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Attesting the Aristotelian Future

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Abstract

Aristotelian relativism about the future (as recently defended by MacFarlane (2003)) claims that a prediction made on Monday, such as ‘It will rain’, can be indeterminate on Monday but determinate on Tuesday. A serious objection to this intuitively appealing view is that it cannot coherently be attested: for if it is attested on Monday, then our blindness to what the future holds precludes attesting that the prediction is determinate on Tuesday, and if it is attested on Tuesday (when, suppose, it rains), then the fact that it rains precludes attesting that the prediction is indeterminate on Monday. In this paper, I focus on Moruzzi and Wright (2009)’s recent development of this objection and argue that it fails. This result removes a major obstacle to defending the Aristotelian view.

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Notes

  1. I won’t address the interpretive question of whether Aristotle was himself an aristotelian.

  2. Although MacFarlane (2008) discusses an application of aristotelianism to propositions (as opposed to utterances), I follow Moruzzi and Wright (2009, p. 311) in their focus on utterances.

  3. There has been a recent explosion of interest in semantic theories which relativize truth to contexts of assessment. (MacFarlane’s work is the source of much of this interest.) But neither my presentation of the unattestability dilemma nor my attempts to defuse it depend upon the details of any such theories.

  4. ‘~P’ is true iff ‘P’ is not true and ‘¬P’ is true iff ‘P’ is false.

  5. Moruzzi and Wright also apply this style of argument to relativism about epistemic modals. For brevity’s sake, my focus will only be upon the argument as it applies to aristotelianism.

  6. Moruzzi and Wright (2009) discuss trumping in greater detail than is required for my purposes here.

References

  • Aristotle. (1984). De Interpretatione. In J. Barnes (Ed.), The Complete Works of Aristotle. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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  • MacFarlane, J. (2003). Future contingents and relative truth. The Philosophical Quarterly, 53, 321–336.

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  • MacFarlane, J. (2008). Truth in the Garden of Forking Paths. In M. Kolbel & M. Garcia-Carpintero (Eds.), Relative Truth. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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  • Moruzzi, S., & Wright, C. (2009). Trumping assessments and the Aristotelian future. Synthese, 166, 309–331.

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Acknowledgment

Thanks to Audrey Yap and the University of Victoria students in my fall 2009 seminar ‘Time, Tense, Change, and Persistence’.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada

    Michael J. Raven

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  1. Michael J. Raven
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Correspondence to Michael J. Raven.

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Raven, M.J. Attesting the Aristotelian Future. Philosophia 39, 751–757 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-011-9306-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-011-9306-9

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