The Open Future

Torre, Stephan

doi:10.1111/j.1747-9991.2011.00395.x

Cited by 32 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 36 publications

(50 reference statements)

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“…But, as I have claimed elsewhere (Torre 2011), the determinism / indeterminism distinction does a poor job capturing the asymmetry in openness that we attribute to the past and future. There are two reasons for not characterizing openness in terms of indeterminism that together I take to be conclusive.…”

Section: Grounding Future Contingent Truthsmentioning

confidence: 88%

The Growing Block, the Open Future and Future Truths

Torre

2021

Disputatio

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In Nothing to Come, Fabrice Correia and Sven Rosenkranz provide a sophisticated, compelling, and thoroughly defended account of the growing block theory. This note critically evaluates two aspects of this account. First, it evaluates Correia and Rosenkranz’s attempt at providing a grounding principle for future truths and argues that this principle fails to make progress in explaining why future truths are true. Second, it evaluates Correia and Rosenkranz’s construal of the open future arguing that the asymmetry in openness with respect to the past and future is not plausibly understood in terms of determinism and indeterminism, and in the final section, it evaluates their claim that a growing block theorist is able to maintain that the future is open in a stronger sense than the block theorist.

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Section: Grounding Future Contingent Truthsmentioning

confidence: 88%

The Growing Block, the Open Future and Future Truths

Torre

2021

Disputatio

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“…And that statements about future indeterministic events can have determinate truth-values. See Torre (2011) for further discussion.…”

Section: The Problem Of Future Contingents and Responsesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Wondering about the future

Torre

2021

Philos Stud

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Will it rain tomorrow? Will there be a sea battle tomorrow? Will my death be painful? Wondering about the future plays a central role in our cognitive lives. It is integral to our inquiries, our planning, our hopes, and our fears. The aim of this paper is to consider various accounts of future contingents and the implications that they have for wondering about the future. I argue that reflecting on the nature of wondering about the future supports an Ockhamist account of future contingents according to which many of them are true. Alternative accounts which maintain that no future contingents are true, either by claiming that they are all false or by claiming that they are neither true nor false, face difficulties concerning why it is appropriate to wonder about them. Reflecting on wondering in general, and wondering about the future in particular, suggests that in wondering how the future will go, we implicitly assume that there is a determinate fact of the matter. After presenting an attractive account of interrogative attitudes that has been recently proposed by Jane Friedman and outlining some norms governing wondering, I argue that all accounts of future contingents except Ockhamism face difficulties concerning why it is appropriate to wonder about them.

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“…Although the vast majority of philosophers of time tend to agree with the idea that the future is in some way or another open, there is disagreement about how the openness of the future should exactly be understood and what metaphysical theories of time best characterize this openness. The various theories of time in the literature model differently the openness of the future and have different understandings of what the openness itself amounts to (see Grandjean, 2021; Torre, 2011 for an overview of the debate). Here, I will focus on just one of those theories of time: a branching conception of time.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Branching time and doomsday

Andreoletti

2021

Ratio

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Branching-time is a popular theory of time that is intended to account for the openness of the future. Generally, branching-time models the openness of the future by positing a multiplicity of concrete alternative futures mirroring all the possible ways the future could unfold. A distinction is drawn in the literature among branching-time theories: those that make use of moment-based structures and those that employ history-based ones. In this paper, I introduce and discuss a particular kind of openness relative to the possibility that time ends (Doomsday). I then show that whereas moment-based branching structures cannot represent this kind of openness, history-based structures can account for it. The conclusion is that historybased structures score a point over moment-based ones.

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The Open Future

Cited by 32 publications

References 36 publications

The Growing Block, the Open Future and Future Truths

The Growing Block, the Open Future and Future Truths

Wondering about the future

Branching time and doomsday

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