Abstract
Everyone agrees that we can’t change the past. But what about the future? Though the thought that we can change the future is familiar from popular discourse, it enjoys virtually no support from philosophers, contemporary or otherwise. In this paper, I argue that the thesis that the future is mutable has far more going for it than anyone has yet realized. The view, I hope to show, gains support from the nature of prevention, can provide a new way of responding to arguments for fatalism, can account for the utility of total knowledge of the future, and can help in providing an account of the (notoriously vexed) semantics of the English progressive. On the view developed, the future is mutable in the following (radical) sense: perhaps, once, it was true that you would never come to read a paper defending the mutability of the future. And then the future changed. And now you will.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
For a development of Geach’s view as it relates to these issues in philosophy of religion, see Todd (2011) (reprinted in Fischer and Todd 2015, Chap. 11). (Some of the material in Sect. 3 below is taken from this paper.) Besides Geach, there is only one other philosopher I’m aware of who defends the mutability of future: Mark Hinchliff. Hinchliff defended the view in a talk given at the University of California, Riverside, in the Fall of 2007, and I am indebted to Hinchliff for bringing the view to my attention, and for helpful discussion about these issues.
Geach (1977, p. 47).
Geach (1977, p. 48).
Geach (1977, p. 48).
Geach (1977, p. 50).
The reason for the past-tense construction is the following. The mutable futurist plainly will not want to say that its being true at t1 that X will happen at t10 does not entail that at t1 X will happen at t10. Nor will she want to say that its being true at t1 that X will happen at t10 does not entail that X (tenselessly) “happens” at t10. Rather, if she countenances such tenseless facts at all, she will say that ‘X happens at t10’ is true iff X has happened at t10, is happening at t10, or will happen at t10. In this case, then, its being true at t1 that X will happen at t10 does entail that X “happens” at t10. She will just insist that it remains possible up until t10 that it becomes false that X “happens” at that time. It remains the case, however, that its having been true at t1 that X would happen at t10 does not guarantee that if we are at a time later than t10 that X happened at t10. After all, the future could have changed.
Geach (1977, pp. 51–52). Note: Geach here contends that no wedge can be driven between what was going to happen and what was such that it would (or even would actually) happen. What was going to happen just is what would actually happen, and vice versa. According to Geach, then, “X will happen” and “X is going to happen” are, in a certain sense, equivalent. However, Geach does not rely on the claim that the English “will” and “is going to” constructions function equivalently in all contexts; this thesis is clearly false. For instance, there is an important difference between the underlined constructions in (1) and (2):
(1) You shouldn’t sit on that rock. The rock will fall (if you do, so you had better not make it fall). AND
(2) You shouldn’t sit on that rock. The rock is going to fall (already, so you had better not fall with it).
Or consider an example from Copley (2009, p. 79): you are driving along the highway and see a billboard. Compare if it says:
(3) We will change your oil in Madera. OR
(4) We are going to change your oil in Madera.
Again, (3) and (4) invite different readings. In the context, (3) is an offer: We will (are offering to) change your oil in Madera if you want your oil changed in Madera. (4) sounds like something of a threat: We are going to change your oil in Madera (so you’d better get ready!). Note: someone asserting (1) and (3) (in the relevant ways) needn’t be asserting any claim about the future (in particular, that there will be a rockfall or that your oil will be changed in Madera). But (2) and (4) indeed do appear to make predictions. The point, then, is this. In neither of these cases is “will” being used to say something about the future itself. The relevant claim (for Geach) is only that “X will happen” and “X is going to happen” are equivalent when the “will” is predictive (says something about the future). When the “will” is not predictive in this way, then of course it isn’t equivalent to “is going to”. (Notably, there are ways of forcing a predictive reading of (1) and (3), for instance: “We will change your oil in Madera. Then your car will be taken to ...”. If we force such a reading, then the claim seems equivalent to “We are going to change your oil in Madera. Then ...”) At any rate, Geach’s claim that no wedge can be driven between what was going to happen and what would actually happen does not depend on the relevant “will” and “is going to” constructions being equivalent across all contexts; cases such as those above are thus, in themselves, no threat to Geach’s argument. For a comparison, someone who maintains that no wedge can be driven between what you must do and what you are obligated to do (plausibly) does not rely on the thesis that the English words “must” and “obligated” function equivalently in all contexts. Plainly, when “must” is employed as an epistemic modal (“Joe must be in the pub today”), it is not equivalent to “must” when it is employed as a deontic modal (“Joe is obligated to be in the pub today”). (I thank Brian Rabern for suggesting this comparison.)
According to the mutable futurist, we find it natural to suppose that we sometimes prevent what was going to happen. And Geach argues that we cannot understand this as preventing what was going to happen unless prevented—for this notion already includes the notion of prevention. But it is important to note that the mutable futurist needn’t deny that we prevent what was going to happen unless prevented. Rather, she just maintains that this isn’t all we prevent: we also (sometimes) simply prevent what was going to happen.
There are, however, brief statements of Geach’s view in Kenny (1987, pp. 53–54), in the Introduction to Fischer (1989, pp. 23–25), in Freddoso (1988, p. 57), and in Dummett (1982, p. 87). More recently, my coauthors and I provide a brief description of the view in Fischer et al. (2009). Geach himself first developed the view in his 1973, and reiterated it very briefly in his 2001. Finally, criticism of the view (as developed in Todd 2011) has recently appeared in Byerly (2014, pp. 25–27). I hope to address Byerly’s criticisms in future work.
Kvanvig (1986, p. 10).
Of course, other philosophers have sought to analyze prevention counterfactually; I focus on Kvanvig only because Kvanvig explicitly focuses on Geach. See, e.g. Dowe (2001). I believe Dowe’s analysis, while slightly different than Kvanvig’s, is subject to the same problems.
Compare Geach’s example:
It is this that creates the absurdity in the schoolboy’s essay on ‘The Uses of Pins’, which concluded with: ‘Finally, pins save millions of lives every year by not being swallowed’. To save millions of lives is to prevent its coming about that millions die; and in this case we should not normally say that millions of people were going to die that year, only keeping pins off the diet saved them. What we should normally say is not, in my view, the norm of truth; but it is because we should not normally say all these millions were going to die that year that it sounds absurd to say that keeping off pins in the diet prevented their death. (1977, p. 47)
With respect to Geach’s “certainly” here, one could interpret him as engaging in a bit of rhetorical flourish; the mutable futurist could seemingly admit that there can be instantaneous spontaneous happenings which were at no prior time going to happen.
Look at it this way. On MF, recall, from the fact that at t1 it was true that X was going to happen at t10, it does not follow that, if we are at t20, looking backwards at t10, that X happened at t10. Now, if it doesn’t follow from its having been true that I would do X at a given time that (looking backwards) I even did X at that time, it will be hard to see how it could follow from its having been true that I would do X at that time that I could not have done otherwise than X at that time. The relevant facts lack even the ‘oomph’ to guarantee that I did the thing, much less that I couldn’t have refrained from doing it.
One could press a similar worry as follows. Certainly a standard reply to the fatalist contends that the explanatory direction moves from my writing this paper now to its having been true 100 years ago that I would write it. But this can seem odd, given certain views about the ontology of time. How could the truth of something 100 years ago in any way have then depended on me or what I do now, when I didn’t even exist then? For more on this issue, see Rea (2006).
Here it is worth briefly mentioning how mutable futurism relates to different positions concerning the ontology of time. Eternalism is the view that past, present, and future objects all equally exist. Mutable futurism would seem plainly to require non-eternalism. As Geach says (somewhat cryptically), “future-land is a region of fairytale” (1977, p. 53). The mutable futurist’s non-eternalist options are presentism, which holds that only present objects exist, and the growing-block theory, which holds that both past and present (but no future) objects exist.
However, for an argument that one can be an open futurist (in the relevant sense) without denying bivalence, see Todd (forthcoming). On this view (the view that I favor), future contingents are systematically false, not neither true nor false.
Hasker (1989, pp. 57–58).
Hasker (1989, p. 62).
Hunt (2001, p. 100).
Well, not quite: the mutable futurist might very well agree that it is contradictory to suppose that an event is known to “occur” (present-tensedely, perhaps), as Hasker says, but is also prevented from occurring, but she will deny that it is contradictory to suppose that someone knew that an event was going to occur but that that event was prevented from occurring. Similarly, on non-mutable future views, it may make sense to say that God’s foreknowledge of a given decision presupposes “the decision’s actually having been made,” as Hasker says above, but the mutable futurist would have to insist that such statements betray a failure to take tense seriously: God’s foreknowledge of a decision certainly does not (in some sense) presuppose its having been made—only that it is going to be made.
There is another way of motivating MF in the neighborhood here worth mentioning, namely, via the paradoxes concerning agency associated with knowing everything one will do in the future; being an agent may require deliberation or acquiring intentions, say, and knowing everything one will do may be incompatible with these things—on the assumption of an immutable future. So the mutable futurist might reason as follows: knowing everything one is going to do shouldn’t undermine agency, but it does unless the future is mutable. And so it is. For more on the relevant problems for agency, see Taylor (1964), Kapitan (1990), and Hunt (1997, 2001).
Of course, the progressive appears in other natural languages besides English, but for reasons of space and ease of presentation I focus only on the progressive in English.
For example, Szabó says, “a semantic analysis of progressive sentences in terms of their perfective correlates is a more or less hopeless enterprise,” and in turn cites others along the same lines. See Szabó (2004, p. 31).
I owe this example, and the inspiration for this section, to a blog post from Joshua Spencer, and subsequent conversations with Neal Tognazzini.
More generally, the intuitive proposal (to be refined) is that Prog[\(\upphi \)] is true iff there are processes in place that will culminate in [\(\upphi \)]. So, departing slightly from (S), we say that Mary is baking bread iff there are processes in place that will culminate in there being bread baked by Mary, that she was baking iff there were such processes that were going to culminate in bread baked by Mary, and that she will be baking iff there will be such processes.
See Dowty (1977).
So, for instance, Landman’s (1992) account (which is, once modified as suggested by Szabó, seemingly the best account on offer) appeals to “reasonable” options for the continuations of events. Commenting, Szabó says, “Normally ‘Mary is swimming across the Atlantic’ is false when Mary is swimming towards the United States, because a world where she gets across is not a reasonable option for her swimming in the actual world” (2004, p. 36). Clearly, any such account will face the challenge of explaining in some principled way the difference between “reasonable” and “unreasonable” options for events.
References
Byerly, T. R. (2014). The mechanics of divine foreknowledge and providence: A time-ordering account. New York: Bloomsbury.
Copley, B. (2009). The semantics of the future. New York: Routledge.
Dowe, P. (2001). A counterfactual theory of prevention and ‘causation’ by omission. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 79, 216–226.
Dowty, D. (1977). Towards a semantic analysis of verb aspect and the English “imperfective” progressive. Linguistics and Philosophy, 1, 45–78.
Dummett, M. (1982). Realism. Synthese, 52, 145–165.
Fischer, J. M. (Ed.). (1989). God, foreknowledge, and freedom. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Fischer, J. M., & Todd, P. (Eds.). (2015). Freedom, fatalism, and foreknowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fischer, J. M., Tognazzini, N., & Todd, P. (2009). Engaging with pike: God, freedom, and time. Philosophical Papers, 38, 247–270.
Freddoso, A. (1988). “Introduction” to Luis de Molina. In On divine foreknowledge: Part IV of the concordia (A. J. Freddoso, Trans.). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Geach, P. (1973). The future. New Blackfriars, 54, 208–218.
Geach, P. (1977). Providence and evil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Geach, P. (2001). Truth and hope. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
Hasker, W. (1989). God, time, and knowledge. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Hunt, D. (1993). Simple foreknowledge and divine providence. Faith and Philosophy, 10, 394–414.
Hunt, D. (1997). Two problems with knowing the future. American Philosophical Quarterly, 34, 273–285.
Hunt, D. (2001). The simple foreknowledge view. In J. K. Beilby & P. R. Eddy (Eds.), Divine foreknowledge: Four views (pp. 65–103). Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.
Hunt, D. (2004). Providence, foreknowledge, and explanatory loops: A reply to Robinson. Religious Studies, 40, 485–491.
Kapitan, T. (1990). Action, uncertainty, and divine impotence. Analysis, 50, 127–133.
Kenny, A. (1987). The god of the philosophers. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kvanvig, J. (1986). The possibility of an all-knowing god. London: Macmillan.
Landman, F. (1992). The progressive. Natural Language Semantics, 1, 1–32.
Montague, R. (1969). On the nature of certain philosophical entities. The Monist, 53, 161–194.
Prior, A. N. (1962). The formalities of omniscience. Philosophy, 37, 114–129.
Prior, A. N. (1967). Past, present, and future. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rea, M. (2006). Presentism and fatalism. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 84, 511–524.
Robinson, M. (2004). Divine providence, simple foreknowledge, and the ‘metaphysical principle’. Religious Studies, 40, 471–483.
Rosenkranz, S. (2012). In defence of Ockhamism. Philosophia, 40, 617–631.
Scott, D. (1970). An advice on modal logic. In K. Lambert (Ed.), Philosophical problems in logic (pp. 143–174). Dordrecht: Reidel.
Szabó, Z. (2004). On the progressive and the perfective. Noûs, 38, 29–59.
Taylor, R. (1964). Deliberation and foreknowledge. American Philosophical Quarterly, 1, 73–80.
Todd, P. (2011). Geachianism. In J. Kvanvig (Ed.), Oxford studies in philosophy of religion (Vol. 3, pp. 222–251). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Todd, P. (forthcoming). Future contingents are all false! On behalf of a Russellian open future. Mind.
Todd, P., & Fischer, J. M. (2015). Introduction. In J. M. Fischer & P. Todd (Eds.), Freedom, fatalism, and foreknowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Torre, S. (2011). The open future. Philosophy Compass, 6, 360–373.
Acknowledgments
For helpful comments on previous drafts of this paper, I wish to thank Mike Rea, Neal Tognazzini, Andrew Bailey, Kenny Boyce, Philip Swenson, John Martin Fischer, and Zoltán Szabó. For discussion, I wish to thank Mark Hinchliff, Michael Nelson, Brian Rabern, Bryan Pickel, and Anders Schouybye.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Todd, P. On behalf of a mutable future. Synthese 193, 2077–2095 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0830-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0830-1