A.N. Prior considered an objection to open future views, viz. that they are inconsistent with our ordinary practices of betting. Prior worried that, on open future views, if we bet on rain, and then it does rain, I could refuse to grant the payout on grounds that the proposition you bet was true was not true at the time of the bet. The author argues that this objection fails, by developing a picture of betting on which we are not betting on anything like current truth. He then considers the objection that his view is inconsistent with the idea that there are non-zero probabilities of future events; he argues that though our credence in a given future contingent proposition may be zero, the objective probability of the relevant event may nevertheless be high. The author develops a comparison between this view and parallel views about the probability of conditionals and probabilities in fictions.
