Attesting the Aristotelian Future

Philosophia 39 (4):751-757 (2011)
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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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Michael J. Raven
University of Victoria

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The Complete Works: The Rev. Oxford Translation.Jonathan Barnes (ed.) - 1984 - Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
De interpretatione =. Aristoteles & Hermann Weidemann - 2014 - Boston: De Gruyter. Edited by Hermann Weidemann.
Future contingents and relative truth.John MacFarlane - 2003 - Philosophical Quarterly 53 (212):321–336.
Truth in the Garden of Forking Paths.John MacFarlane - 2008 - In Manuel García-Carpintero & Max Kölbel (eds.), Relative truth. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 81--102.

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