Abstract
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 notion of “indeterminate existence” suffers conceptual problems, the Growing Block is the preferable view.
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Notes
As opposed to being merely epistemically open—that is, the openness is simply a matter of us not being able to figure out if the events would take place.
At least if it’s open whether the present is the end of the world—if everything could be destroyed in the next moment.
If it’s open whether the entire universe comes to an end right now, it would be better for Cameron to say that ‘the moving spotlighter believes it’s not determinate that there’s no future ontology’.
This isn’t exactly the way Cameron grounds such truths. Instead he appeals to temporal distributional properties (see (2015, 137–44)).
For instance (see Eklund 2011, 160–1): the semantics developed in (Barnes and Williams (2011a)) says that ‘there will be a sea battle tomorrow’ is indeterminate because the precisifications (possible worlds that aren’t determinately false) don’t agree on whether there will be a sea battle—in some worlds there is a sea battle tomorrow, in others there aren’t. But if ‘there is a sea battle tomorrow’ is true, as Barnes and Cameron think, shouldn’t all the precisifications agree that there will be a sea battle? Eklund (ibid., 164) suggests this might not be problematic since we can define different kinds of truth predicates—in which case ‘there will be a sea battle tomorrow’ is ‘true’ on one definition of ‘true’ but not on another. But then the issue becomes a merely verbal one. (For further discussion, see Barnes and Williams 2011b.)
Barnes and Cameron refer the reader to Williams (n.d) for objections to alternative accounts. But Williams doesn’t quite discuss the view that chance norms belief. The closest he comes is in giving an argument that if one has an Aristotelian view of the future, then one should completely reject any future contingent claims. The Aristotelian view involves the claims, that for any future contingent p: (p v ~p), but not (T(p) v T(~p)). From this it follows that for some p: p & ~T(p). But from this further claim, Williams shows that absurdities follow. The Growing Block theorist can avoid this problem by applying MacFarlane’s semantics. Say that t is the present and p is a claim concerning what will happen by time t*. Then we can accept both: (p v ~p relative to t*) and (T(p) v T(~p) relative to t*). And we can deny both: (p v ~p relative to t) and (T(p) v T(~p) relative to t). Thus we can’t get anything like the claim (p & ~T(p)): we can’t derive either (p & ~T(p) relative to t*) or (p & ~T(p) relative to t).
References
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Longenecker, M.TS. Future Ontology: Indeterminate Existence or Non-existence?. Philosophia 48, 1493–1500 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-020-00171-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-020-00171-z