Understanding the past and the future

The correlation of the past, present and future is analyzed, based on two types of possibility thinking: retrospective counterfactual and prospective predictive. It is concluded that psychological science already has a large body of research on how a person understands the present, i.e. actual phenomena, events, situations. The purpose of the article is to shift the research focus from understanding the present to analyzing the characteristics of understanding the past and the future. It turns out that understanding the past is based on retrospective counterfactual thinking, rethinking what happened according to the principle "What would have happened if..?". Counterfactual arguments open up opportunities for people that would have been ignored without them. Understanding of the future is carried out through prospective predictive possibility thinking aimed at answering the question: "What happens if...?". Possibility thinking is actualized when, without focusing on options for changing a cognitive or communicative situation, it is impossible to understand its present state, as well as the potential of the possible. In these cases, external circumstances push the cognizing subject to move from the analysis of the actual to the study of the possible future. For the psychology of the possible, it is fundamental to understand the non-identity of the possible and the possibilistic. The category and phenomenon of the "possibilistic" differs from the "possible". The possible is something that can actually happen or could have happened; the possibilistic does not relate to the facts of reality, but to different focuses of their consideration, points of view on them. The possible is the ontology of cognition, and the possibilistic is epistemology.