Two problems with knowing the future

David Hunt

pp. 207-223

in: L. N. Oaklander (ed), The importance of time, Berlin, Springer, 2001

Abstract

Knowledge is a good thing. But might it be one of those good things of which one can have too much? Perhaps so, if the knowledge in question is foreknowledge. Two concerns over excess foreknowledge have attracted particular attention in the literature. One is that holding a belief about how the future will turn out thereby excludes that portion of the future from being an object of the believer's own agency. The idea is that agency is a matter of intentional action, and such action — including activities, like deliberating and deciding, which are oriented toward the formation of intentions — is stultified by an antecedent belief about what one will do. If this is indeed the case, and impotence is an unacceptable price to pay for prescience, it is evidently possible for someone to have more knowledge than is good for him.¹ The other concern regarding foreknowledge is that there are circumstances in which it is incompatible with libertarian freedom. The circumstances in question are those in which the knower is infallible. The problem is that infallible knowledge rules out even the possibility of someone acting differently than he is known to act, while infallible foreknowledge rules out this possibility in advance. The latter, however, negates a crucial requirement of the libertarian conception of freedom; so if it is better that the universe contain at least some (libertarian) freedom than that it contain an infallible knower who knows absolutely everything even before it happens, there are conditions under which someone might have more knowledge than it is good for anyone to have.²