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Future contingents

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2011)

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  1. 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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  • What Becomes of a Causal Set?Christian Wüthrich & Craig Callender - 2016 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 68 (3):907-925.
    ABSTRACT Unlike the relativity theory it seeks to replace, causal set theory has been interpreted to leave space for a substantive, though perhaps ‘localized’, form of ‘becoming’. The possibility of fundamental becoming is nourished by the fact that the analogue of Stein’s theorem from special relativity does not hold in CST. Despite this, we find that in many ways, the debate concerning becoming parallels the well-rehearsed lines it follows in the domain of relativity. We present, however, some new twists and (...)
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  • The Truth About the Future.Jacek Wawer - 2014 - Erkenntnis 79 (3):365-401.
    There is a long-standing disagreement among Branching-Time theorists. Even though they all believe that the branching representation accurately grasps the idea that the future, contrary to the past, is open, they argue whether this representation is compatible with the claim that one among many possible futures is distinguished—the single future that will come to be. This disagreement is paralleled in an argument about the bivalence of future contingents. The single, privileged future is often called the Thin Red Line. I reconstruct (...)
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  • (1 other version)Alternatives to Histories? Employing a Local Notion of Modal Consistency in Branching Theories.Thomas Müller - 2011 - Erkenntnis 79 (S3):1-22.
    Branching theories are popular frameworks for modeling objective indeterminism in the form of a future of open possibilities. In such theories, the notion of a history plays a crucial role: it is both a basic ingredient in the axiomatic definition of the framework, and it is used as a parameter of truth in semantics for languages with a future tense. Furthermore, histories—complete possible courses of events—ground the notion of modal consistency: a set of events is modally consistent iff there is (...)
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  • (1 other version)Ockhamism and Philosophy of Time.Alessio Santelli (ed.) - 2022 - Springer Cham.
    This book discusses fundamental topics on contemporary Ockhamism. The collected essays show how contemporary Ockhamism can impact areas of research such as semantics, metaphysics and also the philosophy of science. In addition, the volume hosts one historian of Medieval philosophy who investigates the way in which William of Ockham “in flesh and bone” construed time and, more generally, future contingency. The essays explore the different meanings of this theory. They cover three main topics, in particular. The first examines the thesis (...)
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  • Eternalism and the problem of hyperplanes.Matias Slavov - 2022 - Ratio 35 (2):91-103.
    Eternalism is the view that the past, the present and the future exist simpliciter. A typical argument in favor of this view leans on the relativity of simultaneity. The ‘equally real with’ relation is assumed to be transitive between spacelike separated events connected by hyperplanes of simultaneity. This reasoning is in tension with the conventionality of simultaneity. Conventionality indicates that, even within a specific frame, simultaneity is based on the choice of the synchronization parameter. Hence the argument for eternalism is (...)
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  • Credible Futures.Andrea Iacona & Samuele Iaquinto - 2021 - Synthese 199:10953-10968.
    This paper articulates in formal terms a crucial distinction concerning future contingents, the distinction between what is true about the future and what is reasonable to believe about the future. Its key idea is that the branching structures that have been used so far to model truth can be employed to define an epistemic property, credibility, which we take to be closely related to knowledge and assertibility, and which is ultimately reducible to probability. As a result, two kinds of claims (...)
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  • On metaphysics’ independence from truthmaking. Or, Why Humean Supervenience is Compatible with the Growing Block Universe.Aldo Filomeno - 2021 - Erkenntnis 88 (4):1467-1480.
    This paper aims to support the claim that analytic metaphysics should be more cautious regarding the constraints that truthmaking considerations impose on metaphysical theories. To this end, I reply to Briggs and Forbes (2017), whoargue that certain truthmaking commitments are incurred by a Humean metaphysics and by the Growing-Block theory. First, I argue that Humean Supervenience does not need to endorse a standard version of truthmaker maximalism. This undermines Briggs and Forbes’s conclusion that Humean Supervenience and the Growing-Block theory are (...)
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  • The Open Future: Why Future Contingents Are All False.Patrick Todd - 2021 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    This book launches a sustained defense of a radical interpretation of the doctrine of the open future. Patrick Todd argues that all claims about undetermined aspects of the future are simply false.
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  • The Modal Future: A Theory of Future-Directed Thought and Talk.Fabrizio Cariani - 2021 - Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
    Provisional draft, pre-production copy of my book “The Modal Future” (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press).
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  • The Block Universe: A Philosophical Investigation in Four Dimensions.Pieter Thyssen - 2020 - Dissertation, Ku Leuven
    The aim of this doctoral dissertation is to closely explore the nature of Einstein’s block universe and to tease out its implications for the nature of time and human freedom. Four questions, in particular, are central to this dissertation, and set out the four dimensions of this philosophical investigation: (1) Does the block universe view of time follow inevitably from the theory of special relativity? (2) Is there room for the passage of time in the block universe? (3) Can we (...)
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  • Degrees of Freedom.Pieter Thyssen & Sylvia Wenmackers - 2021 - Synthese 198 (11):10207-10235.
    Human freedom is in tension with nomological determinism and with statistical determinism. The goal of this paper is to answer both challenges. Four contributions are made to the free-will debate. First, we propose a classification of scientific theories based on how much freedom they allow. We take into account that indeterminism comes in different degrees and that both the laws and the auxiliary conditions can place constraints. A scientific worldview pulls towards one end of this classification, while libertarianism pulls towards (...)
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  • Assertion and the Future.Corine Besson & Anandi Hattiangadi - 2018 - In Sanford C. Goldberg (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Assertion. 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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  • B-Theory and Time Biases.Sayid Bnefsi - 2019 - In Patrick Blackburn, Per Hasle & Peter Øhrstrøm (eds.), Logic and Philosophy of Time: Further Themes from Prior. Aalborg University Press. pp. 41-52.
    We care not only about what experiences we have, but when we have them too. However, on the B-theory of time, something’s timing isn’t an intrinsic way for that thing to be or become. Given B-theory, should we be rationally indifferent about the timing per se of an experience? In this paper, I argue that B-theorists can justify time-biased preferences for pains to be past rather than present and for pleasures to be present rather than past. In support of this (...)
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  • Future Contingents and the Logic of Temporal Omniscience.Patrick Todd & Brian Rabern - 2019 - 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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  • God, Evil, and Alvin Plantinga on the Free-Will Defense.Ciro De Florio & Aldo Frigerio - 2013 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 5 (3):75--94.
    In this paper we will give a critical account of Plantinga’s well-known argument to the effect that the existence of an omnipotent and morally perfect God is consistent with the actual presence of evil. After presenting Plantinga’s view, we critically discuss both the idea of divine knowledge of conditionals of freedom and the concept of transworld depravity. Then, we will sketch our own version of the Free-Will Defence, which maintains that moral evil depends on the misuse of human freedom. However, (...)
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  • A critical discussion of Prior’s philosophical and tense-logical analysis of the ideas of indeterminism and human freedom.Peter Øhrstrøm - 2019 - Synthese 196 (1):69-85.
    This paper is a critical discussion of A.N. Prior’s contribution to the modern understanding of indeterminism and human freedom of choice. Prior suggested that these ideas should be conceived in terms of his tense logic. It can be demonstrated that his approach provides an attractive formalization that makes it possible to discuss indeterminism and human freedom of choice in a very precise manner and in a broader metaphysical context. It is also argued that Prior’s development of this approach was closely (...)
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  • 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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  • In Defence of the Actuality Principle.Francesco Gallina - 2018 - Philosophia 46 (2):295-310.
    The thin red line theory is a form of branching indeterminism. It entails that, among the many possible developments that reality might take, one is privileged: the actual history. The thin red line theory is naturally paired off with a semantic thesis that may be called ‘the actuality principle’: a statement is true as used at a moment if and only if it is true at that moment on the actual history. The actuality principle has been challenged, for it would (...)
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  • (1 other version)Divine foreknowledge and human freedom: exploring a gap-theoretic account.Michael DeVito - 2023 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 2 (1):1-18.
    The recent work of logician Jc Beall marks a paradigm shift within the fields of analytic theology and philosophy of religion. Thanks to Beall’s work, the long held (and generally unquestioned) assumption that theology is governed by (or closed under) the classical account of logic, is no longer free for the assumption. More importantly, by dropping this unquestioned commitment to the classical account, Beall’s work has uncovered natural and well-motivated solutions to some of monotheistic theologies’ most difficult and longstanding problems. (...)
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  • (In)determinism, Branching Time, and Branching Space.Alexander Hughes - manuscript
    The branching time analysis grounds the possibilities entailed by temporal indeterminism in a branching temporal structure. I construct a spatial analog of the branching time analysis – the branching space analysis – according to which the possibilities entailed by spatial indeterminism are grounded in branching spatial structure. The construction proceeds in such a way as to show the analogies between the branching space and branching time analyses. I argue that the two views are a package. In particular: the theoretical virtues (...)
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  • Nuel Belnap on Indeterminism and Free Action.Thomas Müller (ed.) - 2014 - Wien, Austria: Springer.
    This volume seeks to further the use of formal methods in clarifying one of the central problems of philosophy: that of our free human agency and its place in our indeterministic world. It celebrates the important contributions made in this area by Nuel Belnap, American logician and philosopher. Philosophically, indeterminism and free action can seem far apart, but in Belnap’s work, they are intimately linked. This book explores their philosophical interconnectedness through a selection of original research papers that build forth (...)
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  • 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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  • 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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  • The Actual Future is Open.Giuseppe Spolaore & Francesco Gallina - 2020 - Erkenntnis 85 (1):99-119.
    Open futurism is the indeterministic position according to which the future is ‘open’, i.e., there is now no fact of the matter as to what future contingent events will actually obtain. Many open futurists hold a branching conception of time, in which a variety of possible futures exist. This paper introduces two challenges to branching-time open futurism, which are similar in spirit to a challenge posed by Fine to tense realism. The paper argues that, to address the new challenges, open (...)
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  • Logical and Nomological Obstacles to Foreknowledge of the Future.Erdinç Sayan & Hasan Cagatay - 2019 - Principia: An International Journal of Epistemology 23 (2):345-360.
    A famous puzzle called “Grandmother Paradox” is used to argue against the feasibility of traveling backward in time because of the logical and nomological problems such travel involves, and not only because we don’t have the technology to make it reality. The same kind of problems would be encountered in leaping forward in time and then returning to the time of departure. We argue that a similar family of problems also arise in our having foreknowledge of the future without making (...)
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  • Necessity and Future-Dependence: ‘Ockhamist’ Accounts of Abraham’s Faith at Paris around 1200.Wojciech Wciórka - 2018 - Vivarium 56 (1-2):1-46.
    This article aims to show that the so-called ‘Ockhamist’ solution to the determinist challenge was a commonplace among Parisian scholastics around 1200. On the ‘Ockhamist’ view, some propositions about the past do not fall under the necessity of the past, since their truth-value depends on the future. The paper focuses on two puzzles involving Abraham’s belief in the future Incarnation. The author discusses the ‘Ockhamist’ strategies adopted by theologians of the period, including Simon of Tournai, Peter of Poitiers, Praepositinus of (...)
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