Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T12:42:08.320Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Discourse about the Future

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Michael Clark
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

While philosophers feel relatively comfortable about talking of the present and the past, some of them feel uncomfortable about talking in just the same way of future events. They feel that, in general, discourse about the future differs significantly from discourse about the past and present, and that these differences reflect a logical asymmetry between the past and future beyond the merely defining fact that the future succeeds, and the past precedes, the present time. The problem is: how can we talk about events which have not yet happened, or at any rate are not yet bound to happen, or whose participants do not yet exist? The effect of these worries has led them to claim to recognise restrictions on our talk about the future which do not govern talk about the past and present. The most famous of these views is Aristotle's. According to one familiar interpretation, he holds that a statement about a future event which is not yet settled, a contingent event in the future, is neither true nor false, even though the statement that the event either will or will not happen is necessarily true. Proponents of this view felt that if a future-tensed statement were already true then the fact that it stated would already be settled. I do not propose to discuss this well-known and muchdiscussed doctrine of Aristotle's, but I do want to consider some allied views which have been aired recently, and to look at their philosophical significance. Before I look at these, however, it will be convenient to recall three of the main reasons why the Aristotelian doctrine is unpopular. In the first place it is paradoxical to accept that a statement of the form p v ∼ p is (necessarily) true while claiming that neither of its disjuncts is true. Then there are misgivings about the notion of truth involved: many feel that truth is essentially an attribute of timeless propositions and that it is nonsense to talk of a statement's becoming true as you would of Aristotle's views if the event described became inevitable. There is also the difficulty of accounting for the meaning of a future-tensed sentence which may express a statement that is neither true nor false simply because what it states is not yet settled. It could not be said of the sentence expressing such a statement that you know what it means if you know what it is for the sentence to express a true statement. I know the meaning of the present-tensed sentence ‘A sea-battle is now being waged’ if I know that it can normally be used to make a true statement precisely in the event of there being a sea-battle being waged at present. But I do not know the meaning of the future-tensed sentence ‘A sea-battle will be waged tomorrow’ simply by knowing that the sentence expresses a true statement if it is already settled that there is going to be a battle: the statement doesn't mean that the battle is already settled, otherwise it would not lack a truth-value when the matter was still open – it would be false.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 3: Knowledge and Necessity , March 1969 , pp. 169 - 190
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1969

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

page 170 note 1 Cf. , W. and Kneale, M., The Development of Logic (Oxford, 1962) pp. 46–54.Google Scholar

page 171 note 1 This view has been formalised by Prior in Past, Present and Future (Oxford, 1967) p. 128 ff.Google Scholar, where it is extended to other types of future tense. It is not a view, however, which Prior presents in order to endorse.

page 175 note 1 For a defence of the thesis ‘that thinking (in the wide sense which includes wanting, hoping, fearing, etc.) always involves entertainment of a proposition’, see Kneale, William, ‘Intentionality and Intensionality’, in Proc. Arist. Soc., Suppl. Vol. (1968) 86–5.Google Scholar

page 176 note 1 From the fact that it must be the case that if Clark is in his car at 8 he will be blown up, it does indeed follow in virtue of a well-known principle of modal logic that if Clark must be in his car at 8 he must be blown up. But the converse does not hold.

page 180 note 1 He should have said that past possibilities are those that have already been realised or ruled out.

page 182 note 1 It is a logical truth that (x)(y)(Fx & x = y.⊃. Fy). If anything has a certain property, anything identical with that first thing will also have the property.

page 182 note 2 ‘On the Unity of Professor Carnap’, in Mind (1964) 268–9.Google Scholar

page 183 note 1 If it is allowed that some parts of predicate expressions are referring expressions, this weaker thesis is not entailed by Mayo's. But my objections to this weaker thesis are just as effective against a weaker thesis which merely excludes subject expressions that refer to future individuals.

page 185 note 1 Cf. Searle, J., ‘Proper Names’, in Mind (1958) 168.Google Scholar

page 187 note 1 Gf. Gale, R. M., The Language of Time (London, 1968) p. 184.Google Scholar

page 187 note 2 Cf. Prior, , Past, Present and Future, p. 142.Google Scholar

page 188 note 1 By a ‘causal theory of memory’ I mean any account which postulates as a logically necessary condition for remembering that what is remembered should in some sense cause the ostensible memory.

page 190 note 1 Several people have made helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I am particularly indebted to Professor A. G. Wernham for his comments on Section I.