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The Open Future
Edited by Sam Baron (University of Melbourne)
About this topic
| Summary | The open future category deals with issues pertaining to the fixity of the future. Are propositions about the future true now? Or do such propositions lack a truth-value? These questions connect up to important debates surrounding free-will and deliberation. The open future resides within the temporal ontology category as it has been argued that the openness of the future hangs on the existence of the future. Accordingly, positions such as presentism and the growing block theory are touted as better according with the openness of the future because of their (comparatively) thrifty ontologies. |
| Key works | Anscombe 1956 contains an early contemporary examination of Aristotle’s problem of future contingents, while MacFarlane 2003 offers a recent and influential solution to the problem based on a context of assessment. Dummett 1964 focuses on an argument concerning the asymmetry between past and future, and contains an argument against fatalism. Belnap 1992 argues for a blend of relativity and indeterminism, and Belnap & Green 1994 argue for an open future as rooted in a branching structure of time without a distinguished ‘actual’ future branch. Barnes & Cameron 2008 aim to show that the open future is compatible with determinism about the laws of nature as well as an unrestricted principle of bivalence. Besson & Hattiangadi 2014 argue that intuition supports the bivalence of future contingents, Todd 2021 argues that future contingents are false, and Briggs & Forbes 2012 argue that future contingents can have truth values. Additionally, Miller 2005 argues that the open future is compatible with time travel. |
| Introductions | See the collected papers in Correia & Iacona 2012. See also Øhrstrøm & Hasle 2011. |
Show all references
Related
Siblings
- Eternalism (279)
- Growing Block Views (121)
- Presentism (453)
- Determinism (877)
- Fatalism (336)
- Temporal Eliminativism (72)
- Temporal Ontology, Misc (143)
Contents
323 found
Order:
| 1 — 50 / 323 |
- Assessment Sensitivity about Future Contingents, Vindication and Self-Refutation.Corine Besson & Anandi Hattiangadi - manuscriptJohn MacFarlane has recently argued that his brand of truth relativism – Assessment Sensitivity – provides the best solution to the puzzle of future contingents: statements about the future that are metaphysically neither necessary nor impossible. In this paper, we show that even if we grant all of the metaphysical, semantic and pragmatic assumptions in terms of which MacFarlane sets and solves the puzzle, Assessment Sensitivity is ultimately self-refuting.
- Evaluating future-tensed sentences in changing contexts.Andrea Bonomi & Fabio Del Prete - manuscriptAccording to the actualist view, what is essential to the truth conditions of a future-tensed sentence ‘it will be the case that ϕ’ is reference to the unique course of events that will become actual. On the other hand, the modal view has it that the truth conditions of such a sentence require that the truth of ϕ be already “settled” at the time of utterance, where “being settled at time t” is defined by universal quantification over a domain of (...)
- Modeling future indeterminacy in possibility semantics.Fabrizio Cariani - manuscriptPossibility semantics offers an elegant framework for a semantic analysis of modal logic that does not recruit fully determinate entities such as possible worlds. The present papers considers the application of possibility semantics to the modeling of the indeterminacy of the future. Interesting theoretical problems arise in connection to the addition of object-language determinacy operator. We argue that adding a two-dimensional layer to possibility semantics can help solve these problems. The resulting system assigns to the two-dimensional determinacy operator a well-known (...)
- The Modal Future Hypothesis Debugged.Fabrizio Cariani - manuscriptThis note identifies and corrects some problems in developments of the thesis that predictive expressions, such as English "will", are modals. I contribute a new argument supporting Cariani and Santorio's recent claim that predictive expressions are non-quantificational modals. At the same time, I improve on their selectional semantics by fixing an important bug. Finally, I show that there are benefits to be reaped by integrating the selection semantics framework with standard ideas about the future orientation of modals.
- Hypertemporal Humeanism and the Open Future.Benjamin Smart - manuscriptTake strong open-future Humeanism (OFH) to comprise the following three tenets: (i) that truth supervenes on being (ii) that there is a dynamic present moment, and (iii) that there are no future facts; that is, contingent propositions about the future obtain truth values only when their referents are actualised (Tooley 1997). On the face of it this is a deeply problematic metaphysic - if there are no future facts then prima facie the Humean can neither provide laws of nature, nor (...)Remove from this listExport citation
Bookmark - How to Russell Open the Future.Patrick Todd - manuscriptShort abstract: this is a reply to Schoubye and Rabern's 2017 paper, in Mind, to my own 2016 paper, also in Mind, "Future Contingents are All False! On Behalf of a Russellian Open Future." -/- Long abstract: There is a familiar philosophical position – sometimes called the doctrine of the open future – according to which future contingents (claims about underdetermined aspects of the future) systematically fail to be true. For well over 2000 years, however, open futurists have been accused (...)Remove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- Aristotelian indeterminacy and partial belief: Including case studies of the open future and vague survival.Robert Williams - manuscriptRemove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- Acting in the Garden of Forking Paths.Giacomo Andreoletti - forthcoming - Erkenntnis.The Garden of Forking Paths is a popular theory of agency in the context of branching time. It has two main elements. First, we have the idea that the future is open because it consists of several alternative futures. Second, agents are sometimes able to act in ways that determine which future, among the available ones, is selected and actualized. In this paper, I argue that the Garden of Forking Paths is, upon closer inspection, inherently implausible. More specifically, I first (...)
- Our Naïve Representation of Time and of the Open Future.Batoul Hodroj, Andrew J. Latham & Kristie Miller - forthcoming - Dialectica.It’s generally thought that we naively or pre-theoretically represent the future to be open. While philosophers have modelled future openness in different ways, it’s unclear which, if any, captures our naïve sense that the future is open. In this paper we focus on just one way the future might count as being open: by being nomically open, and empirically investigate whether our naïve representation of the future as open is partly constituted by representing the future as nomically open. We also (...)
- Review of Patrick Todd, The Open Future. Why Future Contingents are All False. [REVIEW]David P. Hunt - forthcoming - Zeitschrift Für Theologie Und Philosophie.
- Defending The Open Future: Replies to MacFarlane, Green, Wasserman, and Bigg & Miller.Patrick Todd - forthcoming - Analytic Philosophy.These are my materials (a short precis, and replies to John MacFarlane, Mitchell Green, Ryan Wasserman, and Anthony Bigg and Kristie Miller) for a symposium on my book, _The Open Future: Why Future Contingents are All False_ (OUP, 2021) in *Analytic Philosophy*. [The contribution from MacFarlane is available on his website, those from Wasserman and Green are on their Academia profiles, and the contribution from Bigg and Miller is on Miller's PhilPapers profile.].
- On The Open Future: Replies to Rhoda and Rubio.Patrick Todd - forthcoming - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion.These are my materials (a short precis, and replies to Alan Rhoda and Daniel Rubio) for an invited symposium on my book _The Open Future: Why Future Contingents are All False_ (OUP, 2021) in IJPR. [The commentaries from Rhoda/Rubio are available on their respective PhilPapers profiles.].
- Future-Directed Counterfactuals, Practical Reasoning, and the Open Future.Stephan Torre - forthcoming - Disputatio.One stark difference between the past and the future lies in our ability to shape the future in a way in which we are unable to shape the past. This paper investigates what kind of beliefs about the future serve as premises in our reasoning about how to act. If we think about belief in terms of agents representing the world, we cannot lose sight of the fact that agents are part of, and shape, the same world they represent. Beliefs (...)
- Todd on the open future.Ryan Wasserman - forthcoming - Analytic Philosophy.
- Future contingents, openness and the possibility of omniscience: Defending an argument against relativism and supervaluationism.Patrick Todd - 2025 - Theoria 91 (2):e12583.Todd and Rabern (2021) mount an argument that – contra both Thomason’s (1970) supervaluationism and MacFarlane’s (2014) relativism – an “open future” view is incompatible with the principle they call “Retro-closure”, according to which today’s rain implies that yesterday it was true that it would rain a day later. In a recent piece, MacFarlane replies. This paper has two aims. First, I argue that MacFarlane’s response to Todd and Rabern is unsuccessful on its own terms. Second, I attempt to clarify (...)
- Amonio y Boecio. Sobre la batalla naval de Aristóteles (Comentario a Aristóteles: 'Sobre la interpretación', 9).David Torrijos Castrillejo & Thomas Rego - 2025 - Madrid: Verbum.The purpose of this book is to fill a gap in the Spanish literature that has already begun to be filled in other languages: to provide the reader with simple and rigorous access to two famous commentators on Aristotle from late Antiquity. This also makes an important contribution to the corpus of Neoplatonic authors in the Spanish language. Classical commentaries have become particularly important in recent decades. On this occasion, it is possible to present an important facet of the author (...)
- Branching Time, Fatalism, and Possibilities.Giacomo Andreoletti - 2024 - Kriterion – Journal of Philosophy 38 (3-4):139-155.The concept of branching time is widely utilized to counter fatalistic arguments to the conclusion that whatever will happen is already unavoidable. The most common semantics for branching time, such as Ockhamism, Peirceanism, and Supervaluationism, offer a formal explanation for why fatalistic arguments are flawed. This paper explores a different type of argument, one that borders on fatalism and is concerned with what might possibly happen in the future. In the paper, I show how this type of argument poses a (...)
- Probability and the Open Future.Sam Baron - 2024 - Analysis 84 (3):686-697.
- On the idea that all future tensed contingents are false.Anthony Bigg & Kristie Miller - 2024 - Analytic Philosophy 1.In “The Open Future” (2021) Patrick Todd argues that the future is open, and that as a consequence all future contingents are false (as opposed to the more common view that they are neither true nor false). Very roughly, this latter claim is motivated by the idea that (a) presentism is true, and so future (and indeed past) things do not exist and (b) if future things do not exist, then the only thing that could ground there being future tensed (...)
- Probabilism: An Open Future Solution to the Actualism/Possibilism Debate.Yishai Cohen & Travis Timmerman - 2024 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 10 (2):349-370.The actualism/possibilism debate in ethics is traditionally formulated in terms of whether true counterfactuals of freedom about the future (true subjunctive conditionals concerning what someone would freely do in the future if they were in certain circumstances) even partly determine an agent's present moral obligations. But the very assumption that there are true counterfactuals of freedom about the future conflicts with the idea that freedom requires a metaphysically open future. We develop probabilism as a solution to the actualism/possibilism debate, a (...)
- The moving open future, temporal phenomenology, and temporal passage.Batoul Hodroj, Andrew J. Latham & Kristie Miller - 2024 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 3 (1):1-20.Empirical evidence suggests that people naïvely represent time as dynamical (i.e. as containing robust temporal passage). Yet many contemporary B-theorists deny that it seems to us, in perceptual experience, as though time robustly passes. The question then arises as to why we represent time as dynamical if we do not have perceptual experiences which represent time as dynamical. We consider two hypotheses about why this might be: the temporally aperspectival replacement hypothesis and the moving open future hypothesis. We then empirically (...)
- Future contingency, future indeterminacy, and grounding: comments on Todd: Book symposium: Patrick Todd, The Open Future: Why Future Contingents are All False. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. 224 pp. $80.00. [REVIEW]Alan R. Rhoda - 2024 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 95 (1):103-109.Invited discussion paper on Patrick Todd's book, _The Open Future: Why Future Contingents Are All False_ (Oxford, 2021).
- Book symposium: Patrick Todd, The open future: why future contingents are all false. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. 224 pp. $80.00. [REVIEW]Daniel Rubio - 2024 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 95 (2):217-223.
- An open future is possible.Amy Seymour - 2024 - Journal of Analytic Theology 12:77-90.Pruss (2016) argues that Christian philosophers should reject Open Futurism, where Open Futurism is the thesis that “there are no true undetermined contingent propositions about the future” (461). First, Pruss argues “on probabilistic grounds that there are some statements about infinite futures that Open Futurism cannot handle” (461). In other words, he argues that either the future is finite or that Open Futurism is false. Next, Pruss argues that since Christians are committed to a belief in everlasting life, they must (...)
- (1 other version)Book Symposium: Patrick Todd, The Open Future: Why Future Contingents are All False. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. 224 pp. $80.00. [REVIEW]Patrick Todd - 2024 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 95 (2):205-207.
- (1 other version)Book symposium: Patrick Todd, The Open Future: Why Future Contingents are All False. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. 224 pp. $80.00. [REVIEW]Patrick Todd - 2024 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 95 (2):225-231.
- Critical Notice: The Modal Future: A Theory of Future-Directed Thought and Talk.Patrick Todd - 2024 - Philosophical Quarterly 74 (3):1026-1035.At least since Aristotle's famous discussion of the sea-battle tomorrow in On Interpretation 9, philosophers have been fascinated by a rich set of interconnecte.
- (1 other version)Knowledge of the Future and Reliable Belief-Forming Processes.Stephan Torre - 2024 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 1.This paper embraces the view that we have substantial knowledge of the future and investigates how such knowledge fundamentally differs from knowledge of the past and present. I argue for a new source of context-sensitivity with respect to knowledge attributions arising from presuppositions about reliable belief-forming processes. This context sensitivity has important consequences for knowledge of the future, as well as the appropriateness of assertions about the future. I argue that not only is knowledge of future events typically brought about (...)
- Critical Notice: The Open Future: Why Future Contingents Are All False, by Patrick Todd. [REVIEW]Stephan Torre - 2024 - Philosophical Quarterly 74 (3):1036-1043.Patrick Todd's The Open Future defends the view that all future contingent statements, like ‘It will rain tomorrow’, are false.1 Not only is ‘It will rain tomor.
- The Modal Future, by Fabrizio Cariani. [REVIEW]David Boylan - 2023 - Philosophical Review 132 (2).
- Freedom and the open future.Yishai Cohen - 2023 - Analytic Philosophy 64 (3):228-255.I draw upon Helen Steward's concept of agential settling to argue that freedom requires an ability to change the truth‐value of tenseless future contingents over time from false to true and that this ability requires a metaphysically open future.
- Dynamic all the way down.Donatella Donati & Simone Gozzano - 2023 - Ratio 37 (1):14-25.In this paper we provide an analysis of dynamic dispositionalism. It is usually claimed that dispositions are dynamic properties. However, there is no exhaustive analysis of dynamism in the dispositional literature. We will argue that the dynamic character of dispositions can be analyzed in terms of three features: (i) temporal extension, (ii) necessary change and (iii) future orientedness. Roughly, we will defend the idea that dynamism entails a continuous view of time, to be analyzed in mathematical terms, where intervals are (...)
- The Open Future: Why Future Contingents are All False, by Patrick Todd. [REVIEW]Aldo Frigerio - 2023 - Manuscrito 46 (1):220-230.Review of Patrick Todd's book, The Open Future: Why Future Contingents are All False, Oxford University Press, 2021.
- Le futur ouvert.Vincent Grandjean - 2023 - Paris: Éditions Hermann.Ce livre propose une étude détaillée et une défense systématique d’une intuition-clé que nous partageons tous à propos de la nature du temps : celle que le futur est ouvert, tandis que le passé est fixé. Si l’occurrence d’une Troisième Guerre mondiale semble indéterminée, il y a bel et bien eu une Première Guerre mondiale. -/- Dans le présent ouvrage, l’auteur fournit une élucidation cohérente, non métaphorique et métaphysiquement éclairante de l’intuition ; il détermine quel modèle de structure temporelle du (...)
- The Open Future: Why Future Contingents are All False, by Patrick Todd. [REVIEW]David Ingram - 2023 - Metaphilosophy 54 (2-3):364-367.
- Bahala Na: Fatalism or an Open Future?Jeremiah Joven Joaquin - 2023 - In Soraj Hongladarom, Jeremiah Joven Joaquin & Frank J. Hoffman, Philosophies of Appropriated Religions: Perspectives from Southeast Asia. Springer Nature Singapore. pp. 81-91.This paper discusses two conceptions of the Filipino expression bahala na. The first implies a fatalistic attitude, while the second implies an open-minded attitude toward an uncertain future. We explore how these two conceptions may be used to frame and address the familiar philosophical puzzle about the compatibility of divine omniscience and human free will.
- Why do people represent time as dynamical? An investigation of temporal dynamism and the open future.Andrew J. Latham & Kristie Miller - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (5):1717-1742.Deflationists hold that it does not seem to us, in experience, as though time robustly passes. There is some recent empirical evidence that appears to support this contention. Equally, empirical evidence suggests that we naïvely represent time as dynamical. Thus deflationists are faced with an explanatory burden. If, as they maintain, the world seems to us in experience as though it is non-dynamical, then why do we represent time as dynamical? This paper takes up the challenge of investigating, on the (...)
- Relativism and Two Kinds of Branching Time.Dilip Ninan - 2023 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 104 (2):465-492.This essay examines the case for relativism about future contingents in light of a distinction between two ways of interpreting the ‘branching time’ framework. Focussing on MacFarlane (2014), we break the argument for relativism down into two steps. The first step is an argument for something MacFarlane calls the "Non-Determination Thesis", which is essentially the view that there is no unique actual future. The second step is an argument from the Non-Determination Thesis to relativism. I first argue that first step (...)
- Patrick Todd. The Open Future: Why Future Contingents are All False. [REVIEW]Alan R. Rhoda - 2023 - Journal of Analytic Theology 11:738-742.
- Freedom, foreknowledge, and betting.Amy Seymour - 2023 - Philosophical Issues 33 (1):223-236.Certain kinds of prediction, foreknowledge, and future‐oriented action appear to require settled future truths. But open futurists think that the future is metaphysically unsettled: if it is open whether p is true, then it cannot currently be settled that p is true. So, open futurists—and libertarians who adopt the position—face the objection that their view makes rational action and deliberation impossible. I defuse the epistemic concern: open futurism does not entail obviously counterintuitive epistemic consequences or prevent rational action.
- The Open Future: Why Future Contingents Are All False, by Patrick Todd. [REVIEW]Donald Wayne Viney - 2023 - Process Studies 52 (2):285-291.
- Branching time and doomsday.Giacomo Andreoletti - 2022 - Ratio 35 (2):79-90.Branching time is a popular theory of time that is intended to account for the openness of the future. Generally, branching-time models the openness of the future by positing a multiplicity of concrete alternative futures mirroring all the possible ways the future could unfold. A distinction is drawn in the literature among branching-time theories: those that make use of moment-based structures and those that employ history-based ones. In this paper, I introduce and discuss a particular kind of openness relative to (...)
- The Asymmetric Nature of Time.Vincent Grandjean - 2022 - Springer Nature.This open access monograph offers a detailed study and a systematic defense of a key intuition we typically have, as human beings, with respect to the nature of time: the intuition that the future is open, whereas the past is fixed. For example, whereas it seems unsettled whether there will be a fourth world war, it is settled that there was a first world war. -/- The book contributes, in particular, three major and original insights. First, it provides a coherent, (...)
- Alethic Openness and the Growing Block Theory of Time.Batoul Hodroj, Andrew J. Latham, Jordan Lee-Tory & Kristie Miller - 2022 - The Philosophical Quarterly 73 (2):532-556.Whatever its ultimate philosophical merits, it is often thought that the growing block theory presents an intuitive picture of reality that accords well with our pre-reflective or folk view of time, and of the past, present, and future. This is partly motivated by the idea that we find it intuitive that, in some sense, the future is open and the past closed, and that the growing block theory is particularly well suited to accommodate this being so. In this paper, we (...)
- Knowledge of Future Contingents.Andrea Iacona - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (2):447-467.This paper addresses the question whether future contingents are knowable, that is, whether one can know that things will go a certain way even though it is possible that things will not go that way. First I will consider a long-established view that implies a negative answer, and draw attention to some endemic problems that affect its credibility. Then I will sketch an alternative line of thought that prompts a positive answer: future contingents are knowable, although our epistemic access of (...)
- The Metaphysics of Ockhamism.Andrea Iacona - 2022 - In Alessio Santelli, Ockhamism and Philosophy of Time: Semantic and Metaphysical Issues concerning Future Contingents. Springer.This paper investigates Ockhamism from a metaphysical point of view. Its main point is that the claim that future contingents are true or false is less demanding than usually expected, as it does not require particularly contentious assumptions about the future. First it will be argued that Ockhamism is consistent with a wide range of metaphysical views. Then it will be shown that each of these views leaves room for the claim that the future is open, at least on some (...)
- Fragmenting Reality: An Essay on Passage, Causality and Time Travel.Samuele Iaquinto & Giuliano Torrengo - 2022 - London: Bloomsbury.The growing interest in fragmentalism is one of the most exciting trends in philosophy of time and is gradually reshaping the contemporary debate. Providing an extensive interpretation of this view, Samuele Iaquinto and Giuliano Torrengo articulate a novel theory of the passage of time and argue that it is the most effective in vindicating the inherent dynamism of reality. Iaquinto and Torrengo offer the first full-range application of fragmentalism to a number of metaphysical topics, including the open future, causation, the (...)
- Probing the Mind of God: Divine Beliefs and Credences.Elizabeth Jackson & Justin Mooney - 2022 - Religious Studies 58 (1):S61–S75.Although much has been written about divine knowledge, and some on divine beliefs, virtually nothing has been written about divine credences. In this essay we comparatively assess four views on divine credences: (1) God has only beliefs, not credences; (2) God has both beliefs and credences; (3) God has only credences, not beliefs; and (4) God has neither credences nor beliefs, only knowledge. We weigh the costs and benefits of these four views and draw connections to current discussions in philosophical (...)
- Practical grounds for freedom: Kant and James on freedom, experience and an open future.Joe Saunders & Neil W. Williams - 2022 - In Freedom After Kant: From German Idealism to Ethics and the Self. Blackwell's. pp. 155-171.In this chapter, we compare Kant and James’ accounts of freedom. Despite both thinkers’ rejecting compatibilism for the sake of practical reason, there are two striking differences in their stances. The first concerns whether or not freedom requires the possibility of an open future. James holds that morality hinges on the real possibility that the future can be affected by our actions. Kant, on the other hand, seems to maintain that we can still be free in the crucial sense, even (...)
- The future ain’t what it used to be: Strengthening the case for mutable futurism.Giacomo Andreoletti & Giuseppe Spolaore - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):10569-10585.This paper explores mutable futurism, the view according to which the future can literally change—that is, it can happen that a future time t changes from containing an event E to lacking it. Mutable futurism has received little attention so far, and the details and implications of the view are underexplored in the literature. For instance, it currently lacks a precise metaphysical model and a formal semantics. Although we do not endorse mutable futurism, our goal here is to strengthen the (...)
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