In an apparent attempt to interpret Aristotle, Jan Łukasiewicz proposed that the idea that the future is open carries a semantic shadow: future contingents are neither true nor false, and connectives are governed by three-valued truth-tables. The view is suspicious, among other things, because it introduces violations of the law of excluded middle (LEM) that do not track intuition (when A is neither true nor false, so is A ∨¬A). Thomason’s application of the method of supervaluations offered a way to salvage the truth-value gap insight while holding on to the validity of LEM. For supervaluationists, future contingents are neither supertrue nor superfalse, but instances of LEM are supertrue—since every way the future will unfold is bound to support one disjunct or the other.In The Open Future, Patrick Todd also maintains that the openness hypothesis carries a semantic shadow. For him, if the future is open, all future contingents are false. Evidently, this view does not need supervaluationism to validate LEM. If A is guaranteed false and negation is classical, A ∨¬A is guaranteed true. The foundation of Todd’s proposal is a twist on what Prior called the Peircean view of future discourse. Peirceanism:Sentences of the form In the future A, Will A, and so on are true if and only if A is true in all causally possible futures. (Todd emphasizes he’s a smidgen non-Peircean: the exact difference won’t matter here.) Pick a canonical future contingent sentence—say,(1) It will rain.If the future is open with respect to (1), there are open possibilities in which it does not rain that are compatible with all the currently settled facts. It follows that (1) is false, that its wide-scope negation It is not the case that it will rain is true, and that LEM is not threatened.Peirceanism is simple and distinguished by a history of high-profile endorsements. It is also not credible, and the incredulous stares it generates do not stem from some hard-to-express bellyaches but from well-known objections. These objections play a structuring role in Todd’s discussion:The core of the book is an energetic rejoinder to these arguments. Todd should be credited for running the gauntlet, and for doing so with creativity and ingenuity. Since, like Todd, I recently spent a few years writing a book on future-directed language (Cariani 2021), and since I have come to diametrically opposed conclusions, you should expect me to believe that Todd’s responses fail. Indeed, I think they do. I will flag the major points of disagreement and then note a way in which the most creative and interesting aspects of the book can be preserved.In response to the negation argument, Todd argues that will belongs to a category of expressions linguists call ‘neg-raisers’. These are expressions that are typically interpreted as scoping over negation, regardless of where negation seems to appear superficially. So, the reason why we do not detect a reading of It won’t rain on which not scopes over will resembles the reason why we interpret I don’t think it’s raining as roughly equivalent to I think it’s not raining.1 The idea of will as a neg-raiser was originally advocated by the linguist Lauren Winans (2016). Given some additional assumptions, it is also related to Bridget Copley’s (2009) proposal that It will rain presupposes that it rains in either all or none of the relevant futures—in other words, that will carries a “homogeneity” presupposition. Indeed, one of the leading accounts of neg-raising—due to Jon Gajewski (2017)—is that it arises because the relevant expressions demand homogeneity.Todd tries to address challenges to the neg-raising thesis. For example, Winans herself worries that the excluded middle inference of ordinary neg-raisers does not project out of questions, whereas WEM does. Contrast:(2a) Does John think Mary is home?(2b) Will Mary be home?A “no” answer to (2a) does not entail that John thinks Mary is not home. A “no” answer to (2b) entails she won’t be. Todd would disagree with this last judgment. He emphatically thinks that, if the future is open, WEM is not valid. He claims that in ordinary contexts in which we utter It will rain, we do not have in mind the open future model. For him, there is something called semantics-cum-metaphysical competence that supplies us linguistic judgments that are informed both by meaning and by some assumptions about the world. In particular, when we do zero in on the open future model, we stop judging the relevant claims as logically true. Try as I might, I could not find any of Todd’s alleged judgments convincing—except as restatements of the Peircean predictions. And the idea of “semantics-cum-metaphysical competence” seems mythical.On this issue, Todd is also at variance with Gajewski’s prominent presuppositional analysis of neg-raisers. Traditionally, the homogeneity presupposition is instrumental to predict the perceived validity of WEM. The idea is that It will rain presupposes that either all relevant futures are rain futures or none are, and for that very reason It will rain or it won’t can be classified as a logical truth. Its status is the same as that of Either the King of France is bald or he isn’t: it cannot be false as long as its presupposition that France has a King is satisfied. This is as close as logically true as a sentence can get if it carries a nontrivial presupposition. If Todd adopted this view, there would be fewer bullets for him to bite.The real heart of the book’s argument is the pragmatic error theory that is mobilized to answer the credences and practices objections. A major reason to care about semantic content is that it feeds into a broader story about communication, inquiry, knowledge, and rational belief. The book faces the important difficulties in this arena head on. Todd’s response to the credence problem is that when we ascribe a probability to It will rain tomorrow, we are not making claims about the probability of the truth of a proposition. Instead, we express an estimate of the world’s tendency to produce a certain outcome. This error theory generalizes to the “practices” objection: promising that it will rain is not a matter of standing in a relation to the proposition that it will rain; and betting that it will rain is not betting on the truth of that proposition either. (Presumably, however, present- and past-directed promises and bets are still propositional.)I doubt that these practices can be splintered in this way. Suppose you promise that you will pick up your friend on August 1, 2025, but you have lost track of where you are in time: for all you know, that date might have passed, and it might not have. Then it won’t be transparent to you whether your promise is directed at a proposition or at a production tendency. Moreover, the object of your promises will change as you pass through time. That seems problematic.Furthermore, it is not clear what to say about bets or promises in the contents of mixed sentences like It rained yesterday and it will rain again tomorrow. This is one of those points that ought to be on the agenda of any error theorist but gets no mention at all in the book. Finally, all of these objections become even more biting if Todd’s view were extended to attitudes like hopes and wonders that are typically future-directed. Todd does not explicitly do this, but that appears to be at best a lacuna in his treatment.In section 6.10, Todd discusses a devastating objection against his own view. The view predicts the consistency of:(3) # It is not the case that it will rain but it probably will.Given Todd’s view, this should be perfectly acceptable whenever rain is open, but the future has the right tendency to produce it. After acknowledging that the problem might be insurmountable, Todd goes on to try to explore what it would be like to bite this bullet. I’ll be blunt: there is no there there. This prediction is as bad as a semantic theory’s predictions can get, and there is no massaging it into acceptability.The good news is that there is no shame in not doing natural language semantics. Todd’s development of the open future thesis is more interesting if it is construed as specifying a canonical language in which the commitments of a certain metaphysical outlook might be formulated. Some of the most interesting parts of the book are the two chapters that connect the metaphysics with the theory of divine omniscience—one being a reprint of an excellent essay that Todd recently coauthored with Brian Rabern. Nothing in these chapters requires the bridge principles connecting truth and divine belief to be about truth in some language people actually speak. In fact, it is a bad idea to advance a dialectic in which views about divine omniscience require the empirical commitment to Peirceanism. Surely some people—perhaps some actual people—could speak a non-Peircean language, and absolutely nothing would follow about divine omniscience.The argumentative development in The Open Future is interesting. It might, in fact, be one of the better ways of supporting its overarching premise. But that premise is itself dubious as a hypothesis about natural language—in fact, more dubious if this is the best one can do to make it plausible.I thank Simon Goldstein, John MacFarlane, Paolo Santorio, and Patrick Todd for feedback on earlier drafts.

中文翻译：

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开放的未来

扬·乌卡谢维奇（Jan Łukasiewicz）显然试图解释亚里士多德，他提出未来是开放的这一观点带有语义阴影：未来的偶然事件既非真亦非假，连接词受三值真值表支配。这种观点是值得怀疑的，除其他外，因为它引入了对不追踪直觉的排中律（LEM）的违反（当 A 既非真亦非假时，A ∨ØA 也是如此）。托马森对超评估方法的应用提供了一种在保持 LEM 有效性的同时挽救真值差距洞察力的方法。对于超估价论者来说，未来的偶然事件既不是超真也不是超假，但 LEM 的实例却是超真——因为未来展开的每一种方式都必然支持一种或另一种析取。 在《开放的未来》中，帕特里克·托德还认为，开放性假设具有语义阴影。对他来说，如果未来是开放的，那么所有未来的可能性都是假的。显然，这种观点不需要超估价主义来验证 LEM。如果 A 保证为假并且否定是经典的，则 A ∨ØA 保证为真。托德提议的基础是对普赖尔所谓的皮尔士未来话语观点的一种扭曲。皮尔士主义：当且仅当 A 在所有可能的因果关系中都为真时，“未来 A”、“威尔 A”等形式的句子才为真。 （托德强调他是一个有点非皮尔士式的人：确切的区别在这里并不重要。）选择一个规范的未来或有句子 - 比如说，（1）会下雨。如果未来相对于（1）是开放的，则有不下雨的可能性与目前所有已确定的事实相一致。由此可见，(1) 是错误的，它的广泛否定“会下雨”并不是真的，并且 LEM 没有受到威胁。皮尔斯主义很简单，并且以高调认可的历史而著称。它也是不可信的，它引起的难以置信的目光并非源于一些难以表达的腹痛，而是源于众所周知的反对意见。这些反对意见在托德的讨论中发挥了结构性作用：本书的核心是对这些论点的有力反驳。托德应对挑战，并以创造力和独创性应对挑战，这一点值得赞扬。因为，像托德一样，我最近花了几年时间写了一本关于面向未来的语言的书（Cariani 2021），并且由于我得出了截然相反的结论，所以你应该期望我相信托德的回应是失败的。确实，我认为他们确实如此。我将标出主要的分歧点，然后指出一种可以保留本书中最具创意和有趣的方面的方法。 针对否定论点，托德认为，意志属于语言学家称为“否定”的一类表达方式。饲养者'。这些表达式通常被解释为否定的范围，无论否定表面上似乎出现在哪里。所以，我们没有检测到“It won't rain on”的读数的原因类似于我们将“I don't think it's raining”解释为“I don't think it's raining”大致相当于“I think it's not raining.1”的原因。反对者最初是由语言学家劳伦·温南斯（Lauren Winans，2016）提出的。考虑到一些额外的假设，它也与 Bridget Copley (2009) 的提议相关，即“会下雨”预设所有相关未来都会下雨，或者都不下雨，换句话说，这将带有“同质性”预设。事实上，Jon Gajewski (2017) 对否定提出的主要解释之一是，它的出现是因为相关表达要求同质性。托德试图解决否定提出论文的挑战。例如，维南斯本人担心，普通否定者排除的中间推论不会毫无问题，而 WEM 则不然。对比：(2a) 约翰认为玛丽在家吗？(2b) 玛丽会在家吗？对 (2a) 的回答为“否”并不意味着约翰认为玛丽不在家。对（2b）的回答为“否”意味着她不会。托德不同意最后的判断。他强调，如果未来是开放的，WEM 就无效。他声称，在我们说“天会下雨”的普通语境中，我们心里并没有想到开放的未来模型。对他来说，有一种叫做语义兼形而上学的能力，它为我们提供了语言判断，这些判断既来自意义，也来自对世界的一些假设。特别是，当我们对开放未来模型进行归零时，我们就不再判断相关主张在逻辑上是否正确。尽我所能，我找不到托德所谓的任何判断令人信服——除了对皮尔士预测的重述。而“语义兼形而上学能力”的想法似乎很神秘。在这个问题上，托德也与加耶夫斯基对否定者的著名预设分析不一致。传统上，同质性预设有助于预测 WEM 的感知有效性。这个想法是，“会下雨”预设了要么所有相关的未来都是下雨期货，要么没有，正因为如此，“会下雨”或“不会下雨”可以被归类为逻辑真理。它的状态与“要么法国国王是秃头，要么不是”的状态相同：只要满足法国有国王的前提，它就不可能是假的。如果一个句子带有重要的预设，那么这在逻辑上是最接近真实的。如果托德采纳这个观点，他咬的子弹就会更少。本书论点的真正核心是实用主义错误理论，它被用来回答相信和实践的反对意见。关心语义内容的一个主要原因是它融入了关于沟通、探究、知识和理性信念的更广泛的故事。本书正面临着这个领域的重要困难。托德对可信度问题的回应是，当我们将概率归因于明天会下雨时，我们并不是在断言某个命题的真实概率。相反，我们表达了对世界产生某种结果的趋势的估计。这种错误理论概括为“实践”反对意见：承诺会下雨并不是与“会下雨”命题相关的问题；而是与“会下雨”的命题相关的问题。打赌会下雨也不是打赌这个命题的真实性。 （然而，据推测，针对现在和过去的承诺和赌注仍然是命题性的。）我怀疑这些实践能否以这种方式分裂。假设您承诺将在 2025 年 8 月 1 日接您的朋友，但您已经忘记了自己当时所在的位置：据您所知，该日期可能已经过去，也可能没有。那么你的承诺是针对一个命题还是针对一种生产趋势，这对你来说就不会是透明的。而且，你的承诺对象会随着时间的推移而改变。这似乎是有问题的。此外，对于像“昨天下雨了，明天又下雨”这样的混合句内容中的打赌或承诺，我们并不清楚该说些什么。这是任何错误理论家都应该考虑的要点之一，但书中根本没有提及。最后，如果托德的观点扩展到诸如希望和奇迹之类通常面向未来的态度，所有这些反对意见都会变得更加尖锐。托德没有明确这样做，但这似乎充其量是他的处理中的一个缺陷。在第 6.10 节中，托德讨论了对他自己的观点的毁灭性反对。该视图预测了以下一致性：(3) # 情况并非会下雨，但很可能会下雨。根据托德的观点，只要有雨，这应该是完全可以接受的，但未来有产生下雨的正确趋势。在承认这个问题可能无法克服后，托德继续尝试探索咬紧牙关会是什么样子。我会直言不讳：那里没有。这个预测是语义理论的预测所能达到的最糟糕的结果，并且没有办法将其调整为可接受的。好消息是，不进行自然语言语义研究并不可耻。如果托德对开放未来命题的发展被解释为指定一种规范语言，在这种语言中可以阐述某种形而上学观点的承诺，那就更有趣了。这本书中最有趣的部分是将形而上学与神圣全知理论联系起来的两章——其中一章是托德最近与布莱恩·拉伯恩合着的一篇优秀文章的重印。这些章节中没有任何内容要求连接真理和神圣信仰的桥梁原则是关于人们实际使用的某种语言的真理。实际上，推进一种辩证法是一个坏主意，在这种辩证法中，关于神圣全知的观点需要对皮尔士主义的经验承诺。当然，有些人——也许是一些真实的人——可能会说非皮尔士语言，并且绝对不会有关于神圣全知的事情。《开放的未来》中的争论发展很有趣。事实上，它可能是支持其总体前提的更好方式之一。但作为关于自然语言的假设，这个前提本身是值得怀疑的——事实上，如果这是让它变得合理的最佳方法，那就更值得怀疑了。我感谢西蒙·戈尔茨坦、约翰·麦克法兰、保罗·桑托里奥和帕特里克·托德对早期草稿的反馈。