Speculative may refer to:

In arts and entertainment

  • Speculative art (disambiguation)
  • Speculative fiction, which includes elements created out of human imagination, such as the science fiction and fantasy genres
  • Speculative Fiction Group, a Persian literature group whose website which is named Fantasy Academy
  • Speculative poetry, a genre of poetry that focuses on fantastic, science fictional and mythological themes
  • Speculative screenplay, or spec script, a non-commissioned, unsolicited screenplay
  • The Speculative Society, a Scottish Enlightenment society dedicated to public speaking and literary composition, founded in 1764

In computing

  • Speculative execution, in computer systems is doing work, the result of which may not be needed. This performance optimization technique is used in pipelined processors and other systems
  • Speculative multithreading, a dynamic parallelization technique that depends on out-of-order execution to achieve speedup on multiprocessor CPUs. It is a kind of speculative execution that occurs at the thread level as opposed to the instruction level

In economics

  • Speculation, the practice of engaging in risky transactions in an attempt to profit from fluctuations in market value
  • Speculative attack, denoting precipitous acquisition of assets by previously inactive speculators
  • Speculative demand, a demand for financial assets that is not dictated by real transactions such as trade or financing
  • Speculative development, in real estate
  • Speculative grade, a grade of bond below investment grade, having higher risk, but typically pay higher yield than better quality bonds
  • Economic bubble, when assets trade at a price that far exceeds an asset's intrinsic value due to speculation

In linguistics

  • Speculative mood, a grammatical mood found in some languages
  • Speculative grammarians, members of a school of grammarian philosophy known as Modism, active in Europe in the 13th and 14th centuries
  • Speculative Grammarian, a parody science journal

In philosophy

  • Speculative philosophy, an aspect of Continental philosophy
  • Speculative realism, a movement in contemporary philosophy
  • Speculative reason, theoretical as opposed to practical thought

Other uses

  • Speculative damages, in law, damages claimed by a plaintiff for losses that may occur in the future
  • Speculative fire, a military tactic of firing to draw enemy fire and confirm the enemy's presence
  • Speculative mason, in Freemasonry
  • Speculative Period, defined in terms of archaeological methods employed in North America between 1492 and 1840

See also

  • Speculation (disambiguation)