Abstract Thinking about the future in a scientific manner is often characterised by an illusion of knowledge, leading to precarious one-sidedness and false conclusions. The reasons for this are misinterpretations of core scientific concepts as well as vested interests in knowledge creation and scientific advice; these misinterpretations and interfering interests can prevail because there is no coherent set of rules on what a scientific enquiry into the future could look like. To provide a foundation for further discussion, this article takes the knowledge illusion seriously and drafts some epistemological concepts and methodological rules that could bridge this gap. Ways to think about the future in a scientific way correspond to scientific anticipation instead of knowledge creation, to a complex analytical worldview instead of determinism, to discourse and scepticism instead of critical rationalism, to illustrative thought experiments instead of explanatory prognoses, and to plausibility instead of probability. The concepts and rules for a scientific enquiry into the future developed in this article can help to clearly differentiate between multiple prognoses and scenarios, and to evaluate scenarios by scientific means.
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