Wondering about the future

Will it rain tomorrow? Will there be a sea battle tomorrow? Will my death be painful? Wondering about the future plays a central role in our cognitive lives. It is integral to our inquiries, our planning, our hopes, and our fears. The aim of this paper is to consider various accounts of future contingents and the implications that they have for wondering about the future. I argue that reflecting on the nature of wondering about the future supports an Ockhamist account of future contingents according to which many of them are true. Alternative accounts which maintain that no future contingents are true, either by claiming that they are all false or by claiming that they are neither true nor false, face difficulties concerning why it is appropriate to wonder about them. Reflecting on wondering in general, and wondering about the future in particular, suggests that in wondering how the future will go, we implicitly assume that there is a determinate fact of the matter. After presenting an attractive account of interrogative attitudes that has been recently proposed by Jane Friedman and outlining some norms governing wondering, I argue that all accounts of future contingents except Ockhamism face difficulties concerning why it is appropriate to wonder about them.

The Assertion Problem

In this chapter, the author responds to a family of related objections to the doctrine of the open future—roughly, problems stemming from the observation that what are plausibly future contingents are often nevertheless properly assertible (despite being, on the author’s view, false). He responds to this family of problems by developing several related themes: (i) even if the author’s view is true, it is properly ignored in ordinary life; (ii) an assertion may assert what is false but nevertheless communicate what is true, and this can explain the appropriateness of that assertion; (iii) there is plausibly replacement talk that we could use that would enable us, if we wished, to avoid saying what is false, but would nevertheless allow us to communicate in satisfactory ways. In the end, then, there is no compelling “assertion problem” for the view defended in this book.

Three Models of the Undetermined Future

This chapter articulates three models of the undetermined future. Assuming that there are multiple future histories consistent with the past and the laws, we can maintain that (I) there is a unique actual future history, and it is determinate which history that is; (II) there is a unique actual future history, but it is indeterminate which history that is; (III) there is no such thing as the “unique actual future history”. Models (I) and (II) are united in terms of there being a unique actual course of history; models (II) and (III) are united in terms of there being no privileged history in the model. The author defends model (III). He further argues that will is a universal quantifier over all the causally possible histories consistent with the future directed facts. The author shows how this view combined with model (III) generates the view that future contingents are all false.

The Open Future: Introduction to a Classical Approach

In this introductory chapter, Patrick Todd introduces the core idea defended in this book—the idea that future contingents are all false. He clarifies what the book simply presupposes but does not defend, and then provides brief chapter-by-chapter summaries of the book.

The Open Future

In The Open Future: Why Future Contingents are All False, Patrick Todd launches a sustained defense of a radical interpretation of the doctrine of the open future, one according to which all claims about undetermined aspects of the future are simply false. Todd argues that this theory is metaphysically more parsimonious than its rivals, and that objections to its logical and practical coherence are much overblown. Todd shows how proponents of this view can maintain classical logic, and argues that the view has substantial advantages over Ockhamist, supervaluationist, and relativist alternatives. Todd draws inspiration from theories of “neg-raising” in linguistics, from debates about omniscience within the philosophy of religion, and defends a crucial comparison between his account of future contingents and certain more familiar theories of counterfactuals. Further, Todd defends his theory of the open future from the charges that it cannot make sense of our practices of betting, makes our credences regarding future contingents unintelligible, and is at odds with proper norms of assertion. In the end, in Todd’s classical open future, we have a compelling new solution to the longstanding “problem of future contingents”.

Future Contingents and the Logic of Temporal Omniscience

Perhaps one of the chief objections to open future views is that they must deny a principle we may call “Retro-closure”: roughly, if something is the case, then it was the case that it would be the case. Certain theorists, however—supervaluationists and relativists—have attempted to maintain both the open future view, and Retro-closure. In this chapter, the author argues (with Brian Rabern) that this combination of views is untenable: we must take our pick between the open future and Retro-closure. They argue that this combination of views results either in an unacceptable form of changing the past, or instead implausibly rules out the (former) existence of an omniscient being. In the appendix to this chapter, Todd argues that we can plausibly do without the Retro-closure principle, and that the principle, while intuitive, is not nearly so obvious as many have seemed to suppose.

Omniscience and the Future

In this chapter, the author discusses what A.N. Prior called “The Formalities of Omniscience”, and shows how the proponent of the view that future contingents are all false can maintain a simple, plausible conception of omniscience—one according to which p is logically equivalent to God believes p. The author introduces and motivates this intuitive equivalence, which he relies on at various points in the chapters to come. If we combine the current view with traditional theism, the result is a version of what has recently been called “open theism”. The author further argues that other open future views cannot maintain this simple view, and that this constitutes at least some reason to prefer his own view. In particular, other open future views must either (a) deny the intuitive equivalence in question, or (b) maintain that God’s mind is sometimes indeterminate.

Credible Futures

This paper articulates in formal terms a crucial distinction concerning future contingents, the distinction between what is true about the future and what is reasonable to believe about the future. Its key idea is that the branching structures that have been used so far to model truth can be employed to define an epistemic property, credibility, which we take to be closely related to knowledge and assertibility, and which is ultimately reducible to probability. As a result, two kinds of claims about future contingents—one concerning truth, the other concerning credibility—can be smoothly handled within a single semantic framework.

Knowledge of future contingents

This paper addresses the question whether future contingents are knowable, that is, whether one can know that things will go a certain way even though it is possible that things will not go that way. First I will consider a long-established view that implies a negative answer, and draw attention to some endemic problems that affect its credibility. Then I will sketch an alternative line of thought that prompts a positive answer: future contingents are knowable, although our epistemic access of them is limited in some important respects.

Futuros contingentes: história de uma outra batalha

The problem of future contingents is examined here through the vantage point of another controversy, the one over which answer Aristotle should be credited with. Two answers are attributed to Aristotle. According to the first one, which is nowadays often referred to as the traditional answer, Aristotle argued that, to prevent determinism as the valid conclusion of the argument presented at the beginning of De interpretation 9, one has to deny the universal validity of the principle of bivalence; according to the other, Aristotle accepted the validity of the principle of bivalence, but averted the conclusion of determinism by introducing the notion of indefinite verum. Both answers are examined with a view to shedding some light on this chapter that has kindled so much discussion.