The abundance of the future. A paraconsistent approach to future contingents

Abstract

Abstract. Supervaluationism holds that the future is undetermined, and as a consequence of this, statements about the future may be neither true nor false. In the present paper, we explore the novel and quite different view that the future is abundant: statements about the future do not lack truth-value, but may instead be glutty, that is both true and false. We will show that (1) the logic resulting from this "abundance of the future" is a non-adjunctive paraconsistent formalism based on subvaluations, which has the virtue that all classical laws are valid in it, while no formula like φ ∧ ¬φ is satisfiable (though both φ and ¬φ may be true in a model); (2) The peculiar behaviour of abundant logical consequence has an illuminating analogy in probability logic; (3) abundance preserves some important features of classical logic (not preserved in supervaluationism) when it comes to express those important retrogradations of truth which are presupposed by the argument de praesenti ad praeteritum.

Necessity and Determinism in Robert Grosseteste’s De libero arbitrio

“…[17], [16], [9]) produced in response to this book, as well as other recently published papers (see e.g. [3], [4], [7], [8], [22]), reveal that this topic is still vivid.…”

Truthier Than Thou: Truth, Supertruth and Probability of Truth

“…Varzi (1999)) and because subvaluationist views are much less prominent in the literature than supervaluationist views, I shall not discuss subvaluationist views explicitly in this paper. For subvaluationist treatments of vagueness and future contingents (respectively) see Hyde (1997) and Ciuni and Proietti (2013). 3 The main purpose of this section is to fix terminology-not to give an introduction of these views suitable for someone completely unfamiliar with them.…”

“…Varzi ()) and because subvaluationist views are much less prominent in the literature than supervaluationist views, I shall not discuss subvaluationist views explicitly in this paper. For subvaluationist treatments of vagueness and future contingents (respectively) see Hyde () and Ciuni and Proietti ().…”

Ockhamism and Philosophy of Time

“…According to such a "flat" postsemantic theory, a sentence is true at a context iff it is true at the context-initialized semantic index. I call this theory flat since its role is highly limited in comparison to more elaborate postsemantic theories such as supervaluationism , subvaluationism (Ciuni & Proietti, 2013), or relativism . Its only role is to provide the unique index that 4 Ockhamism Without Molinism 61 is relevant for semantic evaluation.…”