Abstract

Various philosophers have long since been attracted to the doctrine that future contingent propositions systematically fail to be true—what is sometimes called the doctrine of the open future. However, open futurists have always struggled to articulate how their view interacts with standard principles of classical logic—most notably, with the Law of Excluded Middle (LEM). For consider the following two claims: (a) Trump will be impeached tomorrow; (b) Trump will not be impeached tomorrow. According to the kind of open futurist at issue, both of these claims may well fail to be true. According to many, however, the disjunction of these claims can be represented as p ∨ ~p—that is, as an instance of LEM. In this essay, however, I wish to defend the view that the disjunction these claims cannot be represented as an instance of p ∨ ~p. And this is for the following reason: the latter claim is not, in fact, the strict negation of the former. More particularly, there is an important semantic distinction between the strict negation of the first claim [~(Trump will be impeached tomorrow)] and the latter claim (Trump will not be impeached tomorrow). However, the viability of this approach has been denied by Thomason (Theoria 36:264–281, 1970), and more recently by MacFarlane (Assessment sensitivity: relative truth and its applications, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013) and Cariani and Santorio (Mind 127:129–165. doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzw004, 2017), the latter of whom call the denial of the given semantic distinction “scopelessness”. According to these authors, that is, will is “scopeless” with respect to negation; whereas there is perhaps a syntactic distinction between ‘~Will p’ and ‘Will ~p’, there is no corresponding semantic distinction. And if this is so, the approach in question fails. In this paper, then, I criticize the claim that will is “scopeless” with respect to negation. I argue that will is a so-called “neg-raising” predicate—and that, in this light, we can see that the requisite scope distinctions aren’t missing, but are simply being masked. The result: a under-appreciated solution to the problem of future contingents that sees (a) and (b) as contraries, not contradictories.

Highlights

  • Various philosophers have long since been attracted to the doctrine that future contingent propositions systematically fail to be true—what is sometimes called the doctrine of the open future

  • Open futurists, in this sense of the term, have always struggled to articulate how their view interacts with standard principles of classical logic—most notably, with the Law of Excluded Middle (LEM)

  • According to the kind of open futurist at issue, both of these claims may well fail to be true. The disjunction of these claims can be represented as p ∨ ~p—that is, as an instance of LEM

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Summary

Scopelesssness

The claim at issue is that will is “scopeless” with respect to negation. Under the heading Missing Scope Distinctions, John MacFarlane articulates the thesis by comparing two claims, and writes as follows:. Following MacFarlane, Cariani and Santorio write: Our second constraint [on developing a semantics for will] is that will is scopeless with respect to an important class of other linguistic items. By this we mean that changes in the relative syntactic scope between will and these other items don’t make a difference to the truth conditions of will-sentences. This is a remarkable feature of will, and one that is not generally shared by modal expressions. The lack of scope interactions with negation immediately yields an interesting logical constraint:

A further note
Neg-raising: a primer
Perfect anticipation: variations on a Priorean theme
Against scopelessness: natural language
Some comparisons
Some objections
Conclusion
Full Text
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