The new science of possibility

Abstract

What is possible? Does the future really contain multiple alternative possibilities, or is everything determined in advance and inevitable? Where do possibilities come from? And how is human life shaped by both the awareness of possibilities, and the process of adapting to situations defined by multiple alternatives? This journal, Possibility Studies and Society, was designed to explore these and related questions. The current special issue is a result of a workshop sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation in September 2022 aiming to bring together multidisciplinary scholars from different career stages to discuss the new science of possibilities. Against the backdrop of the countryside around Dublin, the contributors to this special issue discussed ideas relating to how possibility is a core facet of the human experience (Glăveanu, 2023a; Ross, 2023a) and aimed to lay some of the foundation stones for the emerging academic field of Possibility Studies. In this editorial, we will summarise the papers but also draw together some of the key themes and tensions that we believe will drive the field as it emerges from an entanglement of different disciplinary perspectives. Each paper in this special issue draws from different domains’ viewpoint on what it means to say that the possible is essential to human becoming: Baumeister draws from the perspective of future thinking, social psychology and agency; Beghetto has a background in education; Copeland is an ethicist concerned with how ethics can be enacted in everyday life; Paulson and DeDeo are cognitive scientists interested in possibilities in AI; Kushnir is a developmental psychologist concerned with what children's cognitive trajectories can inform our understanding of possibility more generally; Glăveanu wishes to bridge the academic-practice divide and provides a framework for integration; List is a philosopher with a background in agency; Ross provides a view of cognition which emphasises the relationship between internal and external mechanisms; Sjåstad and Bo bridge research in behavioural economics and psychology. This combination exemplifies what is perhaps both a strength and a weakness of Possibility Studies as a discipline. It is a strength because many of the key questions are already being asked in different ways – and a weakness because parallel efforts in different fields may create redundancy. Nevertheless, there are some key themes which recur across the papers which we would like to draw out here and demonstrate how a combination of disciplinary perspectives can lead to greater insights.