The Invisible Thin Red Line

Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 101:354-382 (2020)
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Abstract

The aim of this paper is to argue that the adoption of an unrestricted principle of bivalence is compatible with a metaphysics that (i) denies that the future is real, (ii) adopts nomological indeterminism, and (iii) exploits a branching structure to provide a semantics for future contingent claims. To this end, we elaborate what we call Flow Fragmentalism, a view inspired by Kit Fine (2005)’s non-standard tense realism, according to which reality is divided up into maximally coherent collections of tensed facts. In this way, we show how to reconcile a genuinely A-theoretic branching-time model with the idea that there is a branch corresponding to the thin red line, that is, the branch that will turn out to be the actual future history of the world.

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Author Profiles

Giuliano Torrengo
Università degli Studi di Milano
Samuele Iaquinto
University of Eastern Piedmont

Citations of this work

Is the World a Heap of Quantum Fragments?Samuele Iaquinto & Claudio Calosi - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178:2009-2019.
Fragmentalism We can Believe in.Giovanni Merlo - 2022 - Philosophical Quarterly 73 (1):184-205.
Human Foreknowledge.Fabrizio Cariani - 2021 - Philosophical Perspectives 35 (1):50-69.
Fragmenting Modal Logic.Samuele Iaquinto, Ciro De Florio & Aldo Frigerio - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.

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References found in this work

Past, present and future.Arthur N. Prior - 1967 - Oxford,: Clarendon P..
Past, Present and Future.Arthur N. Prior - 1967 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
The Moving Spotlight: An Essay on Time and Ontology.Ross P. Cameron - 2015 - New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Facing the future: agents and choices in our indeterminist world.Nuel D. Belnap - 2001 - New York: Oxford University Press. Edited by Michael Perloff & Ming Xu.
Objective Becoming.Bradford Skow - 2015 - Oxford: Oxford University Press UK.

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