Prévoir, savoir, pouvoir – from Forecasting to Knowledge and Power

Abstract

There is less and less faith as to the possibility of forecasting since the rules of doing this are increasingly fallible. In the past many scenarii have been conceptualised in order to lower the barier of perception of the new phenomena. The more such scenarii are applied the bigger is the plausibility that one of these might be true, yet the more uncertainty which one. Sociology aware of its defeats in the past lost its faith in predictive potential to avoid repproach of being speculative. There is an increasing conviction that data science and scientists will manage to do it having Big Data at their disposal. Data scientists believe that neither socologists nor any other field experts in social sciences are necessary as data scientists themselves will do to interpret data and succeed in delivering appropriate and relevant policy and business oriented recommendations. The author claims our discipline is still in possession of important resources but sociologists should persuade themselves, the data science can do little without their assistance. The potential of sociology in forecasting is being confirmed by some „hard” scientists. More and more sociological research bring interesting and promising results in forecasting the social behaviour.