The study of the future, social forecasting, mutations: Semiotic challenges and contributions

The research fieldwork dedicated to trend analysis and foresight/ forecast scenarios building, represents an unusual raid in an area where economic and social sciences have invested many efforts. Nevertheless, the semiotic dimension of this subject is not sufficiently thorough; many issues are at stake: – the definition criteria of the corpus; – the selection of trend signals, the selection criteria; – the narrative framework of scenarios; – the deep logic permitting to describe the relationships between the trends and to trace their evolution; – the prevision as mutation logic, anticipation exercise, simulation activity; the different application contexts of the anticipation science.