Philosophical Studies 167 (2):251-271 (2014)
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Abstract |
It is highly now intuitive that the future is open and the past is closed now—whereas it is unsettled whether there will be a fourth world war, it is settled that there was a first. Recently, it has become increasingly popular to claim that the intuitive openness of the future implies that contingent statements about the future, such as ‘There will be a sea battle tomorrow,’ are non-bivalent (neither true nor false). In this paper, we argue that the non-bivalence of future contingents is at odds with our pre-theoretic intuitions about the openness of the future. These intuitions are revealed by our pragmatic judgments concerning the correctness and incorrectness of assertions of future contingents. We argue that the pragmatic data together with a plausible account of assertion shows that in many cases we take future contingents to be true (or to be false), though we take the future to be open in relevant respects. It follows that appeals to intuition to support the non-bivalence of future contingents are untenable. Intuition favours bivalence
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Keywords | The open future Bivalence Norms of assertion Indeterminacy |
Categories | (categorize this paper) |
Reprint years | 2014 |
DOI | 10.1007/s11098-012-0041-2 |
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References found in this work BETA
Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment.Robert Brandom - 1994 - Harvard University Press.
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Citations of this work BETA
Future Contingents Are All False! On Behalf of a Russellian Open Future.Patrick Todd - 2016 - Mind 125 (499):775-798.
How is the Asymmetry Between the Open Future and the Fixed Past to Be Characterized?Vincent Grandjean - 2019 - Synthese (3):1-24.
The Modal Future: A Theory of Future-Directed Thought and Talk.Fabrizio Cariani - 2021 - Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Recent Work on Assertion.Sanford C. Goldberg - 2015 - American Philosophical Quarterly 52 (4):365-380.
View all 13 citations / Add more citations
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