The Open Future, Classical Style

In this chapter, the author defends his view against the core complaint that it invalidates what has been called “Will Excluded Middle” (either it will be that p or it will be that ~p), and an associated principle that has recently been called “Scopelessness”. According to scopelessness, will is “scopeless” with respect to negation; there is no semantic distinction between ~Willp and Will~p. In this chapter, it is argued that the data that seems to support scopelessness is adequately explained by the thesis that will is “neg-raising predicate”. In normal contexts, “No one should do that” certainly pragmatically implies “Everyone shouldn’t do that”—but the former sentence does not semantically entail the latter; this is, in part, to say that should is a neg-raiser. In general, the author defends the crucial scope distinction between ~Willp and Will~p, and responds to several objections to this view.

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.

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”.

Betting on the Open Future

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.

Grounding the Open Future

In this chapter, Patrick Todd considers how presentists can argue that the future is open, holding fixed that they maintain that the past is not. He argues that any such presentist argument is doomed to failure, if it proceeds by appeal to a general thesis about truth (such as that “truth supervenes on being”). Thus, he contends, presentist open futurists should not argue for the open future from an intuition about truth in general, but from an intuition about the future in particular. The result, however, is that presentist open futurists cannot make their case by appeal to anything like a metaphysically neutral starting point. Nevertheless, due to certain asymmetries between facts about the past and facts about the future, a presentist open future view remains substantially theoretically motivated.

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.

Vacillating time: a metaphysics for time travel and Geachianism

Abstract‘Past vacillators’ believe that what was once the case may change over time. This has obvious applications to the possibility of changing the past via time travel. ‘Future vacillators’ believe that some things will happen and yet, later, will not. Further to issues in time travel, future vacillation has applications when it comes to ‘Geachian’ views about the open future. This paper argues that if you deny that the ‘earlier than’ and ‘later than’ relations are converses of one another then you can develop metaphysical systems underpinning the possibility of such vacillation.

Entropy and the Direction of Time

The paper tries to demonstrate that the process of the increase of entropy does not explain the asymmetry of time itself because it is unable to account for its fundamental asymmetries, that is, the asymmetry of traces (we have traces of the past and no traces of the future), the asymmetry of causation (we have an impact on future events with no possibility of having an impact on the past), and the asymmetry between the fixed past and the open future, To this end, the approaches of Boltzmann, Reichenbach (and his followers), and Albert are analysed. It is argued that we should look for alternative approaches instead of this, namely we should consider a temporally asymmetrical physical theory or seek a source of the asymmetry of time in metaphysics. This second approach may even turn out to be complementary if only we accept that metaphysics can complement scientific research programmes.