Abstract
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 much-discussed 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.
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Notes
Cf. W. and M. Kneale, The Development of Logic (Oxford, 1962) pp. 46–54.
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 William Kneale, ‘Intentionality and Intensionality’, in Proc. Arist. Soc., Suppl. Vol. (1968) 86–8.
Cf. J. Searle, Troper Names’, in Mind (1958) 168.
Cf. R. M. Gale, The Language of Time (London, 1968) p. 184.
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© 1970 The Royal Institute of Philosophy
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Clark, M. (1970). Discourse about the Future. In: Knowledge and Necessity. Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-86205-4_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-86205-4_10
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