Responsible Futures Practices and Karl Popper

In the context of future-oriented thinking, the notion of “responsibility” is multivalent, and, with rare exception, ambiguously assigned in our academic research and foresight practices. The goal of this presentation is to identify component parts, developed by research and reflections by practitioners, which may form a basis for responsible futures (RFs) theory and practice. We explore the option for a component part of RF that is developed around research on the ethics of knowledge creation. This line of thinking is most conspicuously associated with the work of Karl Popper, in particular, the insight that knowledge grows through the moral principles associated with “good” conjecture and refutation. The latter, Popper’s famous philosophical observation about falsification, is well-known and widely discussed. The former is comparatively less well-known and rarely discussed in futures studies. Wendell Bell, for example, developed ideas around falsification for futures studies, but overlooked the significance of conjecture entirely. The significance of conjecture in the process of knowledge creation and for Responsible Futures Practice (RFP) , however, go under explored, and are developed upon in this presentation.