Jakub Węgrecki
Jagiellonian University
Proposition are assumed to be objects of our attitudes. Mark Richard (1981), in his famous paper, argued that temporal propositions, i.e. propositions that change their truth-values through time, are not apt to play this role. His argument was criticized (e.g. Brogaard 2012, Sullivan 2014), but the eternalist-temporalist debate is not yet settled.
Recently, Brogaard (2022) proposed a new argument that aims to show that eternal propositions are not objects of future- and past-directed hopes. The goal of my paper is to explicate her argument and to argue that it is not a threat for eternalists. I will examine two problems that are included in her case against eternalism.
The first (alleged) problem is the impossibility of future directed hopes. According to the standard analysis, hope requires estimation of probability: to hope that p, one must believes that there are non-trivial chances that p (0<Pr(p)<1). Given the widely assumed premise that the probability of p is the probability of its truth (Pr(Tp) = Pr(p)), and the claim that probability of true claims is always equal to 1, the absurd conclusion is that future-directed hope is never possible. I will argue that the dubious assumption is the claim that in case of true future-tensed propositions, their probability is always equal to 1.
The second issue is about satisfaction of hope: if propositions are eternally true, it follows that future-tensed propositions are true or false now, and thus, our hopes are fulfiled (or fail to be fulfliled) as soon as they are formed. This concludes the argument against eternalism. My strategy of replying to this problem is to reject the claim that a hope for p (where p is a proposition) is satisfied at t if and only if p is true at t. Rather, we can bind satisfation of hope for p with truth of a different proposition p′ that is systematically related to p. This strategy mirrors the Sullivan’s (2014) temporalist attempt to respond to Richard’s (1981) problem. My conclusion is that the case for eternalism is not yet lost.
Chair: Szymon Sapalski
Time: September 6th, 14:40-15:10
Location: SR 1.006
SOPhiA 2026 