Talking about the future: Unsettled truth and assertion

Abstract

Philosophers have long been concerned with the issue of whether or not the notions of truth and falsity apply to future contingents, that is, to statements that express future events that have not been determined yet and thus may not happen. There are several frameworks that (arguably) provide a satisfactory account of the truth conditions of future tensed sentences, but there have been few accounts of the assertability conditions for such statements. The question therefore remains: under which conditions should one assert that some event will happen, if the universe is indeterministic and its current state leaves it open whether the event at stake will indeed happen. The chapter first explains the problem that future contingents raise for natural language semantics and introduces four frameworks that rely upon the idea of “branching time”. These frameworks are compared and evaluated in the second section. The final section discusses a puzzle that turns upon the assertability of future-tensed sentences.

The Truth About Assertion and Retraction: a Review of the Empirical Literature

“…There is strong disagreement between scholars concerning which view best accommodates conversational patterns. While some identified conversational patterns that allegedly support factive norms (Unger 1975;Williamson 1996;Turri 2010;Benton 2011;Kelp and Simion 2021), others suggested that these patterns equally support other norms, or identified other patterns that support rival views (Stanley 2008;Douven 2006, 468;Kvanvig 2009;McKinnon 2012;Stojanovic 2014;Mandelkern and in potentially harmful fights (Krebs and Dawkins 1984;Smith et al 2003). But what stops dishonest badges from evolving, to the advantage of cheaters?…”

Ockhamism and Philosophy of Time

“…As Stojanovic (2014) observes, different approaches to the metaphysics of time are associated with different semantic treatments. For instance, held that in order for the semantic evaluation of a future-tensed sentence to proceed in the absence of a TRL, a definition of truth for non-atomic formulae needs not just a moment but also a history.…”

“…This challenge takes two forms. One form is sometimes referred to as the assertion problem (although it generalizes to other illocutionary acts) and has been pressed by Green (1994, 2001), Perloff and Belnap (2011), Stojanovic (2014), andSweeney (2015). In response I argue that a sentence can have truth conditions, and thus a determinate content, even if it lacks truth value at its moment of utterance.…”

What is a Morphological Future Doing in a Si-Clause? Traces of Mirativity in Spanish

“… Schwenter (2016b) favors this perspective because it permits the analysis of the discursive projection of insubordinate si-clausesbeing epistemically stronger than other alternatives, they serve to block an ongoing discussion-and also the connection with their adverbial origin -not with the prototypical or hypothetical ones, but with those where the protasis serves as a bridge to a preceding discourse.20 The modal perspective likewise connects with the issues concerning the representation of future time. Some authors(Martin, 1981;Stojanovic, 2014) argue that, in contrast to the past -which is immutable, because it has already taken place-, the future is necessarily speculative in nature. Hence their proposal according to which a linear representation of time will prove useful for the past (immovable) and the present (perceptible).…”