Future Contradictions

A common and much-explored thought is Lukasiewicz’s idea that the future is ‘indeterminate’ – a future which is ‘gappy’ with respect to some claims – and that such indeterminacy bleeds back into the present in the form of gappy ‘future contingent’ claims. What is uncommon, and to my knowledge unexplored, is the dual idea of an overdeterminate future – a future which is ‘glutty’ with respect to some claims. While the direct dual, with future gluts bleeding back into the present, is worth noting, my central aim is simply to sketch and briefly explore an alternative glutty-future view, one that is conservative – indeed, entirely classical – with respect to the present. The structure of the paper runs as follows. §1 briefly sketches the target gap picture of an indeterminate future yielding gappy claims at the present. §2 presents the direct dual idea – a glut picture of an overdeterminate future yielding glutty claims at present. §3 sketches the central idea, a more interesting glut picture in which the future contains contradictory states but the present remains entirely classical. §4 contains a general defense of the idea, leaving it open as to whether the gappy-future view enjoys substantive virtues over the proposed glutty-future view of §3.