Talking about the future: Unsettled truth and assertion (original) (raw)
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Talking about the Future: Settled Truth and Assertion
Future Times, Future Tenses, 2014
Philosophers have long been concerned with the issue of whether the notions of truth and falsity apply or not to future contingents, i.e. to statements that express future events that have not been determined yet and thus may not happen. While there are several frameworks that (arguably) provide a satisfactory account of the truth conditions of future tensed sentences, not much has been done when it comes to providing the assertability conditions for such statements. In other words, the question that concerns us is under which conditions one should assert that some event will happen, if our universe is indeterministic and its current state leaves it open whether the event at stake will indeed happen. The paper is consists of three sections. Section 1 explains the problem that future contingents raise for natural language semantics and introduces four frameworks that rely upon the idea of "branching time". These frameworks are compared and evaluated in section 2. Finally, section 3 discusses a puzzle that turns upon the assertability of future tensed sentences.
The Truth of Future Contingents: An Analysis of Truth-Maker Indeterminacy
2020
I argue that the semantics of sentences expressing future contingent propositions is best viewed as being based on a clear distinction between a time at which a proposition is true and a time at which a state of affairs that makes it true gets actualized. That a prediction is true here and now means that its truth-maker gets actualized later. This is not to say that if a contingent proposition p concerning the future is true at t, it acquires the truth-value true at t only retrospectively, at a later moment. Nor must this be seen as suggesting that it is a settled, unpreventable fact at t that p is true at t. It just means that the reason for its present truth is something that happens later on: the future happens to evolve in such a way as to make a truth-maker of p obtain. In this case, then, it can be said that at t, p is truth-maker indeterminate, or that it has an indeterminate truth-maker. I develop a formal semantics based on this analysis in the follow-up article ‘A Formal F...
Future contingents and the assertion problem
2017
This work is about the problem of future contingents. More specifically, it focuses on how to make sense of assertions about events whose outcome is still indetermined. The problem can be outlined as follows. Suppose that nothing that has transpired so far made it inevitable that a sea battle will take place tormorrow. That is to say, it is objectively (as opposed to epistemically) possible that a sea battle will occur and it is objectively possible that it won’t. Now, let us imagine that someone today asserts “there will be a sea battle tommorow”. How should you evaluate such an assertion if, as we may presuppose, in some possible histories branching out of the present moment it will be true that tomorrow there is a sea battle, whereas in some others will be false—and none of these histories can be privileged over the others? According to a venerable tradition that goes back at least as far as Aristotle, in order to secure the openness of the future future contingentsmust be consid...
The Oxford Handbook of Assertion, 2019
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 that they are not truth apt. We consider a range of norms of assertion and argue that the best explanation of the data is provided by the view that assertion is governed by the Knowledge Norm.
Erkenntnis, 2022
In this article, we take into consideration two semantics of the future tense: linearism, according to which future-tense sentences are interpreted on a single history, and universalism, according to which they are evaluated by universally quantifying on the plurality of future histories that radiate from the present instant. Specifically, we focus on a objection advanced against universalism: if universalism were correct semantics of will, negated future-tense sentences of natural language should have two readings, depending on the scope of negation with respect to the universal quantifier on histories. However, since natural language does not show this difference, one may conclude that there is no universal quantifier in the interpretation of these sentences. We show that this conclusion is premature. First, will has clear scope interactions with indefinite nouns phrases, contrary to what linearism predicts. Second, it is possible to extend the treatment of vague predicates as partial predicates to will: Since partial predicates have no scope interactions with negation, this can account for the scopelessness of will. The partiality of truth conditions is not restricted to will but also pertains to counterfactuals and generics and probably is part of a general tendency to maximize contraries.
A Note on Assertion, Relativism and Future Contingents
I argue that John MacFarlane's (2003) attempt to reconcile his proposed truth-relativist account of future contingents with a plausible account of assertion is self-defeating. Specifically, a paradoxical result of MacFarlane's view is that assertions of future contingents are impermissible for anyone who already accepts MacFarlane's own truth-relativist account of future contingents.
A unified analysis of the future as epistemic modality
Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 2018
We offer an analysis of future morphemes as epistemic modal operators. The main empirical motivation comes from the fact that future morphemes have systematic purely epistemic readings—not only in Greek and Italian, but also in Dutch, German, and English will. The existence of epistemic readings suggests that the future expressions quantify over epistemic, not metaphysical alternatives. We provide a unified analysis for epistemic and predictive readings as epistemic necessity, and the shift between the two is determined compositionally by the lower tense. Our account thus acknowledges a systematic interaction between modality and tense—but the future itself is a pure modal, not a mixed temporal/modal operator. We show that the modal base of the future is nonveridical, i.e. it includes p and ¬p worlds, parallel to epistemic modals such as must, and present arguments that future morphemes are a category that stands in between epistemic modals and predicates of personal taste. We identify, finally, a subclass of epistemic futures which are ratificational, and argue that will is a member of this class.
The Truth About the Past and the Future
This paper is about The Truthmaker Problem for Presentism. I spell out a solution to the problem that involves appealing to indeterministic laws of nature and branching semantics for past- and future-tensed sentences. Then I discuss a potential glitch for this solution, and propose a way to get around that glitch. Finally, I consider some likely objections to the view offered here, as well as replies to those objections.