58³Ô¹Ï

In Todd 2021 (The Open Future: Why Future Contingents are All False) I defended a kind of pragmatic “error-theory” regarding ordinary judgments about the interaction of ‘will’ and negation.  On the view I defended, ‘will’ involves an essentially modal component, in the form of a universal quantifier over the “available” histories.  But this view faces an objection: we do not tend to hear a distinction between ‘not: will’ and ‘will not’.  Response: that is because we typically assume (falsely, I suggest) that there is always only ever one available history, in which case the scope of the negation makes no difference.  In this talk, I aim to review and clarify the essential components of this pragmatic account — and I attempt to sketch an improved story about how a similar strategy might help my “all false” open future view respond to a persistent objection involving credence.  Here I try to build on some anti-“Molinist” remarks of Anscombe and van Inwagen regarding counterfactuals.