Epistemological Explanation of Fortune-Telling, Soothsaying, Prescience, and the Likes

I have noticed two major schools of thought with respect to those who claim to foresee the future. The adherents of one school dismiss such claimants out of hand, decry the impossibility of their claims, and swiftly label them as frauds and charlatans. The adherents of the other school may dismiss some such claimants as snake oil salesmen but nonetheless superstitiously believe in the supernatural phenomena of prescient and psychic abilities of genuine soothsayers. Though I loosely fall into the former school of thought, I do reject the rigidity of many of my schoolmates’ position because their absolutist dismissal precludes them from considering the issue from a nuanced, philosophical perspective. While the view through the philosophical lens certainly does not lend credence to the latter school’s beliefs of an extraordinary nature, it does nonetheless reveal that the claims regarding the abject impossibility of foreseeing the future by the dogmatists in my midst are arbitrary and erroneous. Ironically, foreseeing the future is a widely practiced act and there is a remarkably prosaic explanation to its functioning.

The essential answer is as simple as the use of effective reasoning to predict what will happen—not what has happened (in the past) or what is happening (in the present). Note that when making predictions, one is imagining the outcome of a future event. In so doing, one is, by definition, engaging in the prediction of the future. One uses information that is, or at least seems, relevant to the issue at-hand and draws an inference about what is likely to happen. In syllogistic terms, the relevant items of information constitute the premises in support of an induced (i.e., inductively drawn) conclusion regarding a probable future outcome. One must also be adept at complementary reasoning techniques such as causation, correlation, and statistical probability. The more skilled one is at judging the degree of relevance of various items of information to a given issue and then applying sound principles of logic thereon, the more one is empowered to make accurate predictions (i.e., to foresee the future, in dramatic terms, or, to deliver prophesies, in overly-dramatic ones).

One can, of course, make errors in one’s predictive reasoning. Learning how to identify such errors necessarily precedes, depending on the complexity of the issue and the number of interrelated variables at play, eliminating or minimizing them from one’s predictive reasoning. Possible errors can include mistaking irrelevant information to be relevant or weighing marginally relevant information equally as, or more, heavily than highly relevant information during the reasoning process. With respect to relatively simple matters considered over a relatively short time horizon, it may be possible to completely eliminate errors from one’s predictive reasoning. On the other hand, when pondering the eventual outcome of complex issues over a relatively long time horizon, even the goal of merely minimizing such errors may become a formidable task.

The quality of relevance of an item of information to an issue can be judged through the evident potency of its relationship to the issue. For a premise to be relevant to a position there has to be some aspect that conjoins them in some way (or ways). If there are variables that somehow connect or associate the information to the issue then they are rightly characterized as being relevant. The greater the number of such conjoining variables, the greater the relevance of the information. The ingredient premise, of course, becomes irrelevant in the absence of that vital relationship. The information is irrelevant if it is independent of the issue. Utilizing irrelevant information in one’s predictive reasoning obviously increases the likelihood of making faulty predictions and this is why learning to minimize irrelevant information from the calculus is critical.

Foreseeing the future is not a magical phenomenon at its metaphysical core. Though not the subject of this blog, coincidence is usually the explanation in the case of extraordinary claims. In other, more sober, cases, as we have been discussing, it is a skill that is very much obtainable. Indeed, those most skilled and experienced eventually come to see omens.