermeneutic and interpretative approaches that make sense of reality through diverse cultural lenses, along with critical realism. Here the essay identifies two fundamental ambiguities of futures studies that remain unresolved: the elusive ontology of the future itself, which appears variously as images, signals, trends, scenarios and aspirations, and the scientific validity of methods that aim not at true futures but at credible, plausible, preferable, inclusive or transformative ones. Inayatullah’s contribution was to show how cultural epistemologies can drastically expand the framing of reality, introducing non-Western knowledge resources such as narratives, myths, metaphors and alternative cosmologies, from Chinese and Indian to Islamic traditions.

The essay then updates this category with contemporary developments. Science fiction and world-building are increasingly used to explore alternative futures, including in official Ministries of Defense in Europe, and Afrofuturism has entered the Handbook of Futures Studies. Artistic production is proposed as a legitimate epistemic resource, capable of accessing invisible layers of reality such as tacit knowledge, collective fears and imaginaries, while avoiding the risk Inayatullah warned of: freezing cultures in their past or official expressions. The essay also draws on theories of imagination, distinguishing imagery, imaginary and imaginal modes of mental work, and on Object-Oriented Ontology and speculative realism, which hold that so-called fictional ontologies do exist and have agency within a fully entangled, more-than-human world.

The third category, post-structural epistemology, is where the essay’s political stakes become explicit. Inayatullah framed epistemology as a politics of the real, of time, of discourse and of consciousness, and argued that futures studies often serves dominant actors, with the predictive expert occupying the role of the priest or the king’s adviser. The essay traces how decolonial thinkers extended this line: Quijano’s concept of coloniality, Mignolo’s call for epistemic disobedience and delinking, Santos’s warning against colonial epistemicide and his ecology of knowledges, and Glissant’s archipelagic thinking and poetics of epistemic creolization. It also engages Dussel’s transmodernity and pluriversality, Escobar’s design-oriented pluriverse, and Ramos’s scenario work on pluralism and science in post-normal times.

But the essay argues that these local and practical perspectives fall short on global political epistemology tensions, including AI opacity and world models, climate change and long-term sustainability, the post-truth paradigm and rising epistemic warfare, and social and planetary equity on one shared planet. The central question it poses is how to collectively make sense of one world shared by people with very diverse worldviews, epistemologies and senses of reality. As a resolution, the essay turns to Ferrando’s philosophical posthumanism and its principle of perspectivism, grounded in realism rather than relativism: it is the multiplication of situated viewpoints that allows reality to be grasped, with facts serving as nodes articulating perspectives in a shared landscape.

The essay’s concrete output is a five-level schematic, presented as a fluid scaping heuristic and world-building open framework. Its levels are Onto, covering ontologies, beings and agents, human and non-human; Micro, covering social uses, experiences and practices; Meso, covering structured societies, life-milieus and territories; Macro, covering planetary ecosystems and material and informational systems; and Cosmo, covering worldviews, wisdoms and cosmologies, with an Extro horizon for positioning viewpoints and introducing lenses. The author presents it as an open template to share viewpoints, map variables, organize ideas and sort tensions between perspectives, and as the foundation on which the futurescaping methodology will now be built. As an essay rather than a demonstration, the work is explicitly exploratory, with key learnings to be extracted and tested in the doctoral project that follows.

Subject of Research: A philosophical essay proposing a pluriversal epistemology and five-level schematic for futures research

Article Title: Designing a pluriversal foresight epistemology and schematic, an essay

Article References: Bidault-Waddington, R. (2026). Designing a pluriversal foresight epistemology and schematic, an essay. European Journal of Futures Research, 14(1), Article 39. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40309-026-00296-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40309-026-00296-6

Keywords: futures research, epistemology, foresight, pluriversalism, post-structuralism, decolonial theory, artificial intelligence, Inayatullah, posthumanism, museums, philosophy of science, world-building