On always-false open-futurism, reports of future contingents are always false.
Now, imagine that it is contingent whether the time continues past t1. Perhaps God sustains the world in existence, and has promised to sustain it until t1 inclusive, but is free to stop sustaining it right then.
Suppose it is now t1. Thus, now is potentially the last moment of time, but potentially not. What does the previous sentence mean? It seems to mean the conjunction of these two claims:
How things are now is compatible with its not being the case that there will be time.
How things are now is compatible with its being the case that there will be time.
But on always-false open-futurism, when the very existence of future time is contingent in light of how things are now, all will-claims have to be false. Thus, how things are now necessitates that its not the case that there will be time. In other words, we don’t have (2).
If this is correct, then on always-false open-futurism there cannot be a moment which is both potentially the last moment of time and potentially not the last moment of time. Each moment of time either is necessarily not last or necessarily last. This is a bit of a burden for the theory.
On trivalent open-futurism on which will-claims about future contingents are neither true nor false, the problem disappears. That now is potentially the last moment of time but potentially not can be taken to be equivalent to:
- It is neither true nor false that there will be time.
7 comments:
I have a paper on this I published in response to Patrick Todd. It's called "On the idea that all future tensed contingents are false". It is abridged from a longer draft I can share with anyone who's interested.
I've been scooped! Good work!
Does trivalent open-futurism also say that it COULD NOT be true or false at any point in time whether there will continue to be time?
See: https://philpapers.org/archive/TODDTO.pdf#page=33.25
Thanks, Patrick, for the link. I think the neither-true-nor-false solution removes the big advantage of the always-false view over the trivalent view, namely commitment to classical logic.
Another thought. Suppose that there are exactly two available branches. On one, this is the last moment of time. On another, a dog barks in the next moment. We want to be able to truthfully say something like this: if this isn't the last moment of time, a dog will bark. But we can't. "A dog will bark" is false on always-false. So the only way we could truthfully say the conditional is if "this isn't the last moment of time" is false.
In cases where a contingent end of time isn't in view, there is an analogous problem. Suppose that in one branch a cat meows in the next moment, but there is no barking, and in another a dog barks in the instant, but there is no meowing. Then we want to say if Will(1)(cat doesn't meow), then Will(1)(dog barks). On your view we CAN say that, but only trivially, because the antecedent is false. We can likewise say that if Will(1)(cat doesn't meow), then Will(1)(dog doesn't bark). However, in this case always-false has a solution. Instead, we just say the non-trivial Will(1)(if cat doesn't meow, dog doesn't bark). So there is a non-trivial conditional that replaces the trivial one. But there does not seem to be a similar solution for the no-end-of-time conditional.
I see that worry, but not sure. Is the view threatened if we say that "The pope stopped smoking" is neither true nor false? That isn't clear to me. Dialectically: the problem for the relevant kind of open future view has always been that it is abandoning classical logic in some unprincipled, ad hoc way: right when we see that it would give us a result we don't like (e.g., no free will), we give up some such principle. Well, the view under consideration doesn't do that. W.r.t. to future contingents, it doesn't say anything non-classical. OK, maybe wr.t. textbook presupposition failure, it says something non-classical -- but it says in that case what everyone would/should be saying in that case, so the non-classicality isn't some mark against the open view per se.
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