Showing posts with label doxastic goods. Show all posts
Showing posts with label doxastic goods. Show all posts

Friday, November 1, 2019

Guessing and omniscience

Suppose that yesterday you guessed that today I’d freely mow the lawn, and today I did freely mow the lawn. Then, the correctness of your guess is a doxastic good you possessed.

(Note: If the future is open, so that there was no truth yesterday that today I’d mow the lawn, it’s a little tricky to say when you possessed it. For when you guessed, it wasn’t true that you possessed the doxastic good of guessing correctly. Rather, now that it has become the case that this doxastic good is attributable to you.)

Now no one can have a doxastic good that God lacks. Thus, God had to have at least guessed the same thing yesterday. And God has no doxastic bads. So, God never gets anything wrong. But the only plausible way it can be true that

  1. God always gets right the things we guess right, and

  2. God never gets things wrong

is if God has comprehensive knowledge of the future.