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The open future, bivalence and assertion
journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-08, 15:59 authored by Corine BessonCorine Besson, Anandi HattiangadiIt is highly intuitive that the future is open and the past is closed now—whereas it is unsettled now whether there will be a fourth world war, it is settled that there was a first. Recently, it has become increasingly popular to claim that the intuitive openness of the future implies that contingent statements about the future, such as ‘There will be a sea battle tomorrow,’ are nonbivalent (neither true nor false). In this paper, we argue that the non-bivalence of future contingents is at odds with our pre-theoretic intuitions about the openness of the future. These intuitions are revealed by our pragmatic judgments concerning the correctness and incorrectness of assertions of future contingents. We argue that the pragmatic data together with a plausible account of assertion shows that in many cases we take future contingents to be true (or to be false), though we take the future to be open in relevant respects. It follows that appeals to intuition to support the non-bivalence of future contingents are untenable. Intuition favours bivalence.
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Publication status
- Published
File Version
- Published version
Journal
Philosophical StudiesISSN
1573-0883Publisher
Springer NetherlandsExternal DOI
Issue
2Volume
167Page range
251-271Department affiliated with
- Philosophy Publications
Full text available
- No
Peer reviewed?
- Yes
Legacy Posted Date
2013-10-03First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date
2013-10-03Usage metrics
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