This is the 9th and final installment of my series on Patrick Todd’s recently published book The Open Future: Why Future Contingents are All False (Oxford, 2021). (Previous installments: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.) In this chapter Todd tackles the “assertion problem” for open futurism. He’s quick to clarify that it’s not… Read More »
This is part 7 of my ongoing series on Patrick Todd’s recently published book The Open Future: Why Future Contingents are All False (Oxford, 2021). (Previous installments: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, and part 6.) This post continues my discussion of Ch.6, focusing on pp. 129–147, which is concerned with… Read More »
A common trope in discussions of fatalism is that arguments for fatalism are invariably guilty of a “modal fallacy”, specifically the fallacy of conflating “necessarily, if p then q” with “if p, then necessarily q“. In fancy academic jargon this is known as conflating the necessity of the consequence (i.e., of the whole conditional, if p then q)… Read More »
In my previous post on Ch. 2 of Patrick Todd’s book The Open Future (Oxford 2021), I criticized Todd for confusing supervaluationism with the view defended by Elizabeth Barnes and Ross Cameron in two influential papers. In this post I want to look more closely at the view of Barnes and Cameron (hereafter B&C). For ease of… Read More »