Some Problems with the Russellian Open Future

Abstract

In a recently published paper, Todd (Mind, 125(499), pp. 775-798, 2016a) advocates a novel treatment of future contingents. On his view, all statements concerning the contingent future are false. He motivates his semantic postulates by considerations in philosophy of time and modality, in particular by the claim that there is no actual future. I present a number of highly controversial consequences of Todd's theory. Inadequacy of his semantics might indirectly serve as an argument against the philosophical view underpinning his proposal. Keywords Future contingents • Open future • Future tense Todd (2016a) undertakes a very ambitious project in his recent paper. He tries to motivate a novel treatment of future contingents which would render them all false. He offers a surprisingly simple rationale for his semantic endeavor: a sentence in future tense is true, if and only if what it says happens in the actual future. But if there is no actual future, then nothing happens in the actual future and any sentence in future tense is false. It certainly is an original semantic proposal, well-grounded in existing philosophical views. I am going to argue, however, that it ultimately fails. Upon closer examination, it turns out that Todd's definitions generate numerous difficulties which are hard to accept (or overcome). In my opinion, it indicates that the claim that there is no actual future requires clarification since, when taken at face value, it might lead to unwelcome consequences.

Future Contingents and the Logic of Temporal Omniscience

“…For the former sort of view, see, e.g., Thomason (1970) andMacFarlane (2003). For the latter "all false" approach, see Hartshorne (1965), andPrior's "Peircean" semantics in his (1967: 128-135); for a different version of this approach, see Todd (2016a) and Todd (forthcoming), and for criticism, see Schoubye andRabern (2017) andWawer (2018).…”

Future Contingents and the Logic of Temporal Omniscience*

“…For the former sort of view, see, e.g., Thomason (1970) and MacFarlane (2003). For the latter “all false” approach, see Hartshorne (1965), and Prior's “Peircean” semantics in his (1967: 128‐135); for a different version of this approach, see Todd (2016a) and Todd (2018), and for criticism, see Schoubye and Rabern (2017) and Wawer (2018).…”