Open Future

What cognitive goods do children plausibly have a right to in an education? In attempting to answer this question, I begin with a puzzle centred around Feinberg's (2007) observation that a denial of certain cognitive goods can violate a child's right to an open future. I show that propositionalist, dispositionalist and objectualist characterisations of the kinds of cognitive goods children have a right to run in to problems. A promising alternative is then proposed and defended, one that is inspired in the main by Wittgenstein's (1969) 'hinge' epistemology as developed in his posthumous On Certainty. cognitive goods and epistemic rights What cognitive goods should an education provide? There are a number of ways to approach this question, and one useful place to begin is from a rights-based perspective: an education should afford at least those cognitive goods children plausibly have a right to. What cognitive goods are these? On a first pass, it seems reasonable to say that there are certain facts children have a right to know—and accordingly, that what children have a right to is some (propo-sitional) knowledge, leaving it open exactly which specific knowledge. Extrapolating from this answer, we can call a more general position vis-à-vis the cognitive goods children plausibly have a right to 'propositionalism' , where propositionalism is the claim that the kind of cognitive goods to which children have a right in education are propositional goods.

This paper argues: first, that a presentist, powers based, diachronic account of modality can provide a satisfactory account of our intuitions about modality as well as a compelling rebuttal to alternative accounts; second that taking this account seriously requires a more radically attenuated modal logic than even partisans of such an account realize. Attempting to navigate this problem, I provide a formal, non-normal semantics for a tensed modal logic, along with a philosophical interpretation of it.

Open futurism is the indeterministic position according to which the future is 'open,' i.e., there is now no fact of the matter as to what future contingent events will actually obtain. Many open futurists hold a branching conception of time, in which a variety of possible futures exist. This paper introduces two challenges to branching-time open futurism, which are similar in spirit to a challenge posed by Kit Fine to (standard) tense realism. The paper argues that, to address the new challenges, (branching-time) open futurists must (i) adopt an objective, non-perspectival notion of actuality and (ii) subscribe to an A-theoretic, dynamic conception of reality. Moreover, given a natural understanding of " actual future, " (iii) it is perfectly sensible for open futurists to hold that a unique, objectively actual future exists, contrary to a common assumption in the current debate. The paper also contends that recognising the existence of a unique actual future helps open futurists to avoid potential misconceptions.

Classical theists believe that God has foreknowledge, that God gives promises, and that God does not lie. The notion of promise, however, implies that the giver of a promise does not know the future. Consequently, God either pretends to give promises, or he does not know the future. It seems to be impossible to find a solution to the problem within the framework of classical theism, which is an argument in favor of open theism.

Which historical lens and what scope can capture modernitys complex social, political, economic, and epistemic permutations? Using an historical interpretive lens to explore contingent moments in its making, this work seeks to describe a core dynamic within modernity. In modernity, the assertion of freedom from rooted systems of meaning ushers in radical uncertainty. In response, new certainties are constructed for guiding human action, but being grounded upon indeterminacy these are necessarily provisional and open ended. Uncertainty thus grows in proportion to the expansion of freedom and the abstraction of foundations, making the drives to know and to control insatiable. To narrate a history of this dynamic, I frame it as a series of strategies for grounding upon groundlessness: surveying and mapping, enclosing and improving; risking and insuring. This narrative is largely set in the particular soil of British history, where the discourses surrounding efforts to ground property a...

The supervaluationist approach to branching time (‘SBT-theory’) appears to be threatened by the puzzle of retrospective determinacy: if yesterday I uttered the sentence ‘It will be sunny tomorrow’ and only in some worlds overlapping at the context of utterance it is sunny the next day, my utterance is to be assessed as neither true nor false even if today is indeed a sunny day. John MacFarlane (“Truth in the Garden of Forking Paths” 81) has recently criticized a promising solution to this puzzle for falling short of an adequate account of ‘actually’. In this paper, I aim to rebut MacFarlane's criticism. To this effect, I argue that: (i) ‘actually’ can be construed either as an indexical or as a nonindexical operator; (ii) if ‘actually’ is nonindexical, MacFarlane's criticism is invalid; (iii) there appear to be independent reasons for SBT-theorists to claim that ‘actually’ is a nonindexical expression.