Future contingents and relative truth

Philosophical Quarterly

Volumn 53, Issue 212, 2003, Pages 321-336

  Macfarlane, John ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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EID: 32944461398     PISSN: 00318094     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-9213.00315     Document Type: Article

References (23)

1. Here I presuppose the metaphysical picture of objective indeterminism articulated in N. Belnap et al., Facing the Future (Oxford UP, 2001), pp. 29-32, 139-41.
2. Moments are idealized time-slices of the universe, partially ordered by a causal-historical precedence relation (<) with no backward branching, and histories are maximal chains of moments. For a relativistically acceptable version of branching histories, see Belnap, 'Branching Space-time', Synthese, 92 (1992), pp. 385-434. Although it is strictly correct to say that moments are contained in histories, I shall sometimes talk informally of histories passing through moments.
3. J. Łukasiewicz, 'On Three-Valued Logic', in S. McCall (ed.), Polish Logic (Oxford UP, 1967), pp. 16-18.
4. See A.N. Prior, 'Three-Valued Logic and Future Contingents', The Philosophical Quarterly, 3 (1953), pp. 317-26, at p. 326.
5. See R.H. Thomason, 'Indeterminist Time and Truth-Value Gaps', Theoria, 36 (1970), pp. 264-81.
6. The metaphor is due to Nuel Belnap and Mitchell Green, 'Indeterminism and the Thin Red Line', in J. Tomberlin (ed.), Philosophical Perspectives 8: Logic and Language (Atascadero: Ridgeview, 1994), pp. 365-88,
7. revised as ch. 6 of Belnap et al., Facing the Future.
8. See Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 206-9.
9. See D. Kaplan, 'Demonstratives', in J. Almog et al. (eds), Themes from Kaplan (Oxford UP, 1989), pp. 481-563, at pp. 508-10.
10. See also Lewis, 'Index, Context, and Content', in S. Kanger and S. Öhman (eds), Philosophy and Grammar (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1980), pp. 79-100.
11. I ignore complications raised by recorded messages and the like, which need special treatment. See S. Predelli, 'I Am Not Here Now', Analysis, 58 (1998), pp. 107-15.
12. The terminology is Belnap's: Facing the Future, p. 142. Points of evaluation differ from Kaplan's 'circumstances of evaluation' or Lewis' 'indices' in that they may include both shiftable and non-shiftable parameters, e.g., both time and time of utterance.
13. See Facing the Future, p. 175,
14. 'Double Time References: Speech-Act Reports as Modalities in an Indeterministic Setting', in F. Wolter et al. (eds), Advances in Modal Logic, Vol. III (Stanford: CSLI, 2001), pp. 1-22.
15. There is also an anticipation of double time references in Michael Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language, 2nd edn (Harvard UP, 1981), p. 395.
16. 'Does Tense Logic Rest on a Mistake?', in Evans, Collected Papers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), pp. 343-63, at p. 348. Evans talks of the 'correctness' of utterances instead of their truth, reserving the word 'true' for the truth of sentences relative to a point of evaluation. This difference is, I think, entirely terminological.
17. Philip Percival calls Evans' argument 'the best available defence of the absolutist's claim that any relativization of token truth is incoherent': 'Absolute Truth', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 94 (1994), pp. 189-213, at p. 198.
18. This point of disanalogy between judgement and assertion means that my defence of relative utterance-truth may not generalize to a defence of relative judgement-truth. Cf. J. Campbell, 'The Realism of Memory', in R. Heck Jr (ed.), Language, Thought, and Logic (Oxford UP, 1997), pp. 157-81, at p. 165. I plan to address this intricate issue in future work.
19. Cf. J.R. Searle, 'The point or purpose of the members of the assertive class is to commit the speaker (in varying degrees) to something's being the case, to the truth of the expressed proposition': Expression and Meaning (Cambridge UP, 1979), p. 12.
20. The basic structure of this account of assertion comes from R. Brandom, Making it Explicit (Harvard UP, 1994), ch. 3,
21. 'Asserting', Noûs, 17 (1983), pp. 637-50.
22. Cf. Brandom, Making it Explicit, p. 180.
23. This paper owes much to discussions with Nuel Belnap, Joseph Camp, Jeff King, Lionel Shapiro and Paul Teller.