Discourse about the Future

1969 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 169-190 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Clark
Keyword(s):  
Future Event ◽  
True Statement ◽  
Philosophical Significance ◽  
The Past ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
The Future ◽  
Tensed Sentence ◽  
Future Events ◽  
Contingent Event ◽  
Truth Value

While philosophers feel relatively comfortable about talking of the present and the past, some of them feel uncomfortable about talking in just the same way of future events. They feel that, in general, discourse about the future differs significantly from discourse about the past and present, and that these differences reflect a logical asymmetry between the past and future beyond the merely defining fact that the future succeeds, and the past precedes, the present time. The problem is: how can we talk about events which have not yet happened, or at any rate are not yet bound to happen, or whose participants do not yet exist? The effect of these worries has led them to claim to recognise restrictions on our talk about the future which do not govern talk about the past and present. The most famous of these views is Aristotle's. According to one familiar interpretation, he holds that a statement about a future event which is not yet settled, a contingent event in the future, is neither true nor false, even though the statement that the event either will or will not happen is necessarily true. Proponents of this view felt that if a future-tensed statement were already true then the fact that it stated would already be settled. I do not propose to discuss this well-known and muchdiscussed doctrine of Aristotle's, but I do want to consider some allied views which have been aired recently, and to look at their philosophical significance. Before I look at these, however, it will be convenient to recall three of the main reasons why the Aristotelian doctrine is unpopular. In the first place it is paradoxical to accept that a statement of the form p v ∼ p is (necessarily) true while claiming that neither of its disjuncts is true. Then there are misgivings about the notion of truth involved: many feel that truth is essentially an attribute of timeless propositions and that it is nonsense to talk of a statement's becoming true as you would of Aristotle's views if the event described became inevitable. There is also the difficulty of accounting for the meaning of a future-tensed sentence which may express a statement that is neither true nor false simply because what it states is not yet settled. It could not be said of the sentence expressing such a statement that you know what it means if you know what it is for the sentence to express a true statement. I know the meaning of the present-tensed sentence ‘A sea-battle is now being waged’ if I know that it can normally be used to make a true statement precisely in the event of there being a sea-battle being waged at present. But I do not know the meaning of the future-tensed sentence ‘A sea-battle will be waged tomorrow’ simply by knowing that the sentence expresses a true statement if it is already settled that there is going to be a battle: the statement doesn't mean that the battle is already settled, otherwise it would not lack a truth-value when the matter was still open – it would be false.

Discourse about the Future

1969 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 169-190
Author(s):  
Michael Clark
Keyword(s):  
Future Event ◽  
True Statement ◽  
Philosophical Significance ◽  
The Past ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
The Future ◽  
Tensed Sentence ◽  
Future Events ◽  
Contingent Event ◽  
Truth Value

While philosophers feel relatively comfortable about talking of the present and the past, some of them feel uncomfortable about talking in just the same way of future events. They feel that, in general, discourse about the future differs significantly from discourse about the past and present, and that these differences reflect a logical asymmetry between the past and future beyond the merely defining fact that the future succeeds, and the past precedes, the present time. The problem is: how can we talk about events which have not yet happened, or at any rate are not yet bound to happen, or whose participants do not yet exist? The effect of these worries has led them to claim to recognise restrictions on our talk about the future which do not govern talk about the past and present. The most famous of these views is Aristotle's. According to one familiar interpretation, he holds that a statement about a future event which is not yet settled, a contingent event in the future, is neither true nor false, even though the statement that the event either will or will not happen is necessarily true. Proponents of this view felt that if a future-tensed statement were already true then the fact that it stated would already be settled. I do not propose to discuss this well-known and muchdiscussed doctrine of Aristotle's, but I do want to consider some allied views which have been aired recently, and to look at their philosophical significance. Before I look at these, however, it will be convenient to recall three of the main reasons why the Aristotelian doctrine is unpopular. In the first place it is paradoxical to accept that a statement of the form p v ∼ p is (necessarily) true while claiming that neither of its disjuncts is true. Then there are misgivings about the notion of truth involved: many feel that truth is essentially an attribute of timeless propositions and that it is nonsense to talk of a statement's becoming true as you would of Aristotle's views if the event described became inevitable. There is also the difficulty of accounting for the meaning of a future-tensed sentence which may express a statement that is neither true nor false simply because what it states is not yet settled. It could not be said of the sentence expressing such a statement that you know what it means if you know what it is for the sentence to express a true statement. I know the meaning of the present-tensed sentence ‘A sea-battle is now being waged’ if I know that it can normally be used to make a true statement precisely in the event of there being a sea-battle being waged at present. But I do not know the meaning of the future-tensed sentence ‘A sea-battle will be waged tomorrow’ simply by knowing that the sentence expresses a true statement if it is already settled that there is going to be a battle: the statement doesn't mean that the battle is already settled, otherwise it would not lack a truth-value when the matter was still open – it would be false.

scholarly journals You can't change the past: Children’s recognition of the causal asymmetry between past and future events

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katharine A Tillman ◽  
Caren Walker
Keyword(s):  
Early Childhood ◽  
Causal Reasoning ◽  
Future Event ◽  
Turn On ◽  
The Past ◽  
External Agents ◽  
The Future ◽  
Future Events ◽  
Conceptual Distinction ◽  
Do So

Children’s temporal and causal reasoning skills improve substantially during early childhood, but it remains unclear when they fully understand the conceptual distinction between the past and the future. Here we explored U.S. 3- to 6-year-old children’s (n = 228) and adults’ (n = 60) understanding that acting in the present can change the future but not the past. To do so, we told participants 3-step causal stories, e.g., “(1) When Sally flips the light switch, (2) the light turns on, (3) so she can see to find her toy,” and asked about the effects of an action at event 2, e.g., “What if John turned off the light?”. When asked about the effects of the change on the future consequent event (3), only 3-year-olds responded at chance, while 4- to 6-year-olds became increasingly likely to judge that the future event would also change. However, when asked about the effects of the change on the past antecedent event (1), children of all ages, like adults, consistently judged that the past event still occurred. This suggests that children have an early-developing understanding that the past cannot be changed. Using a similar paradigm, we also explored children’s reasoning about the implications of the non-occurrence of event 2, in which the cause was not specified, e.g., “What if the light didn’t turn on?”. Both children and adults reasoned differently about these scenarios than they did about those involving actions by external agents. In particular, adults and 6-year-olds inferred that the antecedent event also had not occurred. Implications for theoretical accounts of causal and temporal reasoning are discussed.

scholarly journals A palace fit for the future: Desirability in temporal work

2021 ◽  
pp. 147612702110120
Author(s):  
Siavash Alimadadi ◽  
Andrew Davies ◽  
Fredrik Tell
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
The Past ◽  
Renewal Program ◽  
The Future ◽  
Depth Study ◽  
Future Events ◽  
Future Outcomes ◽  
Pluralistic Contexts

Research on the strategic organization of time often assumes that collective efforts are motivated by and oriented toward achieving desirable, although not necessarily well-defined, future states. In situations surrounded by uncertainty where work has to proceed urgently to avoid an impending disaster, however, temporal work is guided by engaging with both desirable and undesirable future outcomes. Drawing on a real-time, in-depth study of the inception of the Restoration and Renewal program of the Palace of Westminster, we investigate how organizational actors develop a strategy for an uncertain and highly contested future while safeguarding ongoing operations in the present and preserving the heritage of the past. Anticipation of undesirable future events played a crucial role in mobilizing collective efforts to move forward. We develop a model of future desirability in temporal work to identify how actors construct, link, and navigate interpretations of desirable and undesirable futures in their attempts to create a viable path of action. By conceptualizing temporal work based on the phenomenological quality of the future, we advance understanding of the strategic organization of time in pluralistic contexts characterized by uncertainty and urgency.

Church Time and Astrological Time in the Waning Middle Ages

2002 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 117-132
Author(s):  
Hilary M. Carey
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Missed Opportunities ◽  
The Past ◽  
Adam And Eve ◽  
Primary Qualities ◽  
The Future ◽  
Future Events ◽  
Scientific Claims ◽  
To Come

Time, according to medieval theologians and philosophers, was experienced in radically different ways by God and by his creation. Indeed, the obligation to dwell in time, and therefore to have no sure knowledge of what was to come, was seen as one of the primary qualities which marked the post-lapsarian state. When Adam and Eve were cast out of the garden of delights, they entered a world afflicted with the changing of the seasons, in which they were obliged to work and consume themselves with the needs of the present day and the still unknown dangers of the next. Medieval concerns about the use and abuse of time were not merely confined to anxiety about the present, or awareness of seized or missed opportunities in the past. The future was equally worrying, in particular the extent to which this part of time was set aside for God alone, or whether it was permissible to seek to know the future, either through revelation and prophecy, or through science. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the scientific claims of astrology to provide a means to explain the outcome of past and future events, circumventing God’s distant authority, became more and more insistent. This paper begins by examining one skirmish in this larger battle over the control of the future.

Time and Truth: The Presentism-Eternalism Debate

Philosophy ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 84 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Stoneham
Keyword(s):  
Open Future ◽  
Equal Footing ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Future Events ◽  
Growing Block ◽  
The Open Future ◽  
Block Universe ◽  
The Way

AbstractThere are many questions we can ask about time, but perhaps the most fundamental is whether there are metaphysically interesting differences between past, present and future events. An eternalist believes in a block universe: past, present and future events are all on an equal footing. A gradualist believes in a growing block: he agrees with the eternalist about the past and the present but not about the future. A presentist believes that what is present has a special status. My first claim is that the familiar ways of articulating these views result in there being no substantive disagreement at all between the three parties. I then show that if we accept the controversial truthmaking principle, we can articulate a substantive disagreement. Finally, I apply this way of formulating the debate to related questions such as the open future and determinism, showing that these do not always line up in quite the way one would expect.

scholarly journals Desafios do contemporâneo na ficção de Lídia Jorge / Challenges of the Contemporary in the Fiction of Lídia Jorge

2019 ◽  
Vol 39 (61) ◽  
pp. 117
Author(s):  
Maria Graciete Besse
Keyword(s):  
Human Vulnerability ◽  
The Past ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
The Future ◽  
Portuguese Society

Resumo: Desde O dia dos prodígios (1980) até Estuário (2018), a obra ficcional de Lídia Jorge percorre diferentes lugares, experiências e memórias para desenhar uma cartografia da vida precária e interrogar incansavelmente as sombras que se escondem nas dobras do tempo, sabendo que “escrever sobre o passado é sempre uma proposta de futuro”. A partir de alguns conceitos fundamentais de Agamben, o objectivo deste estudo é analisar como o olhar iluminador da romancista se debruça sobre o arcaico e o contemporâneo, para resgatar do silêncio os contornos mais sensíveis da realidade, oferecendo-nos um testemunho notável sobre a vulnerabilidade humana e interpelando-nos para uma reflexão estimulante sobre a importância da literatura na transformação do mundo.Palavras-chave: Lídia Jorge, Agamben, romance, sociedade portuguesa, ética.Abstract: From The Day of Prodigies (1980) to Estuary (2018), Lídia Jorge’s fictional work traverses different places, experiences and memories to draw a map of precarious life and tirelessly interrogate the shadows that hide in the folds of time, knowing that “writing about the past is always a proposal for the future.” From some fundamental concepts of Agamben, the objective of this study is to analyze how the illuminating look of the novelist focuses on the archaic and the contemporary, to rescue from the silence the most sensitive contours of reality, offering us a remarkable testimony about human vulnerability and questioning us for a stimulating reflection on the importance of literature in the transformation of the world.Keywords: Lídia Jorge, Agamben, novel, portuguese society, ethic.

scholarly journals Culture, Temporal Focus, and Values of the Past and the Future

2012 ◽  
Vol 38 (8) ◽  
pp. 1030-1040 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tieyuan Guo ◽  
Li-Jun Ji ◽  
Roy Spina ◽  
Zhiyong Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Differences ◽  
Cultural Influences ◽  
Future Event ◽  
Asymmetry Effect ◽  
Past Event ◽  
Monetary Value ◽  
The Past ◽  
Chinese Canadians ◽  
The Future ◽  
Temporal Focus

This article examines cultural differences in how people value future and past events. Throughout four studies, the authors found that European Canadians attached more monetary value to an event in the future than to an identical event in the past, whereas Chinese and Chinese Canadians placed more monetary value to a past event than to an identical future event. The authors also showed that temporal focus—thinking about the past or future—explained cultural influences on the temporal value asymmetry effect. Specifically, when induced to think about and focus on the future, Chinese valued the future more than the past, just like Euro-Canadians; when induced to think about and focus on the past, Euro-Canadians valued the past more than the future, just like Chinese.

The Role of Past in the Simulation of Autobiographical Future Episodes

2010 ◽  
Vol 57 (6) ◽  
pp. 419-428 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nadia Gamboz ◽  
Maria A. Brandimonte ◽  
Stefania De Vito
Keyword(s):  
Young Adults ◽  
Episodic Memory ◽  
Recognition Task ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Future Events ◽  
Delayed Recognition

Human beings’ ability to envisage the future has been recently assumed to rely on the reconstructive nature of episodic memory ( Schacter & Addis, 2007 ). In the present research, young adults mentally reexperienced and preexperienced temporally close and distant autobiographical episodes, and rated their phenomenal characteristics as well as their novelty. Additionally, they performed a delayed recognition task including remember-know judgments on new, old-remember, and old-imagine words. Results showed that past and future temporally close episodes included more phenomenal details than distant episodes, in line with earlier studies. However, future events were occasionally rated as already occurred in the past. Furthermore, in the recognition task, participants falsely attributed old-imagine words to remembered episodes. While partially in line with previous results, these findings call for a more subtle analysis in order to discriminate representations of past episodes from true future events simulations.

PROPHETIC ANTICIPATION OF THE FUTURE AND ITS IMPACT ON THE LIFE OF THE COMPANIONS (MAY ALLAH BE PLEASED WITH THEMPREPARE)

2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 973-981
Author(s):  
Jasim Mohammed Rashid Rashid
Keyword(s):  
First Generation ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
Science Of History ◽  
Successful Leadership ◽  
Future Science ◽  
The Future ◽  
Future Events ◽  
Better Than ◽  
Research Studies

Clarifying the image of the desired future is one of the first tasks of the successful leadership, which draws its followers the features and milestones of this future. Indeed, future science today has become one of the important sciences for which research, studies and centers are held, and this science was clear to the prophets, peace be upon them, for it is like a science of history, and if It was in the future and it has not yet occurred, but among the prophets and wise men there is a date that falls in the future that can be read and the path that he will follow. This is our master Moses on him and on our Prophet, may prayers and peace be upon him, he offers the Messenger of ALLAH Muhammad, may ALLAH  bless him and grant him peace, an integrated reading, not to his ummah to which he was sent but to the nation of Muhammad peace ALLAH  be upon him and she was at the beginning of its inception, and he is with the Supreme Companion, that this ummah cannot tolerate fifty prayers a day, so your Lord asked to reduce your nation, even though it is a future that has not yet come, and this our master is kind to him and our Prophet, prayers and peace, submits a report to ALLAH  the Wise and the All-Knowing that The future of these people is not better than their past And if we go back to the Sunnah of the Holy Prophet Muhammad, may God’s prayers and peace be upon him, we find the clarity of future events before him as the clarity of past events that occurred and passed, so what happened in the migration with the great companion Saraqa bin Malik, is the clearest evidence of what they intended As for the science of the future in the Noble AL  Qur’an, ALLAH Almighty made it clear and made it subject to laws and Sunnahs. When these laws and these Sunnahs are applied, the results are identical to that. The Noble AL  Qur’an has put introductions into which results can be obtained. Therefore, the idea of ​​this research came about how the ummah can read its future based on the facts of the reality in which it is living, and the interest of the first generation in the anticipations of the Prophet, may ALLAH bless him and grant him peace), highlighting examples of the influence of the prophetic foresight on the lives of the honorable Companions, may ALLAH  be pleased with them.

Studying Organization from the Perspective of the Ontology of Temporality

2020 ◽  
pp. 50-68
Author(s):  
Anthony Hussenot ◽  
Tor Hernes ◽  
Isabelle Bouty
Keyword(s):  
Creative Process ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
The Past ◽  
Temporal Phenomenon ◽  
The Future ◽  
Future Events

This chapter suggests an events-based approach that can be used to understand organization as a temporal phenomenon. To date, the ontology of time sees the present, the past, and the future as different and discrete temporal epochs and thus prevents us from understanding activities as a creative process in which the past, the present, and the future are constantly redefined to give meaning and sense to actors. Conversely, an ontology of temporality enables us to grasp the situated nature of organizational phenomena. We argue that an events-based approach provides a better understanding of how past, present, and future events are constantly co-defined and configured, thereby enabling actors to gain a sense of continuity, i.e. a sense about their history, the present moment, and an expected future. Following a discussion of the nature of an events-based approach, we discuss the contributions and implications of such an approach by showing how it redefines the very subject of organization and brings insights to the study of contemporary organizational phenomena.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document