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Truth and the Open Future: The Solution to Aristotle's Sea Battle Challenge with the Principle of Bivalence Retained

Arsenijevic, Milos (2016) Truth and the Open Future: The Solution to Aristotle's Sea Battle Challenge with the Principle of Bivalence Retained. In: UNSPECIFIED.

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Abstract

The talk deals with Aristotle’s famous sea-battle problem concerning the truth values of sentences about contingent future events: If an utterance of the sentence “There will be a sea battle tomorrow” is true, then it seems that it is determined that there will be a sea battle tomorrow. For otherwise, how could the utterance be true? If, however, an utterance of the sentence “There will be a sea battle
tomorrow” is false, then it seems that it is determined that there will be no sea battle tomorrow. For otherwise, how could the utterance be false? Thus, it seems that it is determined whether there will be a sea battle tomorrow or not – and so for any future event whatsoever. This, however, is in conflict with the (plausible) assumption that there is such a thing as an open future, i.e., that at least for some (possible) future events, it is not determined whether they will take place or not. Some have argued, in light of this problem, that sentences about f
uture events are neither true nor false. In this talk, however, it shall be argued that the sea-battle problem can be resolved in an intuitively plausible manner without giving up the principle of bivalence.


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Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item (UNSPECIFIED)
Creators:
CreatorsEmailORCID
Arsenijevic, Milosmarsenij@f.bg.ac.rs
Keywords: sea-battle, indeterminism, the principle of bivalence, temporal-modal logic
Subjects: General Issues > Scientific Metaphysics
General Issues > Determinism/Indeterminism
Depositing User: Dr. Milos Arsenijevic
Date Deposited: 05 Jul 2016 15:43
Last Modified: 17 Jul 2016 06:38
Item ID: 12257
Subjects: General Issues > Scientific Metaphysics
General Issues > Determinism/Indeterminism
Date: 13 July 2016
URI: https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/12257

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