The Problem of Future Contingencies

Abstract

A RISTOTLE believed that any statement which asserts or 1A denies, concerning a contingent event, that it is going to occur, is neither true nor false, the world being as yet indeterminate with regard to the existence or nonexistence of such things.' Few doctrines from antiquity have engendered more controversy than this one, as indicated by the rash of polemic that has broken out over it again in the last few years.2 Medieval philosophers, following Boethius, found in it a thorny problem of reconciling liberty with divine omniscience; Lukasiewicz, more recently, revived Aristotle's arguments to provide an interpretation for his three-valued logic, while other writers still find it necessary to take account of essentially the same arguments in dealing with metaphysical problems of time. Nearly all the Scholastics discarded Aristotle's arguments as inconsistent with Christian presuppositions, while modern logicians have tended to dismiss them as paralogisms. C. A. Baylis rejected all of them, as reinterpreted by Lukasiewicz, as fallacious,3 and W. V. Quine has disdained one of the conclusions as "Aristotle's fantasy."4 Applying them to metaphysical puzzles, Gilbert Ryle treats such