Future Contingents in a Branching Universe

Abstract

AbstractSuppose that our world is objectively indeterministic, so that at certain points in time, there is more than one way in which events might carry on. Two main positions address how to think about the future as it unfolds beyond such indeterministic points in time: the Thin Red Line (TRL) approach which holds that among possible future courses of events, exactly one of them is what will happen; and the Open Future (OF) approach which denies this posit of a privileged course of events. OF is often associated with the view that future contingents (statements concerning future events whose truth value is not guaranteed by physical, metaphysical, or logical necessity) are neither true nor false. This “truth-value gap” commitment has in turn been thought to produce unpalatable implications concerning the practice of assertion: (1) Some have denied that it is possible to assert a future contingent when that statement’s propositional content lacks truth value at the time of its utterance; (2) others have denied that one can appropriately assert a future contingent when its propositional content cannot be known to be true at the time of its utterance. In response to (1) I argue that a sentence can have truth conditions, and thus a determinate content, even if it lacks truth value at its time of utterance. Because it is contents (rather than truth-valued contents) that are needed for viable speech acts, I conclude that OF can readily accommodate assertions of future contingents. In response to (2) I argue that even if we accept the “knowledge norm” for assertion that drives this objection, that norm does not mandate a reading on which assertions of future contingents must violate it on OF. The upshot of our response to these two objections to OF is that the contest between it and TRL should be settled, if at all, on other grounds than those pertaining to the pragmatic and epistemological aspects of assertion of future contingents.