Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

John MacFarlane, in his celebrated ‘Future contingents and relative truth’ (2003), revisited Aristotle’s discussion about future contingents, truth, time and propositional content to argue for doubly relativized propositions, i.e. propositions whose truth is relative to their context of utterance as well as to their context of assessment. Without discussing other merits of MacFarlane’s relativism, I will show how his argument about future contingents loses much of its appeal when it is assessed via the speech act-theoretic notions of propositional content and direction of fit. I will also sketch an account of predictions (utterances of declarative sentences about future contingents) that makes justice to the two sorts of intuitions that motivated MacFarlane’s discussion:

(a) the determinacy intuition, according to which a prediction has a definite truth-value, as it may share its propositional content with assertions about the present or the past;

(b) the indeterminacy intuition, according to which a prediction does not have a definite truth- value, given that the future is indeterminate or open.

Unlike MacFarlane’s, my account does not require to give up truth-conditionally complete (non-relative) propositional contents, but, making a significant amendment to Searle's speech act theory, it will tell assertions and predictions apart as speech acts with different direction of fit and, hence, different propositional content conditions. It turns out that, at the time of utterance, predictions often lack referential truth-conditions and only have  utterance-bound truth-conditions.