An Answer to the Question “Liberating the Future from the Past? Liberating the Past from the Future?”

Abstract

The future is uncertain; no one can tell for sure that the sun will rise tomorrow. Elaborate predictions are made on the basis of sophisticated “scientific” theories, and much assurance is derived from them, and much arrogance displayed as a result. But we have long lost the hope that any such theory can unveil relations of causal efficacy, that it can fathom the essence of things; all that is accessible to us is past regularities — that’s all the content “causal efficacy” can have for us, as Hume pointed out. So any prediction proffered by those regularities presupposes the belief that the same regularities will continue to take place: that the future will resemble the past. And no one knows that. Besides, if what no one knows were true, then it would continue regularly to be the case, as was without exception in the past, that all scientific theories will at some point prove false and be discarded. Which places us in an uncomfortable dilemma: either there is no grounding for the belief that any prediction we make is true (however true predictions may have been so far) or there is grounding for the belief that all current bases for predictions are false.