Abstract
In his paper “Future Contingents and Relative Truth,” John MacFarlane argues for truth relativism on the basis of the possibility of the open future. He defends the relativization of a truth predicate of linguistic items: utterances of sentences produced in concrete contexts. In more recent work, however, he contends that this was wrong, because when propositions are taken as truth bearers, the truth absolutists he was objecting to have an escape, and offers a new argument for relativism based on the semantics of “actually.” Here, I will critically examine these points. In the first place, I will suggest that the new argument concerning “actually” is not convincing. More importantly, I argue that truth absolutists should not accept MacFarlane’s “gift,” that is, his proposal for them to resist his previous arguments once they take truth to be a predicate of propositions: if there was a good argument in “Future Contingents and Relative Truth” for truth relativism taking truth as a property of linguistic items, there is still one when taking it as a property of propositions; these issues do not depend on the nature of truth bearers. I conclude by outlining what I take to be the best line for truth absolutists to take regarding the open future.
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Notes
- 1.
As he (2005, 322) puts it, “there is something a bit odd about calling utterances or assertions, in the ‘act’ sense, true or false at all. We characterize actions as correct or incorrect, but not as true or false”; assertions in the object sense – “what is asserted” – are according to him (2008, 93) just propositions.
- 2.
Austin (1950, 119) – who had as good an ear for common usage as anybody – pointed out that it is also far away from common usage to predicate truth of propositions, in the philosophers’ sense. Ordinary language predicates truth of things said, which in my own view are not just propositions, but propositions taken with a generic constative force.
- 3.
I follow MacFarlane (2003, 323) in presupposing “the metaphysical picture of objective indeterminism articulated in N. Belnap et al., Facing the Future (Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 29–32, 139–41. 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.” Cf. also Thomason (1970). In speaking of “basic particular facts,” I am gesturing in the direction of any adequate way of putting aside “facts about the future” such as the fact that it is true in 1492 that the Olympic Games were going to be held in Barcelona 500 years later.
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
Or just to H(CU), if no history overlaps with both CU and CA. I will disregard this possibility in what follows.
- 7.
On behalf of what she describes as “traditional semantics” – which she characterizes by its not countenancing relativizations to context of assessments, nor therefore MacFarlane’s “very radical view” rejecting “the assumption of standard semantics that sentence truth is relative only to a context of use,” Brogaard (2008, 329) accepts MacFarlane’s suggestion for traditionalists to account for the determinacy and indeterminacy intuitions, in contrast to what I will later suggest they should do. She rejects instead MacFarlane’s contention that traditional, supervaluationist semantics cannot capture those intuitions when it comes to the evaluation of linguistic items. She argues that even on the traditional assumptions, the following counts as true, uttered by Sally to Jake: “The sentence ‘There will be a sea battle tomorrow,’ as uttered by you yesterday, was true at the time of utterance.” To show that she contends that the mentioned sentence is not merely mentioned but also used and resorts to Recanati’s proposal concerning such mixed or open quotation cases. The essential feature of the idea is that, while indexicals such as tense or “tomorrow” in the mentioned sentence obtain their value from the implied context (Jake’s) in which it was uttered, in order to obtain the ascribed proposition, the worlds/histories at which it is supposed to be evaluated are rather provided by the context of the ascription (Sally’s). In this way, we obtain the same effect as with MacFarlane’s proposal concerning evaluations of propositions as True or otherwise. Thus, Brogaard and I argue for the same claim, that the issues concerning relativism do not depend on whether sentences or propositions are truth bearers. Of course, for the reasons I will provide in the third section, I think that the way Brogaard’s proposal manages to show this gives the game away to the relativist, much as MacFarlane’s does.
- 8.
Dietz & Murzi (forthcoming) make related points, cf. fn. 20 and surrounding text.
- 9.
For, to reiterate, I do not think any serious truth absolutist who adopts supervaluationism as a means for capturing his preferred option (among the two that the facts of the open future leave to truth absolutist, to wit: capturing the contemporary indeterminacy intuition, or rather the retrospective determinacy intuition) should accept MacFarlane’s offer.
- 10.
Hunter & Asher (2005, 121) provide additional nice examples: ‘If someone other than George Bush had won the election, the actual winner would have been happy’.
- 11.
Brogaard (2008, 332–4) also provides this reply to the new argument. For her, having a reply is not merely theoretical exercise, given that (as a previous footnote explains) she gladly adopts the line that MacFarlane offers to the supervaluationist. The same applies to Dietz & Murzi (forthcoming), who also provide this reply, and similarly appear to embrace MacFarlane’s “gift” to supervaluationists.
- 12.
Isidora Stojanovic pointed this out to me.
- 13.
It would be interesting to know what Brogaard (2008) thinks, but she does not discuss the more complex examples such as (10). Dietz and Murzi (forthcoming), who also appear to accept MacFarlane’s proposal for the supervaluationist to capture the determinacy intuition, do discuss (10) – cf. their section 5. Surprisingly in my view, they just contemplate the shifty sense, and hence contend that it is false. However, they are happy to accept the non-shifty, true reading of ‘yesterday it was still possible that the weather today would be different than it actually would be’. A truth-value links principle corresponding to TVL above would validate the intuition that, to the extent that this sentence has a true reading, (10) must equally have one. Dietz & Murzi appear to accept only the true, non-shifty reading of the quoted sentence for the ad hoc reason that it does not create the problem that accepting such a reading for (10) poses, given the package of views they accept: to wit, that MacFarlane’s argument at least works for a reading of (10).
- 14.
The already discussed Brogaard (2008) and Dietz & Murzi (forthcoming) show that this is no mere theoretical possibility.
- 15.
I present these considerations in counterfactual terms in order to make manifest something I would have thought is obvious, but I have found sometimes contested in presentations of this material, to wit, that nothing in them requires by itself a commitment to modal realism.
- 16.
- 17.
Concerning the notion of use of a proposition, which will play a crucial role in what follows, MacFarlane (ms., 4.3, 97) says: “It may seem strange to talk of a proposition being true at a context of use, because a proposition is not ‘used’ in the way that a sentence is. But […] in an extended sense, we can think of assertions or beliefs as ‘uses’ of the propositions asserted or believed.”
- 18.
The truth of sentences/propositions also plays a nonnormative role in evaluating the contents of sentences also when they occur embedded and thus nonasserted, for instance, in order to account for the semantics of truth-functional operators such as “or” and “if … then.”
- 19.
In part, because of this, I prefer Stalnaker’s (1978) notion of context as a “presupposition set,” but for present purposes, we can go along with MacFarlane’s choice.
- 20.
In my own view, this applies to all indexicals, including also “I”; think of Neo in Matrix using “I” to refer not to his real scruffy self but to his glossy virtual avatar in the matrix. When the global behavior of indexicals and demonstratives is taken into consideration, I do not see any good reason to consider these cases as any more “pragmatic” than the demonstrative or anaphoric uses of “here” and “now.”
- 21.
For the concept of the Thin Red Line, cf. Belnap et al. (2001), 135 ss.
- 22.
In Perry’s terminology, the assertion is not about it – otherwise, it would be a purely indexical contextualist view, as opposed to a nonindexical contextualist proposal.
- 23.
Presumably, the differences between the semantics should also transpire with respect to other speech acts, such as promises, orders, or questions; in order to settle these debates, it might be useful to explore the matter from that perspective.
- 24.
It might well be that assertion is not constitutively normative. On the expressive Gricean account in Bach and Harnish (1979), assertion is constituted by specific communicative intentions of speakers; norms of assertion are regulative, deriving from other norms such as moral sincerity rules as in Hindriks (2007). I agree with MacFarlane (ms, 5.4.2) that these accounts are not correct, but for distinguishing indexical contextualist, nonindexical contextualist, and relativist proposals, a regulative norms approach would be equally serviceable.
- 25.
This is the version I take to be more adequate for nonindexical contextualists to deal with the open future, although of course there are others; the nonindexical contextualist can also enlist in his own framework the form of contextualism I will finally propose, taking future contingents to make just one claim that concerns the histories overlapping the intended time in the future when the indeterminacy is resolved.
- 26.
- 27.
I reserve the final, all-things-considered appraisal for the last section.
- 28.
Egan’s work is also interesting because he carefully formulates the sort of contextualist proposal I tend to find preferable in all cases that have been suggested so far. In the case of predicates such as “tasty,” the idea is that it applies to an object just in case it has a disposition to cause certain experiences, which would be manifested under certain idealized conditions; we apply those predicates under more or less general presuppositions of commonality in the conditions for manifestation of the disposition, and usually assuming also conative attitudes pressing for those commonalities to exist, or to create them when they do not. Egan (2010, §5) rejects this sort of view on the basis of concerns that his own previous careful formulation should help to dispel. Cf. López de Sa (2008), García-Carpintero (2008), and Schaffer (2011).
- 29.
Egan’s (2010) argumentative strategy is thus slightly peculiar: he bases his theoretical proposal on a semantic story justified on the basis of cases (those allegedly motivating de se and de nunc contents) to which applying the full view he advances would be absurd. In a previous article discussing epistemic modals (Egan 2007), though, he does discuss the conditions for the Stalnakerian assertion of de se contents to be legitimate. The requirement he poses is one of (presupposed) similarity in the relevant parameter. If I am my only audience, it makes sense to update the context set with my own assertions/judgments of de se contents. Similarly, if we are asserting de nunc contents concerning sufficiently lasting time intervals, it makes sense to update the context set with those asserted contents throughout the relevant interval. Egan (2007) provides a similar rationale for updating de se-like contents expressed by epistemic modals. Correspondingly, in the case of disputes of taste, Egan (2010) argues that they are nondefective (roughly) when presuppositions of similarity vis-à-vis the relevant standards are in place. This makes it at the very least very difficult to distinguish it in the pretheoretical terms we have been seeking for future contingents in this chapter from the contextualist-presuppositionalist view outlined in the previous note. Egan (2010, 282) contends that the contextualist and relativist proposals can be intuitively resolved in favor of the relativist tale, but I do not think he is right; in my own view, the semantically relevant folks’ intuitions simply betray absolutist assumptions at odds with relativism, indexical or otherwise. I leave this for elaboration in future work. Torre (2010) criticizes Egan’s account and provides an alternative proposal.
- 30.
However, to show that Egan’s story makes sense with respect to the open future, according to the suggestions outlined in the previous footnote, we should justify the presupposition of similarity in the relevant parameter (the class of histories open at different points in the “conversation”). This cannot be done in this case, under the ordinary assumptions of “branch-pruning” as time goes by; it only makes sense under nonbranching conditions.
- 31.
I must say that I find “misleading” a bit of an understatement to describe the footnote, if this was the intended interpretation. I think that the only plausible interpretation of the footnote for an ordinary, informed, and charitable reader, given the context in which it occurs, takes it to accept that “True” is assessment-sensitive in the substantive sense I am about to describe.
- 32.
For reasons that Percival’s (1994, 199–200) nuanced discussion illuminates, as Cian Dorr pointed out to me, “relativism” might be a bad term for the doctrines that MacFarlane’s calls “nonindexical contextualism” – which is one more reason for preferring that terminology. The model for those proposals is the standard relativization of truth to possible worlds. But the fact that contents have their truth relativized to worlds does not mean that truth is thereby a relative notion, in any straightforward sense. A clear case of hidden relativization is given by gradable adjectives, such as “tall.” Claims involving them are straightforwardly relative in that they ultimately involve a relation to something like a point in a scale (García-Carpintero (2008) has some discussion and references to contemporary linguistic literature). If the standard relativization of the truth of contents to possible worlds was understood in this way, truth-ascriptions would involve reference to specific worlds, and then they would be (counterintuitively) necessary. (Cp., however, Schaffer (2011, §1.2), who defends this “nonindex” view of propositions.)
- 33.
I assume we are evaluating a straightforward future-tense assertion, not an epistemic modal.
- 34.
Marques (ms) elaborates on this, arguing against the relativist contention that truth is to play a normative role vis-à-vis assertion and retraction such that a reflective and sincere speaker who makes a permissible assertion that p at c1 (where p is true) but fails to retract at a later context c2 (where p is not true) should be deemed irrational. MacFarlane’s most recent version of his forthcoming book (ms) has a final chapter interestingly addressing these worries, which I cannot discuss here.
- 35.
MacFarlane has a new, interesting objection to the “Thin Red Line” proposal in his forthcoming book (§9.4.2), which I cannot confront here. Interestingly, by the way, he has also dropped the ‘actually’-based objections against supervaluationism I have been discussing here.
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Acknowledgement
Financial support for my work was provided by the DGI, Spanish Government, research project FFI2010-16049, and Consolider-Ingenio project CSD2009-00056; through the award ICREA Academia for excellence in research, 2008, funded by the Generalitat de Catalunya; and by the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013 under grant agreement no. 238128. Previous versions of this chapter were presented at the Agreement & Disagreement Inaugural Conference of the CeLL, Institute of Philosophy, London, at the 7th GAP conference, Bremen 2009 and at a talk at the Philosophical Society, Oxford 2010. Thanks to Cian Dorr, Richard Dietz, John Hawthorne, Anita Hattiagandi, Andrea Iacona, Max Kölbel, Dan López de Sa, John MacFarlane, Teresa Marques, Storrs McCall, Julien Murzi, Peter Pagin, Sven Rosenkranz, Isidora Stojanovic, Stephan Torre, Neftalí Villanueva, Ralph Wedgwood, and Tim Williamson for helpful discussion and to Michael Maudsley for the grammatical revision.
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García-Carpintero, M. (2013). Relativism, the Open Future, and Propositional Truth. In: Correia, F., Iacona, A. (eds) Around the Tree. Synthese Library, vol 361. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5167-5_1
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