Metaphysics > Time > Temporal Ontology > The Open Future

The Open Future

Edited by Sam Baron (Australian Catholic University)
Assistant editors: James Darcy, David Ingram
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 between past and future, and contains an argument against fatalism. Belnap 1992 argues for a blend of relativity and indeterminism, and Belnap & Green 1994 argues 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.
Introductions See the collected papers in Correia & Iacona 2013. See also Øhrstrøm & Hasle 2011.
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247 found
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  1. Assessment Sensitivity About Future Contingents, Vindication and Self-Refutation.Corine Besson & Anandi Hattiangadi - manuscript
    John 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.
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  2. Evaluating Future-Tensed Sentences in Changing Contexts.Andrea Bonomi & Fabio Del Prete - manuscript
    According to the actualist view, what is essential in the truth conditions of a future-tensed sentence of type ‘it will be the case that ϕ’ is the 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 the truth of ϕ being already “settled” at the time of utterance, where “being settled” is defined by universal quantification over a domain of courses (...)
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  3. The Modal Future Hypothesis Debugged.Fabrizio Cariani - manuscript
    This 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.
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  4. Hypertemporal Humeanism and the Open Future.Benjamin Smart - manuscript
    Take 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 (...)
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  5. How to Russell Open the Future.Patrick Todd - manuscript
    Short 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 (...)
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  6. Aristotelian Indeterminacy and Partial Belief: Including Case Studies of the Open Future and Vague Survival.Robert Williams - manuscript
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  7. Does Success Entail Ability?David Boylan - forthcoming - Noûs.
    This paper is about the principle that success entails ability, which I call Success. I argue the status of Success is highly puzzling: when we focus on past instances of actually successful action, Success is very compelling; but it is in tension with the idea that true ability claims require an action be in the agent's control. I make the above tension precise by considering the logic of ability. I argue Success is appealing because it is classically equivalent to two (...)
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  8. Human Foreknowledge.Fabrizio Cariani - forthcoming - Philosophical Perspectives.
    I explore the motivation and logical consequences of the idea that we have some (limited) ability to know contingent facts about the future, even in presence of the assumption that the future is objectively unsettled or indeterminate. I start by formally characterizing skepticism about the future. This analysis nudges the anti-skeptic towards the idea that if some propositions about the future are objectively indeterminate, then it may be indeterminate whether a suitably positioned agent knows them.
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  9. The Phenomenology and Metaphysics of the Open Future.Derek Lam - forthcoming - Philosophical Studies:1-27.
    Intuitively, the future is open and the past fixed: there is something we can do about the future but not the past. Some metaphysicians believe that a proper metaphysics of time must vindicate this intuition. Whereas philosophers have focused on the future and the past, the status of the present remains relatively unexplored. Drawing on resources from action theory, I argue that there is something we can do about the present just like there is something we can do about the (...)
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  10. The Open Future: Why Future Contingents Are All False.Patrick Todd - forthcoming - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    In The Open Future: Why Future Contingents are all False, Patrick Todd launches a sustained defense of a radical interpretation of the doctrine of the open future, one according to which all claims about undetermined aspects of the future are simply false. Todd argues that this theory is metaphysically more parsimonious than its rivals, and that objections to its logical and practical coherence are much overblown. Todd shows how proponents of this view can maintain classical logic, and argues that the (...)
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  11. Future Contingents and the Logic of Temporal Omniscience.Patrick Todd & Brian Rabern - 2021 - Noûs 55 (1):102-127.
    At least since Aristotle’s famous 'sea-battle' passages in On Interpretation 9, some substantial minority of philosophers has been attracted to the doctrine of the open future--the doctrine that future contingent statements are not true. But, prima facie, such views seem inconsistent with the following intuition: if something has happened, then (looking back) it was the case that it would happen. How can it be that, looking forwards, it isn’t true that there will be a sea battle, while also being true (...)
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  12. Back to the (Branching) Future.Giacomo Andreoletti - 2020 - Acta Analytica 35 (2):181-194.
    The future is different from the past. What is past is fixed and set in stone. The future, on the other hand, is open insofar as it holds numerous possibilities. Branching-tree models of time account for this asymmetry by positing an ontological difference between the past and the future. Given a time t, a unique unified past lies behind t, whereas multiple alternative existing futures lie ahead of t. My goal in this paper is to show that there is an (...)
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  13. Assertion and the Future.Corine Besson & Anandi Hattiangadi - 2020 - In Sanford Goldberg (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Assertion. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 481-504.
    It is disputed what norm, if any, governs assertion. We address this question by looking at assertions of future contingents: statements about the future that are neither metaphysically necessary nor metaphysically impossible. Many philosophers think that future contingents are not truth apt, which together with a Truth Norm or a Knowledge Norm of assertion implies that assertions of these future contingents are systematically infelicitous. In this article, we argue that our practice of asserting future contingents is incompatible with the view (...)
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  14. Future Ontology: Indeterminate Existence or Non-existence?Michael Tze-Sung Longenecker - 2020 - Philosophia 48 (4):1493-1500.
    The Growing Block Theory of time says that the metaphysical openness of the future should be understood in terms of there not being any future objects or events. But in a series of works, Ross Cameron, Elizabeth Barnes, and Robbie Williams have developed a competing view that understands metaphysical openness in terms of it being indeterminate whether there exist future objects or events. I argue that the three reasons they give for preferring their account are not compelling. And since the (...)
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  15. Children’s Future-Oriented Cognition.Teresa McCormack & Christoph Hoerl - 2020 - In Janette Benson (ed.), Advances in Child Development and Behavior, Vol. 58. Cambridge. MA: Elsevier. pp. 215-253.
    Children’s future-oriented cognition has become a well-established area of research over the last decade. Future-oriented cognition encompasses a range of processes, including those involved in conceiving the future, imagining and preparing for future events, and making decisions that will affect how the future unfolds. We consider recent empirical advances in the study of such processes by outlining key findings that have yielded a clearer picture of how future thinking emerges and changes over childhood. Our interest in future thinking stems from (...)
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  16. Future Contingents, Branching Time and Assertion.Alessio Santelli - 2020 - Philosophia (2):1-23.
    According to an influential line of thought, from the assumption that indeterminism makes future contingents neither true nor false, one can conclude that assertions of future contingents are never permissible. This conclusion, however, fails to recognize that we ordinarily assert future contingents even when we take the future to be unsettled. Several attempts have been made to solve this puzzle, either by arguing that, albeit truth-valueless, future contingents can be correctly assertable, or by rejecting the claim that future contingents are (...)
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  17. The Problem of Future Contingents: Scoping Out a Solution.Patrick Todd - 2020 - Synthese 197 (11):5051-5072.
    Various philosophers have long since been attracted to the doctrine that future contingent propositions systematically fail to be true—what is sometimes called the doctrine of the open future. However, open futurists have always struggled to articulate how their view interacts with standard principles of classical logic—most notably, with the Law of Excluded Middle. For consider the following two claims: Trump will be impeached tomorrow; Trump will not be impeached tomorrow. According to the kind of open futurist at issue, both of (...)
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  18. The Invisible Thin Red Line.Giuliano Torrengo & Samuele Iaquinto - 2020 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 101:354-382.
    The aim of this paper is to argue that the adoption of an unrestricted principle of bivalence is compatible with a metaphysics that (i) denies that the future is real, (ii) adopts nomological indeterminism, and (iii) exploits a branching structure to provide a semantics for future contingent claims. To this end, we elaborate what we call Flow Fragmentalism, a view inspired by Kit Fine (2005)’s non-standard tense realism, according to which reality is divided up into maximally coherent collections of tensed (...)
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  19. The Truth of Future Contingents: An Analysis of Truth-Maker Indeterminacy.Tero Tulenheimo - 2020 - Filosofiska Notiser 7 (1):53-77.
    I argue that the semantics of sentences expressing future contingent propositions is best viewed as being based on a clear distinction between a time at which a proposition is true and a time at which a state of affairs that makes it true gets actualized. That a prediction is true here and now means that its truth-maker gets actualized later. This is not to say that if a contingent proposition p concerning the future is true at t, it acquires the (...)
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  20. Back to the actual future.Jacek Wawer & Alex Malpass - 2020 - Synthese 197 (5):2193-2213.
    The purpose of the paper is to rethink the role of actuality in the branching model of possibilities. We investigate the idea that the model should be enriched with an additional factor—the so-called Thin Red Line—which is supposed to represent the single possible course of events that gets actualized in time. We believe that this idea was often misconceived which prompted some unfortunate reactions. On the one hand, it suggested problematic semantic models of future tense and and on the other, (...)
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  21. Fatalism and Future Contingents.Giacomo Andreoletti - 2019 - Analytic Philosophy 60 (3):1-14.
    In this paper I address issues related to the problem of future contingents and the metaphysical doctrine of fatalism. Two classical responses to the problem of future contingents are the third truth value view and the all-false view. According to the former, future contingents take a third truth value which goes beyond truth and falsity. According to the latter, they are all false. I here illustrate and discuss two ways to respectively argue for those two views. Both ways are similar (...)
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  22. Aquinas, Geach, and Existence.Damiano Costa - 2019 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 11 (3):175-195.
    Aquinas’ theory of being has received a growing amount of attention from contemporary scholars, both from a historic and a philosophical point of view. An important source of this attention is Geach’s seminal Form and Existence. In it, Geach argues that Aquinas subscribes to a tensed notion of existence and a theory of time according to which past and future entities do not exist in act. Subsequent commentators, such as Kenny in his Aquinas on Being, have agreed with Geach on (...)
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  23. How is the Asymmetry Between the Open Future and the Fixed Past to Be Characterized?Vincent Grandjean - 2019 - Synthese (3):1-24.
    A basic intuition we have regarding the nature of time is that the future is open whereas the past is fixed. For example, whereas we think that there are things we can do to affect how the future will unfold, we think that there are not things we can do to affect how the past unfolded. However, although this intuition is largely shared, it is not a straightforward matter to determine the nature of the asymmetry it reflects. So, in this (...)
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  24. The Neo-Molinist Square Stands Firm: A Rejoinder to Kirk MacGregor.Elijah Hess - 2019 - Philosophia Christi 21 (2):391-406.
    In a previous issue of Philosophia Christi, Kirk MacGregor responded to an essay of mine in which I argued for a neo-Molinist account of open theism. The argument demonstrated how, given standard counterfactual semantics, one could derive an “open future square of opposition,” that is, a depiction of the logical relations that hold between future-tense statements from an open theistic standpoint. Conceding the validity of the argument, MacGregor nevertheless sought to deny its soundness by criticizing both its conclusion and the (...)
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  25. Thisness Presentism: An Essay on Time, Truth, and Ontology.David Ingram - 2019 - Oxford, UK: Routledge.
    Thisness Presentism outlines and defends a novel version of presentism, the view that only present entities exist and what is present really changes. Presentism is a view of time that captures a real and objective difference between what is past, present, and future, and which offers a model of reality that is dynamic and mutable, rather than static and immutable. The book advances a new defence of presentism by developing a novel ontology of thisness, combining insights about the nature of (...)
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  26. Will Done Better: Selection Semantics, Future Credence, and Indeterminacy.Fabrizio Cariani & Paolo Santorio - 2018 - Mind 127 (505):129-165.
    Statements about the future are central in everyday conversation and reasoning. How should we understand their meaning? The received view among philosophers treats will as a tense: in ‘Cynthia will pass her exam’, will shifts the reference time forward. Linguists, however, have produced substantial evidence for the view that will is a modal, on a par with must and would. The different accounts are designed to satisfy different theoretical constraints, apparently pulling in opposite directions. We show that these constraints are (...)
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  27. Filosofia del Futuro.Samuele Iaquinto & Giuliano Torrengo - 2018 - Milano: Raffaello Cortina.
    Scopo del volume è offrire un’introduzione accessibile e rigorosa ai più recenti sviluppi di una fondamentale branca della filosofia del tempo: la filosofia del futuro. Vengono presentate e discusse alcune delle domande chiave del dibattito contemporaneo, ad esempio: il futuro è già scritto o esistono molti cammini alternativi che il tempo è in grado di imboccare? "Esistere" significa semplicemente essere presenti o ci sono veri e propri oggetti futuri? Siamo davvero liberi di scegliere quali azioni compiere e di modificare il (...)
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  28. Imprints in Time: Towards a Moderately Robust Past.Michael Longenecker - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (10):2429-2446.
    Presentism says that only present objects exist. But the view has trouble grounding past-tensed truths like “dinosaurs existed”. Standard Eternalism grounds those truths by positing the existence of past objects—like dinosaurs. But Standard Eternalism conflicts with the intuition that there is genuine change—the intuition that there once were dinosaurs and no longer are any. I offer a novel theory of time—‘The Imprint’—that does a better job preserving both the grounding and genuine change intuitions. The Imprint says that the past and (...)
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  29. Some Problems with the Russellian Open Future.Jacek Wawer - 2018 - Acta Analytica 33 (4):413-425.
    In a recently published paper, Patrick Todd (2016, 'Future contingents are all false! On behalf of a Russellian open future') advocates a novel treatment of future contingents. On his view, all statements concerning the contingent future are false. He motivates his semantic postulates by considerations in philosophy of time and modality, in particular by the claim that there is no actual future. I present a number of highly controversial consequences of Todd’s theory. Inadequacy of his semantics might indirectly serve as (...)
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  30. A Note on Aristotle and Beliefs About the Future.Bo R. Meinertsen - 2017 - In He Xirong, Peter Jonkers & Shi Yongze (eds.), Philosophy and the Life-World: Chinese Philosophical Studies, XXXIII. Washington, DC, USA: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy. pp. 207-213.
    This note falls into two main parts. In the first part, I shall consider the question of whether or not Aristotle believed that there can be true statements about what will happen in the future. I will first clarify this question, which will involve consideration of some logical and metaphysical notions in Aristotle. I will then argue that the answer to the question is ‘No’ (with a qualification). In the second part, I shall argue that his view is correct. I (...)
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  31. Against the Russellian Open Future.Anders J. Schoubye & Brian Rabern - 2017 - Mind 126 (504): 1217–1237.
    Todd (2016) proposes an analysis of future-directed sentences, in particular sentences of the form 'will(φ)', that is based on the classic Russellian analysis of definite descriptions. Todd's analysis is supposed to vindicate the claim that the future is metaphysically open while retaining a simple Ockhamist semantics of future contingents and the principles of classical logic, i.e. bivalence and the law of excluded middle. Consequently, an open futurist can straightforwardly retain classical logic without appeal to supervaluations, determinacy operators, or any further (...)
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  32. Partial and Paraconsistent Approaches to Future Contingents in Tense Logic.Seiki Akama, Tetsuya Murai & Yasuo Kudo - 2016 - Synthese 193 (11).
    The problem of future contingents is regarded as an important philosophical problem in connection with determinism and it should be treated by tense logic. Prior’s early work focused on the problem, and later Prior studied branching-time tense logic which was invented by Kripke. However, Prior’s idea to use three-valued logic for the problem seems to be still alive. In this paper, we consider partial and paraconsistent approaches to the problem of future contingents. These approaches theoretically meet Aristotle’s interpretation of future (...)
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  33. Anti‐Metaphysicalism, Necessity, and Temporal Ontology.Mark Balaguer - 2016 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 89 (1):145-167.
    This paper argues for a certain kind of anti-metaphysicalism about the temporal ontology debate, i.e., the debate between presentists and eternalists over the existence of past and future objects. Three different kinds of anti-metaphysicalism are defined—namely, non-factualism, physical-empiricism, and trivialism. The paper argues for the disjunction of these three views. It is then argued that trivialism is false, so that either non-factualism or physical-empiricism is true. Finally, the paper ends with a discussion of whether we should endorse non-factualism or physical-empiricism. (...)
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  34. Causal and Moral Indeterminacy.Sara Bernstein - 2016 - Ratio 29 (4):434-447.
    This paper argues that several sorts of metaphysical and semantic indeterminacy afflict the causal relation. If, as it is plausible to hold, there is a relationship between causation and moral responsibility, then indeterminacy in the causal relation results in indeterminacy of moral responsibility more generally.
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  35. Chance and Temporal Asymmetry, Edited by Alastair Wilson: Oxford: Routledge, 2014, Pp. Vii + 297, £45. [REVIEW]Craig Callender - 2016 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94 (1):209-210.
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  36. A Critical Introduction to the Metaphysics of Time.Benjamin Curtis & Jon Robson - 2016 - Bloomsbury Academic.
    What is the nature of time? Does it flow? Do the past and future exist? Drawing connections between historical and present-day questions, A Critical Introduction to the Metaphysics of Time provides an up-to-date guide to one of the most central and debated topics in contemporary metaphysics. Introducing the views and arguments of Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Newton and Leibniz, this accessible introduction covers the history of the philosophy of time from the Pre-Socratics to the beginning of the 20th Century. The (...)
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  37. Dummett on Bringing About the Past.Brian Garrett - 2016 - Philosophia 44 (1):113-115.
    In ‘Bringing about the Past’ Michael Dummett attempted to defend the coherence of the idea of bringing about the past. I agree that bringing about the past is conceptually no more problematic than bringing about the future, but argue, against Dummett, that there is no need to restrict the scope of an agent’s knowledge in order to make sense of intentionally bringing about past events.
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  38. The Virtues of Thisness Presentism.David Ingram - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (11):2867-2888.
    Presentists believe that only present things exist. But opponents insist this view has unacceptable implications: if only present things exist, we can’t express singular propositions about the past, since the obvious propositional constituents don’t exist, nor can we account for temporal passage, or the openness of the future. According to such opponents, and in spite of the apparent ‘common sense’ status of the view, presentism should be rejected on the basis of these unacceptable implications. In this paper, I present and (...)
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  39. Between Ockhamism and the Thin Red Line.Alex Peter Malpass - 2016 - Diametros 48:55-70.
    In this paper we will put forward a novel semantics for future contingents. The idea behind the semantics is to be a compromise position between the ‘Ockhamist’ semantics, first put forward by Prior [1966], Thomason [1970] etc., and a version of the Thin Red Line semantics recently proposed by Malpass and Wawer [2012]. The new position is able to represent alternative possibilities in two different ways, as actual or counterfactual, which corresponds to a similar distinction in two-dimensional semantics between the (...)
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  40. Transition Semantics for Branching Time.Antje Rumberg - 2016 - Journal of Logic, Language and Information 25 (1):77-108.
    In this paper we develop a novel propositional semantics based on the framework of branching time. The basic idea is to replace the moment-history pairs employed as parameters of truth in the standard Ockhamist semantics by pairs consisting of a moment and a consistent, downward closed set of so-called transitions. Whereas histories represent complete possible courses of events, sets of transitions can represent incomplete parts thereof as well. Each transition captures one of the alternative immediate future possibilities open at a (...)
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  41. On Behalf of a Mutable Future.Patrick Todd - 2016 - Synthese 193 (7):2077-2095.
    Everyone agrees that we can’t change the past. But what about the future? Though the thought that we can change the future is familiar from popular discourse, it enjoys virtually no support from philosophers, contemporary or otherwise. In this paper, I argue that the thesis that the future is mutable has far more going for it than anyone has yet realized. The view, I hope to show, gains support from the nature of prevention, can provide a new way of responding (...)
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  42. Future Contingents Are All False! On Behalf of a Russellian Open Future.Patrick Todd - 2016 - Mind 125 (499):775-798.
    There is a familiar debate between Russell and Strawson concerning bivalence and ‘the present King of France’. According to the Strawsonian view, ‘The present King of France is bald’ is neither true nor false, whereas, on the Russellian view, that proposition is simply false. In this paper, I develop what I take to be a crucial connection between this debate and a different domain where bivalence has been at stake: future contingents. On the familiar ‘Aristotelian’ view, future contingent propositions are (...)
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  43. The Puzzle of the Changing Past.Luca Barlassina & Fabio Del Prete - 2015 - Analysis 75 (1):59-67.
    If you utter sentence ‘Obama was born in 1961’ now, you say something true about the past. Since the past will always be such that the year 1961 has the property of being a time in which Obama was born, it seems impossible that could ever be false in a future context of utterance. We shall consider the case of a sentence about the past exactly like , but which was true when uttered a few years ago and is no (...)
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  44. The Moving Spotlight: An Essay on Time and Ontology.Ross P. Cameron - 2015 - Oxford University Press.
    Ross P. Cameron argues that the flow of time is a genuine feature of reality. He suggests that the best version of the A-Theory is a version of the Moving Spotlight view, according to which past and future beings are real, but there is nonetheless an objectively privileged present. Cameron argues that the Moving Spotlight theory should be viewed as having more in common with Presentism than with the B-Theory. Furthermore, it provides the best account of truthmakers for claims about (...)
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  45. Freedom, Fatalism, and Foreknowledge.John Martin Fischer & Patrick Todd (eds.) - 2015 - Oxford University Press.
    We typically think we have free will. But how could we have free will, if for anything we do, it was already true in the distant past that we would do that thing? Or how could we have free will, if God already knows in advance all the details of our lives? Such issues raise the specter of "fatalism". This book collects sixteen previously published articles on fatalism, truths about the future, and the relationship between divine foreknowledge and human freedom, (...)
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  46. Ockhamism and Quantified Modal Logic.Andrea Iacona - 2015 - Logique Et Analyse 58:353-370.
    This paper outlines a formal account of tensed sentences that is consistent with Ockhamism, a view according to which future contingents are either true or false. The account outlined substantively differs from the attempts that have been made so far to provide a formal apparatus for such a view in terms of some expressly modified version of branching time semantics. The system on which it is based is the simplest quantified modal logic.
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  47. Contingencies within Spacetime.Baptiste Le Bihan - 2015 - Dissertation, University of Rennes 1
    I begin by giving reasons to accept the block-universe view, the strongly supported by physics view that we live in a four-dimensional world. According to it, the past and the future are as real as the present. As a result, it seems that the future is determined in the sense that what will be the case will necessarily be the case. In the dissertation, I examine whether we have to accept this consequence. I show that we do not have to (...)
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  48. Does Branching Explain Flow of Time or the Other Way Around?Petr Švarný - 2015 - Synthese 192 (7):2273-2292.
    The article discusses the relation between two intuitive properties of time, namely its flow and branching. Both properties are introduced first in an informal way and compared. The conclusion of this informal analysis is that the two properties do not entail each other nor are they in contradiction. In order to verify this, we briefly introduced the branching temporal structures called branching space-time, branching continuation and their versions Minkowski branching structure and branching time with Instants. Two possible ways how to (...)
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  49. Future Contingents, Indeterminacy and Context.Paula Sweeney - 2015 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 96 (2):408-422.
    In Facing the Future, Belnap et al. reject bivalence and propose double time reference semantics to give a pragmatic response to the following assertion problem: how can we make sense of assertions about future events made at a time when the outcomes of those events are not yet determined? John MacFarlane employs the same semantics, now bolstered with a relative-truth predicate, to accommodate the following apparently conflicting intuitions regarding the truth-value of an uttered future contingent: at the moment of utterance, (...)
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  50. Introduction.Patrick Todd & John Martin Fischer - 2015 - In John Martin Fischer & Patrick Todd (eds.), Freedom, Fatalism, and Foreknowledge. Oxford University Press. pp. 01-38.
    This Introduction has three sections, on "logical fatalism," "theological fatalism," and the problem of future contingents, respectively. In the first two sections, we focus on the crucial idea of "dependence" and the role it plays it fatalistic arguments. Arguably, the primary response to the problems of logical and theological fatalism invokes the claim that the relevant past truths or divine beliefs depend on what we do, and therefore needn't be held fixed when evaluating what we can do. We call the (...)
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