Four Versions of Open Theism

Alan,

Thanks for the posting. This taxonomy is helpful. I'm currently reading through your paper forthcoming in FandP, though this posting is rather broader. Can you say a bit more about what distinguishes (3) and (4)? I think I'm getting the idea, but I want to make sure. Thanks.

Hi Kevin,

Glad to make your acquaintance.

Anyway, (3) represents the Aristotelian solution to logical fatalism--basically, deny bivalence for future contingents. So, where X is a future contingent, both "X will obtain" and "X will not obtain" are neither true nor false.

Option (4) has been largely neglected historically. The first person that I know of to defend it is Arthur Prior in "The Formalities of Omniscience". His view is that when X is a future contingent both "X will obtain" and "X will not obtain" are false. The plausibility of this position depends on what Prior calls the 'Peircean' system of tense logic, which implies that WILL(X) and WILL(~X) are contraries, not contradictories. I explain and defend this here.

Does that help?

BTW, I noticed that you're a coeditor of the IEP. Any chance you might be interested in an article on open theism? I'd be happy to write one laying out the philosophical terrain of the issues involved.

Hi Alan,

Very interesing post. I'm a little curious about the fact that the metaphysical positions (i.e., the versions of open theism) are defined semantically. Why? It is certainly possible to provide a semantics for future contingents given an open (or, I take it, branching) future on which bivalence is valid (see for instance some very early stuff from Vaugh McKim, 'Temporal Modalities and the Future', NDJFL, c. '85?) So I don't offhand see why alethic openess is defined as above, viz.,

"...the future is alethically open at time T iff with respect to possible future state of affairs X and future time T* neither "X will obtain at T*" nor "X will not obtain at T*" is true at T.

The openess of the future doesn't *entail* that semantic conclusion, I don't think. And in a way not so surprisingly. We shouldn't expect the metaphysical position (whether it's some form of indetermninsm or determinism) to affect the semantic interpretation of future tensed statements.

Alan,

Yes, it is good to make your acquaintance too. Your further comments about (3) and (4) do help--that's what I thought was going on, but just wanted to make sure. (4) strikes me as puzzling given that it seems to suggest that the proposition [it will rain somewhere in the world on Friday, 24 Feb] is now false, but the proposition [it rained somewhere in the world on Friday, 24 Feb] will be true on Saturday. I'm guessing this is an issue you address in the Peircian system paper--so I'll add that to my 'to read' pile. Thanks.

Regarding the IEP, yes I am an area editor, and while I am definately interested in there being an entry on open theism, such an entry is already in the works. But I'd love to you have submit something else. Let's correspond off-blog via email, and hopefully we can find something.

"I will either die or not die tomorrow" is false?

Alan,

I have some further comments for you regarding your paper on Peircean tense logic.

1. I'm perplexed by the shift from the truth/falsity of propositions (as involved in "if p then it has always been the case that it would be the case that p") to assertability conditions. Isn't it possible that there are true propositions even if there are no satisfied assertability conditions? (For example, if there exist no asserters?)

2. Regarding your discussion of the roulette wheel, you seem to want to say that the person who says, before the wheel is spun, "the ball will land on 20" isn't making a prediction at all. Here you appeal to the principle of charity. But maybe I'm just not as charitable as you. Such individuals seem to definately be making predictions, at least in some cases, even when they have NO grounds for asserting that proposition as true. For example, take the student that, the night before a test, tells her roommate: "You don't need to know that--it's not going to be on the test." The roommate asks, "Are you sure?" The student asserts, "Yes, I'm sure that's not going to be on the test. Let's go get a beer." Now, it seems clear to me that this kind of situation happens frequently with regard to future utterances. And I'd want to say that the student is just being irrational. The student is asserting something as true when there is no possible way that she could know it's true. Such assertions don't seem to carry any causal force, but they still seem to be assertions. (That's why what the student says strikes us, or at least me, as so ludicrous--she's asserting when she can do no more than guess!).

3. In section 5 on the grounding problem, you appeall to A-theoretical ontologies such as presentism. At the end of the section, for example, you write "given an A-theoretical ontology, grounding considerations strongly favor Peircian tense logic over against its Ockhamist rival." But I don't think this is quite right. You need not just an A-theory, but also something stronger like A-theory and presentism, or A-theory and the growing block. But this isn't essential--you can have an A-theoretic eternalism. In such a case, it is the existing future (or the things that exist in the future) that ground the truth of the future-directed propositions. Not only does this seem to be the majority view among Ockhamists (not that I've taken a formal poll, so I could be wrong), but it also suggests that despite what you do argue, you aren't successful in 'argu[ing] that A-theoretical versions of Ockhamism lack the ontological resources to ground truths about the future." Maybe you've shown that A-theoretical forms of presentism or the growing-block theory lack these resources, but that doesn't seem very surprising. In fact, I'd be surprised if folks with those positions didn't agree with you regarding Ockhamism being false. So am I missing something?

Mike,

Thanks for the comment. You say of my definition of alethic openness:

The openness of the future doesn't *entail* that semantic conclusion....We shouldn't expect the metaphysical position (whether it's some form of indetermninsm or determinism) to affect the semantic interpretation of future tensed statements.

I'm not quite sure in what sense you mean to refer to the "openness" of the future, but regardless I didn't claim that alethic openness what *entailed* by the openness of the future. All I've attempted to do here is distinguish between four different versions of open theism. Whether any of those versions is correct is, of course, a further question.

At any rate, your claim that determinism/indeterminism shouldn't affect the truth values of propositions about the future begs the question against 'Peircean' tense logic. For the Peircean, the causal contingency or necessity of possibly future state of affairs is what grounds the truth value of propositions about those states of affairs.

Kevin,

You say: (4) strikes me as puzzling given that it seems to suggest that the proposition [it will rain somewhere in the world on Friday, 24 Feb] is now false, but the proposition [it rained somewhere in the world on Friday, 24 Feb] will be true on Saturday.

(4) only implies that [it will rain somewhere in the world on Friday, 24 Feb] is false IF, prior to Feb 24, it is a future contingent. If it is contingent on Feb 22, then it is false on Feb 22. If, however, it ceases to be contingent on Feb. 23 (say, b/c God decides to make it rain), then it is true on Feb. 23.

"I will either die or not die tomorrow" is false?

Of course not. This is trivially true b/c 'die' and 'not die' are contradictory possibilities.

If you think this refutes alethic openness, that's because you're equating "I will either die or not die" with "Either I will die or I will not die". The former is trivially true, but opinions can differ on the latter. Proponents of non-bivalentist omniscience will say that it is true b/c in all causally possible futures one or the other of those disjuncts is true. Proponents of bivalentist omniscience will say that it is false b/c neither of those disjunct is true if your death is now a future contingent.

Alan, this is an excellent help. Views 2 and 4 hadn't occurred to me.

Actually, I would argue that 3 is not the Aristotelian solution to anything. It's what Aristotle saw as a puzzle to be solved. He seems to me to state something like 3 in order to capture the idea that the future is in some sense open. Then he points out something that follows that he seems to me to be unable to tolerate. As I read him, he doesn't really come to a conclusion but simply presents it as a puzzle that he doesn't know what to say about.

The puzzle for him, as I read him, is that he starts out finding the following two propositions attractive:

A. Either there will be a sea battle tomorrow, or there won’t be a sea battle tomorrow.
B. If it’s not fixed that there will be a sea battle tomorrow, then it’s not true that there will be a sea battle, and it’s not false that there will be a sea battle.

Since he wants to think of the future as not fixed, he concludes from that and B that:

C. It’s not true that there will be a sea battle, and it’s not false that there will be a sea battle.

That's all well and good until you compare it closely with A. If A and C are both true, then it's not true or false that there will be a sea battle, but there will or won't be one. He seems to me to be wondering how it could possibly be that one of them has to be true, but neither of them is true. That's just incredibly weird, even if you can find a logic that will make it consistent. By the end of the discussion, it's not clear to me that he's as confident of B and C as he was earlier on. It's also not clear to me that he rejects it and retains A (as I think is the best solution to the puzzle). He seems unsure about what he should say, as I read him.

I should note that I'm not the only one who says this. Tim Williamson says several Aristotle scholars have said this. The only one I know about directly is Julia Annas, but he says several Aristotle scholars have cautioned him not to go around calling the view capture in 3 above as Aristotle's view.

Given all that, I have to wonder if there's a similar puzzle about view 4. The following statements all come out true, on view 4:

D. It's false that there will be a sea battle tomorrow.
E. There might be a sea battle tomorrow.
F. There might be a sea battle tomorrow, but it's false that there will be a sea battle tomorrow.

F sounds really ultra-strange to my ears. I think what you have to say, though, is that D does not entail:

G. There won't be a sea battle tomorrow.

Once D entails G, it's going to be hard to resist one more step:

H. It's true that there won't be a sea battle tomorrow.

That of course contradicts D. I'm guessing that it's the D-G entailment that you'll resist, but I suppose you could resist some earlier step. All of these steps seem so utterly obvious to me that it seems to me to be as unattractive as the strangeness of view 3. On either view, I believe you're also going to get some problems with truth-functionality of logical connectives, as Williamson's book on vagueness shows for denying bivalence (as 3 does) or excluded middle (as I think 4 has to do) for very different reasons. I think these are the sort of thing that motivates most metaphysicians to insist on alethic settledness. You get to retain standard logic.

So there's plenty of work for you to explore (and perhaps you've already done so with all this; I admit that I haven't read your papers on this yet). I look forward to seeing the development of your fourth option, because it seems to be a truly creative move. I'm surprised a non-philosopher like Boyd came up with something like that. Now I might have to take a closer look at his books (which I've had for several years).

"At any rate, your claim that determinism/indeterminism shouldn't affect the truth values of propositions about the future begs the question against 'Peircean' tense logic."

I don't know, at at least one rate, one could say that it's Piercean tense logic that's begging the question. I didn't make the claim that one could not construct a tense logic on which one's particular metaphysical assumptions affect one's semantics (obviously, all sorts of models are available). Perhaps Peirce has done so, or more likely suggested how it might be rigorously done.
But there is no question that more recent developments and advancements in model theory show that this is not at all necessary. What I said is that the metaphysics does not restrict one's semantics: i.e. there is no logical requirement here. In fact it's pretty easy to provide a semantics preserving bivalence for any of these metaphysical assumptions (openness, indeterminism, etc.). And since we can easily do this, it might be a good idea not to define these metaphysical positions semantically (whatever the defenders of openess happen to be saying). That's all I was after.

Kevin,

Thanks for your comments on my paper. It's still a work in progress, so any constructive feedback at this point is more than welcome.

Re (1): Sure it’s possible that there be true propositions w/o satisfied assertibility conditions. My focus in that section is on what kind of propositions people express when they make genuine predictive utterances. I appeal to assertibility conditions to argue that such utterances invariably express propositions that carry probabilistic causal force. Hence Peircean tense logic is closer to the semantics of actual predictions than is Ockhamist tense logic.

Re (2): I agree that your student is being irrational, but I would analyze that irrationality differently. I think that when the student says “I’m sure that’s not going to be on the test� that the student is either expressing a belief that carries causal force--It is highly probable that it won’t be on the test. The irrationality comes in, I think, with regard to how that belief was formed and maintained. If the student was tired of studying and wanted a beer real bad, then he might have let wishful thinking get the best of him and formed a belief that, in his more critical moments, he wouldn’t have taken seriously. A similar kind of wishful thinking is, I think, behind the gambler’s fallacy and many others besides.

Re (3): I gather that by A-theoretic eternalism you mean something like a B-theoretical ontology with the addition of a ‘moving spotlight’ that picks out an objective, changing present. Frankly, I hadn’t given this view serious consideration. That’s an oversight I’ll have to rectify. Offhand, however, I find it hard to see how the ‘spotlight’ could represent anything more than an illusion of becoming, in which case this reduces to a pure B-theory. For becoming to be real, that spotlight would have to have some objective ontological status. But what could that amount to? I’m not sure.

Jeremy,

Thanks for the caution on Aristotle. I wasn’t aware that view 3 was a controversial interpretation. Now I know better. Thanks.

As for the puzzle you raise for view 4, F is not at all strange if you read it the way a proponent of view 4 reads it. That proponent will endorse Prior’s ‘Peircean’ system of tense logic according to which WILL(p) means that it is causally inevitable that p. Conversely, WILL(~p) means that it is causally impossible that p. Hence, for future contingent p, both WILL(p) and WILL(~p) are false, whereas both MIGHT(p) and MIGHT(~p) are true. Thus, on Peircean tense logic, the inference from D to G is invalid. The real question, then, is whether that is the metaphysically appropriate tense logic to adopt.

As for Boyd’s views, they were anticipated and shaped by Charles Hartshorne, on whose work Boyd wrote his dissertation. You probably won’t find any explicit statement of view 4 is Boyd’s books, however. While he’s held the view for quite awhile, he didn’t know how to formulate it precisely until he, Tom Belt, myself, and a few others hashed it out a couple years ago on Boyd’s discussion board.

On the moving spotlight issue, there's one way I've thought of to make sense of it. Meinongians (but not Meinong himself, according to Dean Zimmerman, though a good historical example can easily be found in Anselm) believe that nonexistent things still have being in some sense. If you accept something like that, then you can think of the spotlight as covering what exists and the B-series as including all the other things that have being in the non-existent past and future. I've never won anyone over to this view (winning people over to views you think are false isn't generally very easy), but I think it might be the best way to make sense of a moving spotlight view.

I'll have to think about this tense logic issue. I have to confess that I have a hard time wrapping my mind around any tense logic that assumes an A-theory, because the B-theory has always seemed intuitively obvious to me, even long before I had seen anyone discussing it as a philosophical view. I don't think people naturally think in A-terms, and the difficulty of constructing tense logic is testament to that.

What I'm guessing I would want to say, though, is that I just don't see any causal element in statements about what might happen or statements about what will happen. I think Zagzebski is right that many problems related to this issue arise because of a confusion of truth about the future and causal relations between the present and the future, which makes it really hard to figure out what's motivating your view, because you're building what she calls a confusion into an actual definition of truth about the future!

I have trouble believing in either (3) or (4) because I'm dubious about the idea of alethic openness. But here's a more focused problem for (4). It depends on

(T) it is true that p iff p.

Here's a reductio, from premises that view (4) accepts. Suppose it's open whether there will be a sea battle tomorrow:

(1) it is false that there will be a sea battle tomorrow. (premise)
(2) it's not the case that it is true that there will be a sea battle tomorrow (from 1)
(3) it's not the case that there will be a sea battle tomorrow (from 2, T)
(4) there will not be a sea battle tomorrow (from 3, simply rephrasing the negation)
(5) it's true that there will not be a sea battle tomorrow (from 4, T)
(6) it's false that there will not be a sea battle tomorrow (premise)

Don't 5&6 make a contradiction?

Alan,
You:(4) only implies that [it will rain somewhere in the world on Friday, 24 Feb] is false IF, prior to Feb 24, it is a future contingent. If it is contingent on Feb 22, then it is false on Feb 22. If, however, it ceases to be contingent on Feb. 23 (say, b/c God decides to make it rain), then it is true on Feb. 23.

Yes, this is exactly what is puzzling to me. It is strange that a time-indexed proposition would go from being false to being true. But maybe I simply think this because of my views on propositions. And because I'm an Ockhamist.

You:I appeal to assertibility conditions to argue that such utterances invariably express propositions that carry probabilistic causal force. Hence Peircean tense logic is closer to the semantics of actual predictions than is Ockhamist tense logic.

Yes, I see that. I'm just not convinced by the argument.

I think Mike Reas discusses the conjunction of eternalism and an A-theory in his "Presentism" (Oxford Handbook?). I think these are very important issues, and am glad for the chance to discuss them.

Oops, I didn't mean to appear to be screaming in the previous post. I must have screwed up the HTML tags. Sorry for that.

One extra bold tag and suddenly we have a screaming match! Problem fixed.

Thanks. :)

Heath,

The problem with your argument against view 4 is the move from your

(3) it's not the case that there will be a sea battle tomorrow
to
(4) there will not be a sea battle tomorrow

The proponent of view 4 will not grant the validity of this inference, so the contradiction between 5 and 6 cannot emerge. The proponent of view 3, however, does grant the inference and avoids contradiction by denying bivalence.

Kevin,

Thanks for the reference to Rea. I took a look at his article on "Four-Dimensionalism". He mentions the 'moving spotlight' idea, but he distinguishes it from 'eternalism', which he defines in a manner that excludes the A-theory.

Wait, so what is the logical form of (4)?

I take (3) to be: Not Ex Bx Tx
where Bx is "x is a sea battle" and Tx is "x is tomorrow".

The only thing I can think of for (4) that isn't equivalent to that is: Ex Not[Bx Tx]
But I have trouble seeing (4) as a positive existential statement that something exists. So how are (3) and (4) even different claims to be able to justify the entailment?

Alan,

Thanks, I caught this myself after looking a bit closer. (Jeremy, if you were referring to my argument, the difference is between
(3) ~ Will(there is a sea battle), versus
(4) Will( ~ there is a sea battle) ).

So I agree there is no contradiction here.

The only thing this makes me think is that, while one heavily advertised positive for the Peircean interpretation is that it sticks closer to natural language, there is no natural language difference that I can hear between "It's not the case that there will be a sea battle tomorrow" and "There won't be a sea battle tomorrow." Put it this way. If I ask, "Will there be a sea battle tomorrow" and you say "no", that only has one interpretation in my book.

But that's not a knock-down consideration. Thanks for the post.

Yes, that makes sense, Heath. As I said before, I sometimes have a hard time thinking in tense logic, because I find it so counterintuitive. I tend to think of the logical form of past, present and future as restricting quantification over times, and those end up being part of the restriction of the existential quantifier rather than a quantifier you can move around. But I agree that in the tense logic we're working with for the bivalentist view of alethic unsettledness, (3) does not entail (4). It's just hard for me to think that way.

Hi all-

How'd I miss THIS thread? Good stuff.

Just a quick comment on Jeremy's surprise that "a non-philosopher like Boyd came up with something like that." Boyd's Ph.D. (Princeton) is in philosophy. ;o)

Tom

Tom, this isn't correct about Boyd. His PhD is from Princeton Theological Seminary. So it is correct to say he's a non-philosopher.

I'm not sure how we demarcate who's a philosopher, but it seems significant that Boyd is/was professor of theology at Bethel College. I don't think he's ever held himself out to be a philosopher, and to my knowledge he's published just one article in an academic philosophy journal, Philosophia Christi, in 2003.

I'm not sure why the question of whether Boyd is a philosopher or non-philosopher is at all relevant. It's arguments and ideas that matter, not who advances them.

At any rate, it's misleading to say that Boyd "came up with" option 4. Charles Hartshorne, on whom Boyd wrote his dissertation, had already espoused something similar. And Boyd's views didn't fully coalesce on option 4 until after a year or so of interaction with the above-commenting 'Tom', myself, and a few others on his then-operating discussion board. This is a fairly recent development in Boyd's thinking. Even his Philosopia Christi piece, to which Matthew refers, reflects some lingering confusions about what option 4 entails, confusions that he has since cleared up with help from others.

I didn’t intend to be divisive re: Boyd. I just found Jeremy’s comment on Boyd curious and thought he might not be aware of Boyd’s background. Jon is correct of course. Boyd’s PhD is from PTS. But among PTS’s PhD programs (and that in which Boyd did his degree) is philosophical theology, something I imagine it would be difficult to complete and end up a non-philosopher. Boyd’s B.A. is in philosophy. Why am I talking about this?

Of course, if by ‘philosopher’ one means a person who earns his living from teaching and writing philosophy, then yes, Boyd’s a non-philosopher.

Alan makes an excellent point--it's about arguments and ideas.

Tom

There is, of course, no clear account of what being a philosopher involves--I suppose ordinary people with junior high educations can be philosophers. The relevant issue here is one of academic qualifications, and on that score, getting a degree from PTS doesn't qualify one as a philosopher.

This is a sensitive issue for philosophy departments since there are so many other disciplines that somehow think that what they do, and the credentials they dispense, count as philosophical. Philosophers of science don't pretend to be physicists or biologists just because they know a lot about it in virtue of what they work on, and those of us who work some in formal epistemology don't pretend to be probability theorists of the sort that might be hired by a statistics department. It escapes me how those outside of philosophy can be so presumptuous as to think differently about their own work.

My response here is part of a patterned response I use in university settings never to let the claim to philosophical credentials get stretched in such a context, but instead to demand that the same respect for training and competence that is constitutive of academic disciplines generally be accorded to philosophy as well.

"It escapes me how those outside of philosophy can be so presumptuous as to think differently about their own work"

Jon, here's my guess and it is admittedly vague. There is a *sense* for what philosophy is and what philosophers do (just as there is hockey sense and baskeball sense and so on). I can tell quickly (among the uninitiated) when they have it and I know you can too. They very quickly get the rules for philosophical exchange and so on. Others seem never to quite get it, despite being otherwise well-educated and knowledgable. So these presumptions, I conjecture, are based on a basic misunderstanding of what philosophers do.
On the other hand, it has to be admitted, it is really hard to convey in some complete way what philosophers do.

Sounds like a great thread if somebody wanted to take up the question of what being a philosopher involves. As a non-philosopher myself--but a very big fan and earnest student--I'd be very interested to know how you all view the call to philosophy.

Back to the OV.
Tom

I am intrigued and somewhat curious about your stating the 4 views of open theism using various Greek or Latin pre-scripts to otherwise philosophico/theological words. My question to you is: to which of these 4 views do you suspect the prophets of Israel would have subscribed given their usage of also curious Hebrew language in prophecy? The most curious was the use of the past tense when they prophesied future events. This has also been a curiosity to writers of Hebrew textbooks for theology students. So curious, in fact, that they have given special names to the prophets' usage. My thinking is that none of the prophets in Israel would agree with you or any of the contemporary evangelical bright lights you reference espousing these 4 parallel albeit differing views.

Hi Ron,
I suspect that any of the versions of open theism I enumerated could in principle accommodate the Hebrew use of the past tense in prophecy. No open theist that I know of would deny that the future is partly settled. Insofar as it is settled, whether directly by God himself or indirectly by natural causation, God can know it as such. Thus, use of the past tense in prophetic contexts may merely indicate the settledness of the future in that respect. I see no special problems here for open theism.

Open theism doesn't have trouble with prophecy per se, but I'm not sure how it handles prophecy about what free beings will do, e.g. a king's free choice to conquer Palestine prophesied as a judgment against Israel or a free choice of a disciple to betray his master and send him to be crucified. Certain prophecies are specifically given against people for actions that they are then blamed for (e.g. Isaiah 10 about the evil king of Assyria who was God's tool for judging Israel but blameworthy in doing so). I don't think it's a problem in principle about prophecy in general, but I do think it's very difficult to make sense of some of these specific biblical prophecies.

I think you're right, Jeremy, that prophecy per se is not a problem or open theism, but specific prophecies about distant future events do pose a challenge. While open theists like Sanders have proposed OT-compatible explanations for many Biblical prophecies, sometimes the suggested exegesis comes off looking rather forced. So open theists still have a fair amount of work to do here if they want to effectively sell their view to the wider evangelical community. Theologically, open theists need to refine their exegeses of Biblical prophecies. Philosophically, they need to develop a more detailed model of providence that, ideally, would show how long-range infallible prophetic projections can be made without requiring any large-scale overriding of libertarian freedom. In short, Hasker's capable work notwithstanding, we're still waiting for someone to do for open theism what Thomas Flint did for Molinism. I'm planning to take a whack at that in the near future.

Please let us know when you've come up with something. I consider this to be the important issue for open theism in terms of whether it's compatible with evangelical views on scripture. I don't think the ETS did a good enough job probing on it when they had their heresy hearings on Pinnock and co. If I remember correctly, the most they were willing to say is that someone might hold to open theism and not have realized the consequences for scripture of such a view, which is like saying that the view looks to imply non-evangelical views but evangelicals can hold to it as long as they don't realize (or admit to) such implications.

If you can show a consistency between the two, then it will be a real achievement. I think it might take a philosopher to do so (if it's possible, which I'm not at this point convinced of). It wasn't done with universalism to my satisfaction until Keith DeRose. I think his view can be maintained as full universalism and full evangelicalism, but you have to say things most universalists don't accept. You may have to do the same with open theism. The question is whether the view will be so altered that it will be viewed as a via media rather than open theism itself.

For Alan Rhoda,
I suggest tht you consider the position of many of the early church fathers which was: "Simply because the future is foreknown does not mean it is 'determined'.

Thanks for the suggestion, Ron.

The problem is that open theists have already considered that position and have found it untenable. One of the main driving motives of open theism is the conviction that foreknowledge (more broadly, foretruth) is incompatible with free will. This should not be understood as the obviously false claim that knowledge itself determines, but rather as the claim that the future is determinately knowable if and only if it is determined.

Alan, I think there are three arguments here:

(1) The only way to know the future is if determinism is true.
(2) The truth of future propositions entails the necessity of those propositions. Thus there are not true future contingents and thus nothing to be known.
(3) Mere knowledge of anything means it was causally determined.

I'm not sure of this, but it sounds as if you're treating Ron as saying (3) and then saying that you accept a different argument that on the surface sounds like (1) but really turns out to be (2) because of the parenthetical expression. I suspect Ron really meant (2), however, and not (1). It's not mere knowledge that he's thinking of but foreknowledge, and the main difference there relies on the difference between knowledge of the past and present and knowledge of the future, which gets to the issue of future contingents, exactly the issue in (2) and not the more general knowledge issue of (1). So I don't think it's fair to respond that open theists aren't endorsing (1), because open theists do endorse (2), the very argument he's rejecting.

None of that means he's argued that (2) is fallacious or anything, but I think you've misunderstood which argument he had in mind and thus made it sound as if you don't accept the argument he had in mind, and I don't think that's correct if my interpretation of him is right.

I'm not sure I follow you, Jeremy. I don't think Ron is affirming (1), (2), or (3). In fact, I'm pretty sure he would take strong exception to all of them.

I take Ron to be expressing the common view that knowledge of the future (i.e., foreknowledge) does not of itself render necessary (i.e., non-contingent) the future known. Frankly, I agree with that, but I don't think it suffices to resolve the problem of fatalism. Nor would most open theists. The concern is based on the idea that knowledge supervenes on truth which supervenes on being. So for the entire future to be determinately knowable there must be a determinate set of truths about it, which in turn means that it would have to be already ontologically determinate. But if it is already ontologically determinate now, in advance of any free decisions on our part, then our free decisions cannot make any difference to it, which results in fatalism. (I realize this argument is sketchy - I'm not trying to lay out a detailed case for the incompatibility of free will and foretruth but just to indicate the concern in general terms.)

Yes, Ron couldn't be affirming any of them if he's to deny open theism. What he was doing was denying an open theistic argument. I took him to be denying (2). You took him, it seemed to me, to be denying (1) and then said that open theists aren't using that argument because it's obviously fallacious. I think he considers (2) to be fallacious, and you were seeming to me to try to get out of it by saying the argument he was concerned with is not the one open theists hold. I think he did have in mind (2), an argument open theists hold, and I agree with him that it's fallacious, confusing issues of truth conditions with issues of causation.

Truth conditions of contingently true propositions are in the future, and any causes of causally determined propositions would be before the truth conditions have occurred. I agree that argument (1) then would enter in, and the classical theist would need to explain how God could know these things whose truth conditions don't exist now, but that's a different argument. It doesn't mean that (2) is a successful argument. I suspect that's what Ron was getting at.

Maybe I'm just reading too much of myself into him, but that's how I took what he was saying, because it's what I would say.

Ron-

The use of the past-tense in Hebrew is not so much a problem for the sort of arguments Alan proposes. How would an ancient Hebrew think of the future in contingent terms? How would they work the semantics of it out? There are good examples of them doing so in their Scriptures. They show themselves capable of conceiving of and describing the future is 'open' terms.

Regarding the particular feature of Hebrew you mention, you're no doubt aware that it’s still a feature of modern Hebrew (and of a sister Semitic language, modern Arabic, in which I do my work). There’s hardly a day that goes by we don’t use the Arabic past-tense with reference to the future. It’s a way we emphasize the intent of the speaker or the certain nature of some future response. But it’s still the future that’s in view. For example, an employer will say say “If you don’t show up on time tomorrow morning I ‘fired’ [past tense] you.� The use of the past emphasizes the certainty of the response in question. There's nothing of the past in view. Modern Arabs speak this way and yet can and do at the same time conceive of the future in more rigorously philosophical terms, including the sort of semantics Alan describes.

Tom