Logos & Episteme

Volume 3, Issue 1, 2012

Knowing Future Contingents

This paper argues that we know the future by applying a recent solution of the problem of future contingents to knowledge attributions about the future. MacFarlane has put forward a version of assessment-context relativism that enables us to assign a truth value 'true' (or 'false') to future contingents such as “There Will Be A Sea Battle Tomorrow.” Here I argue that the same solution can be applied to knowledge attributions about the future by dismissing three disanalogies between the case of future contingents and the case of knowledge attributions about the future. Therefore none of the traditional conditions for knowledge can be utilized to deny that we know the future, as I argue in the last section.