Future Contingents and the Logic of Temporal Omniscience*

Abstract

At least since Aristotle's famous 'sea-battle' passages in On Interpretation 9, some substantial minority of philosophers has been attracted to what we might call the doctrine of the open future. This doctrine maintains that future contingent statements-roughly, statements saying of causally undetermined events that they will happen-are not true. 1 But, prima facie, such views seem inconsistent with the following intuition: if something has happened, then (looking backwards) 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 that, looking backwards, it was the case that there would be a sea-battle? This tension forms, in large part, what might be called the problem of future contingents.Some theorists respond to this tension by insisting that one of the intuitions here must simply be denied. For example, so-called Peircians give up the backwardlooking intuition, while so-called Ockamists give up the forward-looking intuition (see Prior 1967: 113-135). But a dominant trend in temporal logic and semantic theorizing about future contingents seeks to validate both intuitions. Theorists in this tradition-including some interpretations of Aristotle, but paradigmatically, Thomason (1970), as well as more recent developments in Belnap, et al. (2001) and MacFarlane (2003MacFarlane ( , 2014-have argued that the apparent tension between the intuitions is in fact merely apparent. 2 In short, such philosophers seek to maintain both of the following two theses: * For comments and discussion, thanks to

Necessity and Determinism in Robert Grosseteste’s De libero arbitrio

“…[17], [16], [9]) produced in response to this book, as well as other recently published papers (see e.g. [3], [4], [7], [8], [22]), reveal that this topic is still vivid.…”

“…"while I am sitting, it is necessary that I am sitting" [pp. [22][23][24][25] in this case the alternative "I am sitting or I am not sitting" is destroyed. Next, he reformulates the two kinds of necessity and calls them: 1) necessity from which "only what is necessary follows"; 2) necessity from which "what is contingent seems to (videtur) follow.…”

Ockhamism and Philosophy of Time

“…The example they offer is due to Dummett: "A city will never be built here", and we are to imagine it said of a location on which no city is built over an infinite duration of time. However, our semantic clause for 'Willalways:A' predicts, as it should, that the Dummett sentence is true in the imagined scenario.10 The truth definitions that we have given for ROF have the welcome feature that they do not validate whatTodd and Rabern (2019) call "Retro-closure": If A, then Was:Will:A. Suppose 'A' holds at m. 'Was:Will:A' is true at m iff 'Will:A' is true at some m' < m. But there need not be any such m'.…”

The open future: why future contingents are all falseby PatrickToddOxford University Press, 2021, $70.00, xi+212 pp.

“…Chapters 5 and 7 deal with future contingents and the problem of God's omniscience (Chapter 7 is a reprint of Todd & Rabern, 2021). Given the absence of future‐directed facts that go beyond what is settled, and given that Todd assumes that God is outside time, some aspects of the future are epistemically open to God.…”