Great site. How does our approach to knowledge about the past differ from our approach to knowledge about the future?

Comments

Others may have things to add, but one obvious way is that many of our beliefs about the past are caused by things that happened in the past and produced traces, either directly or indirectly, in our brains. But on the usual view about how the universe is wired up, our beliefs about the future aren't caused by future events.

This doesn't make knowledge claims about the past uniformly more secure than knowledge claims about the future. Some facts about the past may be well nigh inaccessible; their traces may be faint or non-existent, and there may be no good general grounds for inferring. (For example: I'd guess that there's almost no hope that anyone will ever know exactly how many people were on the swath of ground now marked out by the University of Maryland campus at noon on April 3, 1808. But -- skeptical worries aside -- we can reasonably claim to know that the earth will rotate on its axis over the next 24 hours.

Still, knowledge of the past has a certain priority. Our knowledge that the earth will rotate on its axis over the next 24 hours is based on things we know about the past and generalizations that this knowledge supports. Something like this is true in general: knowledge of future events is grounded in knowledge of the past, but not vice-versa.

Read another response by Allen Stairs

Read another response about Knowledge, Time