of the course of time. The comprehension of these three states of time came to the humanity only after the invention of written language. In fact, the past becomes only then “turned back”, when it is not only remembered but is written. The differentiation of the past, present, and future is shown most
clearly by the Judaic-Christian tradition.
Really, the difference between the past, present, and future is not very clear. The present does not exist at all. Indeed, if social processes have some duration, they are passing continuously from the past into the future at every moment.
That is, they are already in the past, or they are already not in the future. While we are speaking, each word is already in the past prior to the termination of a phrase. In the general case, the socio-philosophical thought admits that the past and the future allegedly meet in the present. Moreover, it is already impossible to influence the past, the present itself is influenced, and the future
is influenced only in potency.
The humanity always wished to know about its future, and the capacities for foresight were highly appreciated. Ethnography and archaeology evidence for that the problem of future worried the people still on the early stages of development of the society. At first, it was fixed in fairy-tales and myths which are now by important objects for the analysis of various archetypes.
Beginning from the times of antiquity, the genre of prognoses develops in the form of utopias. Among the most famous utopias, we name the Plato’s idea of a social system where philosophers govern the state. In the Middle Ages, a number of prominent utopias was created (“Utopia” by T. More, “Town of the Sun” by T. Campanella, “New Atlantis” by F. Bacon), where the authors posed the problems of ideal social system and moral values. In the XVIIIth century, utopias used widely the ideas of Enlightenment.
The second half of the XIXth century saw the start of the impetuous development of scientific fantasy. In 1948, J. Orwell created the famous antiutopia “1984”, where he posed the socio-philosophical problems of control over the future through the manipulation by the past.
In the 1960–70s, the attempts to search for a reliable methodology of scientific prognostication were carried out. They were associated with the development of activity of the so-called Rome club created in 1968 by the initiative of A. Peccei, the Italian businessman and public figure. The club joined scientists which had the aim to attract attention of politicians and the public to global problems of contemporaneity. In the first lecture at the Rome club named “The limits of growth” (1972), the American professor D. Meadows made conclusion on the collapse of the humanity associated with the exhaustion of resources and contamination of the environment. He proposed to search for a withdrawal from this state on the basis of “zero growth” of the population and industry.
The distinctions of global modelling from the futurology of the 1960s are not only in the use of computer-based models, but in the application of the alternative multivariant approach to the determination of tendencies of the development of the future.
The general information about the future is derived through the foresight, i.e., the grounded supposition about the future state of phenomena of the nature and society and about the phenomena which are not known at present, but can be revealed. In this case, a prognosis is a probabilistic opinion about the state of various phenomena in the future.
A prognosis is an integral function of science whose development takes place with reinforcement of the prognostic function. Prognostication has also a great applied meaning.
The important problem of the methodology of prognostication is the revelation of factors which determine the future which follows from the present and has roots in the past. The law of causality states: a reason conditions obligatorily a consequence. In fact, such a causality induces the basic problems of prognostication which were analyzed by the Russian researcher O. Panarin.
In particular, he emphasized that the same reason can generate different consequences. The determinated hierarchies “reason — consequence” and “essence — phenomenon” do not always act in highly organized systems such as the society and its social life. In addition, any list of the a priori reasons
which we construct to make a determinated conclusion as for the future is always incomplete. Moreover, many processes which take place in the society’s life are connected not by causal-resultative ties, but by the relations of complementarity.
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