Fatalism

Abstract

WHAT will be will be. Either the Labour party will come to power in Britain within the next three years or it will not; and if it will, it will, and if it will not, it will not. But if it will, is it already true that it will ? This is a strange question, just as it would be a strange question to ask whether it is still true that the Conservative party was in power three years ago. The reason why these questions are strange is that the truth of a statement is not a proper subject of temporal predicates. The state of affairs which makes an empirical statement true is locatable in time, but the truth of the statement is not. Thus the statement that the Battle of Hastings was fought in 1066 is made true by this historical occurrence, but the truth of this statement is not in its turn an event of history. We can ask for the date of a battle but, having learned when it was fought, we cannot then go on to ask for the date of its being fought at that date. There is a time at which a given event occurs, and a time, which may be the same or different, at which it is discovered to occur, but there is no second dimension of time in which its occurring at a time occurs.