Foreknowledgeare

Foreknowledgeare is a neologism used in philosophy and speculative fiction to denote a hypothetical condition in which an agent possesses comprehensive foreknowledge of all future events and states of the world, including its own actions and their outcomes. It is treated as a conceptual tool to examine how knowledge of the future would interact with agency, causation, and responsibility.

The concept is typically discussed in two forms. Strong foreknowledgeare denotes infallible, universal foreknowledge of every future contingency, while weak foreknowledgeare describes partial, probabilistic, or context-limited foreknowledge. Both forms raise questions about whether knowing the future is compatible with free choice.

Philosophical implications include challenges to standard accounts of free will and moral responsibility. If the future is foreknown with certainty, some argue that choice becomes illusory; others argue that foreknowledge does not determine action and may coexist with freedom under certain compatibilist frameworks. The notion also engages debates about predestination and determinism, and the extent to which prediction implies control or necessity.

In practice, foreknowledgeare appears mainly as a thought experiment and narrative device in philosophy of time and science fiction. Critics caution that as a hypothetical extreme, it may blur distinctions between epistemic certainty and causal influence, and that it should be treated as an idealized tool rather than a claim about real-world phenomena.