Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

The advocates of a branching conception of time come in two main sorts: Thin Red Line (TRL) theorists and Open Futurists. TRL theorists hold that a specific possible future, the ‘thin red line’, is already marked or individuated as the actual future. Open Futurists hold instead a democratic stance towards possible futures: no possible future is marked or individuated as the actual one.  According to a standard view, Open Futurism entails that there is no unique actual future. Our aim is twofold. First, we show that the Open Futurism, far from being inconsistent with the existence of a unique actual future, really entails it. Second, we show that, once Open Futurists recognize the existence of the actual future, they have access to a very natural semantics approach to future contingents. Besides being independently plausible, this approach enables them to solve the so-called assertion problem(s).