Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Knowledge of something in advance of its occurrence, especially by extrasensory perception; clairvoyance.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Previous knowledge or cognition; antecedent examination.
  • noun A preliminary examination; specifically, in Scots law, a preliminary examination of a witness or of one likely to know something about a case, or the evidence taken down; especially, an examination of witnesses to a criminal act, before a judge, justice of the peace, or sheriff, by a procurator-fiscal, in order to know whether there is ground of trial, and to enable him to set forth the facts in the libel.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun Previous cognition.
  • noun (Scots Law) A preliminary examination of a criminal case with reference to a prosecution.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun parapsychology The ability to foresee the future.
  • noun parapsychology Knowledge of an event that is to occur in the future.
  • noun Scotland The practice of taking a factual statement from a witness before a trial.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun knowledge of an event before it occurs

Etymologies

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Examples

  • * The precognition is the record of the preliminary evidence on which the public officers charged in Scotland with duties entrusted to a grand jury in England, incur the responsibility of sending an accused person to trial.

    Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft 1885

  • For precognition, that is not the case whether a study subject gets the right answer 100% of the time or the wrong answer 100% of the time, the result is the same: a significant deviation from random chance in response to a future-stimulus.

    Boing Boing David Pescovitz 2011

  • JB, that kind of precognition you're talking about seems to happen all the time.

    What dreams may come 2008

  • Following our previous blog, we do want to relieve everyone of the Angst that McTaggart's ideas seem ineluctably to lead to, just as Einstein relieved the world of Buber's Angst, and in an earlier blog we mentioned that a sort of 'precognition' might be definable in terms of our new and less Angst-ridden description of physics.

    McTaggart, Buber, Swartz and Sri Aurobindo Tusar N Mohapatra 2006

  • Now 'precognition' or if we want to call it that 'presentiment' is a very popular (or populist) notion but one that is, for very good reasons a notion which is almost anathema to current highly respectable physics literature (Note 1), though not to the philosophy literature to the same extent.

    McTaggart, Buber, Swartz and Sri Aurobindo Tusar N Mohapatra 2006

  • The article gives a concise overview of research into 'psi phenomenon', such as precognition, clarevoyance and thought transference and considers many of the controversies in the field, with opinions from both 'believers' and 'skeptics'.

    Mind Hacks: Science of the psychic 2005

  • The article gives a concise overview of research into 'psi phenomenon', such as precognition, clarevoyance and thought transference and considers many of the controversies in the field, with opinions from both 'believers' and 'skeptics'.

    Mind Hacks: April 2005 Archives 2005

  • And I think what happens -- I would love to know, if I-- look, if I had this kind of precognition I'd go out and bet the lottery and that would be it.

    CNN Transcript Aug 5, 2002 2002

  • If "precognition" existed it would have long been used by some species somewhere, giving it an unbeatable evolutionary advantage.

    California Literary Review 2009

  • Finally there are Class III impossibilities, which seem to violate all the known laws of physics, such as precognition and perpetual motion machines.

    Madison.com - top 2009

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