Abstract

New problems of considerable theoretical and practical interest have been developing in the course of the intensive treatment, in the recent past, of questions of social prediction. A number of such problems are associated with the phenomena of what are termed "self-fulfilling" and "self-destructing" forecasts, to which great attention is given in contemporary philosophical and sociological literature abroad. The specifics of the relationship between past, present, and future in the functioning of social systems, the interconnection among the goals human beings set and their notions about the future, the influence of forecasting on the course of historical events, the structure of the process of prediction, and the peculiar nature of the truth of social prognostications — these are only a few of the interesting and complicated epistemological and methodological problems having a direct relation to the phenomena in question