The Epistemology Of The Future

It is not difficult to observe that many people spend a great deal of their lives preparing for expected future events.  The occurrences that they plan for rest on varying degrees of likelihood, as the very nature of the future is that it is unobserved at the present moment.  That the future has not occurred, as well as the fact that human limitations prevent one from directly perceiving into anything other than the present, undermines the claims of those who pretend to know for sure what awaits them.  Information about the future itself is largely impossible to obtain (with one major exception that will be addressed below).

In fact, evidences pointing to specific future events only tell one about the present, not the future: they at most reveal details about one's perceptions at the present moment.  It may seem as if it will rain if dark clouds appear overheard, for example, and yet it is possible that no rain will follow.  Seeing the clouds only proves that one is seeing the clouds; to conclude that it must rain is to make a mere assumption.  As far as epistemology goes, a claim about the future in this instance is sound only if it is rooted in seeming probability.

Probability estimates remain legitimate as long as they match the available evidence, but no amount of information received through the senses alone establishes that some particular event will occur.  There is always the possibility that even a seemingly unlikely thing could happen.  This does not leave us in a complete absence of knowledge about the future beyond perceptions, however.  In spite of the epistemological limitations that prohibit knowledge of exactly what will happen following the present moment, it is not the case that nothing about the future can be known.

The only things that can be known with absolute certainty about the future are that the laws of logic will apply by necessity (I use "things" in a plural sense because  logical truths do not encompass one single fact), existing regardless of what else might hypothetically cease to exist and restricting events to those which are logically possible.  There is no true knowledge of what will or must happen in the future other than this, but this does not mean that there is not genuine evidence suggesting that certain events will likely occur.