Abstract

In his work on the open future, Patrick Todd outlines three models of how to deal with future contingents. These models must answer two questions: one metaphysical, about what facts there are in the world; one semantic, about how to deal with sentences involving ‘will.’ Model 1 has a privileged timeline. Model 2 has an actual future timeline but leaves it indeterminate which timeline that is. Model 3 has no future timeline. All three give will-sentences a modal treatement, as a box over available futures. I will argue that Todd’s second model has problems and should be improved. The first is that it denies what Todd labels as the basic metaphysical intuition behind open-futurism. The second is that indeterminacy about the facts that characterize the actual timeline breaks through into indeterminate identity. I propose a fix to model 2 eliminating its actual future and resolving an issue that arises in applying the neutral semantics Todd endorses to indeterminate sentences. This improved model, I suggest, may even compare favorably to Todd’s preferred model 3.