HOW DO WE CONCEIVE THE FUTURE?

The theoretical philosophical interest in the future comes only after the practical one. Every philosophical reflection on the future builds on a practical approach towards the latter. As, on the one hand, human behavior is not fully determined while, on the other, people have the faculty of imagining future states of the world, everyone has an immediate practical interest in the future. Since human actions are determined by independently made decisions, people orient their actions according to purposes of their own choosing that lie in the future. In this paper I examine three different types of human approaches towards the future: predicting, intending, and promising. In their everyday experience, all individuals have developed some intuitive understandings of what constitutes a prediction, an intention, or a promise, which are resident in natural language as implicit meanings of words. Taking this everyday linguistic experience as a starting point, I try to formulate explicit understandings of predicting, intending, and promising. By predicting, we form an idea of the events we expect to happen. Insofar as predicting involves events that have not yet occurred and cannot be described, all predictions about them are uncertain. When the occurrence of particular events depends on how we ourselves will act, we develop a peculiar readiness to act in a particular way. Intention consists in this readiness to perform a given action. The only way others can learn that someone intends to perform a particular action is if the person declares this intention. Declaration of an intention for action entails no obligation to perform the action. Such an obligation arises only if one makes an utterance of another type, namely if one makes a promise. There is not merely an intention to perform a particular action but that this intention is so serious that the promiser is ready to suffer possible sanctions if he or she fails to perform as promised. There is a close interrelation between predicting, intending, and promising as three different ways in which humans approach the future. Without predictions of the future, intentions for action cannot be formed; without intentions, obligations cannot be undertaken through promises.