Editorials and Other Reflections on Possibility

This ending commentary on this inaugural issue of Possibility Studies and Society surveys the papers submitted by over 30 scholars from diverse fields and backgrounds that explore the emerging field of Possibility Studies through the lens of their respective disciplines and theoretical perspectives. It draws out the complexities of the really and ideally possible, the future and the past, and reality and imagination before moving to examine the purpose of Possibility Studies with a focus on political change, education, and hope. It calls for an embrace of non-dualistic attitudes across all domains and an engagement with the energy generated by collaborative difference.

This article challenges the traditional view of progress as a linear trajectory from ignorance to knowledge, arguing that creative cognition involves an extended and dynamic system of non linear possibility generation. It emphasises the importance of an externalist approach which takes into account the role of objects in the environment in shaping cognition. Accidents are seen as a key trigger for creative thinking, as they disrupt planned cognitive trajectories and introduce novel elements into the cognitive ecosystem, leading to new possibilities that were previously inconceivable. However, how we filter these opportunities is rarely explored. The feeling of impasse, when problem-solvers are stuck and unable to find a solution, is also explored as an important generative state for creativity. While this state may be unpleasant, research suggests that persevering through it can lead to a sense of ‘aha’ and may be actively sought out by creatives. The article concludes that further research is needed to fully understand the relationship between aversive states, chance and human imagination in order to understand creative thinking.

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.

The phrase enacting chance denotes the generation of possibilities, that is, to make something possible. —Lambros Malafouris, this issue.

Possibilities studies is concerned with understanding what it means to have a sense of the multiple and open-ended nature of our presents, futures, and pasts (Glăveanu, 2023)—what Baumeister calls the matrix of maybes (Baumeister & Alquist, 2023). From the perspective of chance and serendipity scholars, this uncertainty comes from the dynamic interaction of people and things that arise naturally from living in a world in flux and reflect the dynamic nature of environmental change (Rietveld, 2022).