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Book symposium: Patrick Todd, The open future: why future contingents are all false. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. 224 pp. $80.00

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Notes

  1. Barnes and Cameron (2009) introduce a wrinkle here: if there is indeterminacy in the laws of nature or in the present state of the world, then the combination of laws and present state may not settle whether there is a sea battle tomorrow. We will revisit this point later, but for now will press on as if we are assuming determinacy in the laws and present facts.

  2. This terminology comes from Belnap and Green (1994). Todd prefers to avoid it because of an ambiguity over whether the thin red line marks a determinate future. Following Hughes (2015), he refers to the Occamist model as one containing a privileged future, which neither of the other models contains.

  3. Todd is the main defender of this type of view, with his (2016) representing an earlier version.

  4. This account is primarily motivated by Barnes and Cameron (2009) as well as Barnes and Williams (2011).

  5. See, e.g., Williamson (1994, 2005).

  6. See Evans (1978), Parsons (2000), especially ch. 3, Greenough (2008), and Garrett (2014) for further discussion.

  7. Note that premise (1), like model 2 itself, is neutral on the ontology of facts. They could be true propositions, obtaining states of affairs, complexes of objects and properties, etc. See Mulligan and Correia (2021) for a menu of options.

  8. See van Inwagen (2009) and the first chapter of his (2023) for elaboration and defense.

  9. See Barcan Marcus (1961), Kripke (1971), and Williamson (2013) for some well-known examples. Schechter (2011) attempts to defang many of the arguments that identity is a strict relation, but does so by changing classical logic. Many partisans of model 2 wish to claim that they can preserve classical logic, so Schecter’s theory is not available to them.

  10. Note that Barnes and Cameron (2009]), the inspiration for model 2, make a point that the kind of indeterminacy they are interested in is (at least consistent with being) bivalent (p. 292–98).

  11. Rubio [2019] makes this argument.

  12. Prior’s (1953) objection to reading Łukasiewicz this way is addressed in the more detailed semantic framework of Rubio [2019].

  13. On a final note, since these two models are the same ontologically, a natural way to separate them is by comparing their ideology. This is a tricky task, but pinning down the logical apparata required to state them will be important, as per Rubio (2022).

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    Daniel Rubio

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Rubio, D. Book symposium: Patrick Todd, The open future: why future contingents are all false. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. 224 pp. $80.00. Int J Philos Relig 95, 217–223 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-024-09914-4

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