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contingentibus'. The Latin singular form nearly always refers to a proposition, and is usually in the ablative form, as in 'de contingenti', meaning a contingent proposition. The
English tends to reflect this - Googling the plural 'future contingents' returns the stuff about God's foreknowledge, Googling the singular 'future contingent' gives stuff about propositions. Note also that the English plural usage is normally a noun, whereas the plural usage is normally an adjective. (The SEP article throughout conforms to this convention).
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noun in this context, let me know. Otherwise the article could be called 'future contingent proposition', but then you lose the ambiguity of the plural form, which sometimes means 'event', other times 'proposition' or 'statement'. I appreciate that
Knowledge has a policy on use of the singular, but that does not require us to have articles on 'scissor', 'trouser' or 'pant'.
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as an adjective qualifying a singular or plural noun. Specifically 9 occurrences of 'future contingent proposition', 8 occurrences of 'future contingent statement', 2 of 'future contingent event' and 1 of 'future contingent prediction'. If you can find important and significant uses of the singular
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But I have argued that it is unlikely that
Diodorus himself intended his Argument to run on temporally definite expressions, or that that he noticed its implicit commitment to necessitarianism. So it is most likely that neither the Master Argument nor DI 9 was directly conceived in opposition to the
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So I think the singular form can be used as a noun. There's a WP article naming policy that says to prefer the singular, because you can usually add the -s to get the plural form without an additional redirect. I lean to the singular, even if it might sound slightly artificial, since we can phrase
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Looking at the article as a whole, if a branching model of time is assumed, then there seems (to me) to be no paradox. Along some branching timelines the battle might be fought, and along others it might not be fought. The proposition as to whether the battle is fought or not in the future can then
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Sorry, don't agree. My golden and never to be broken rule is that what is
Knowledge should never be far from anything in a standard reference work. Knowledge should not be an outlier. Thus, if we look at the SEP, there are 28 occurences of 'future contingents' in the plural form, i.e. as a noun,
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is true, then it is also true tomorrow and it was also true yesterday; or stating it more accurately, classical logic does not concern itself with the concept of time. Also, it helps that the ancient Greeks had a tense that they could use specifically for timeless truths, whereas we have to do with
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Sorabji has suggested that it is, for reasons of intellectual economy, attractive to rule out the possibility that the neither
Aristotle's argument against the fatalist nor the Master Argument was a response to the other. Now it has been made very likely by Sedley, on the basis of historical
301:
In reference to this discussion about the relevant grammatical moods in
Ancient Greek and how much they affect possible translations, I decided to edit the article to avoid casting an uncited aspersion upon Aristotle (namely, that he commits the modal fallacy), as Aristotle's use of different
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Careful. 'Future contingents' is a direct importation into
English of the Latin plural 'futura contingentia'. The Latin plural form nearly always refers to future contingent events or propositions, and is found in discussions of God's foreknowledge in tracts like Ockhams 'De futuris
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sentences/propositions/statements (e.g., in Putnam, 1967, 'Time and physical geometry'; or
Mignucci, 1996, 'Ammonius on Future Contingent Propositions'). It also makes sense to me to introduce what a future contingent is before saying what the problem is. Objections? â
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Thus it would be odd to have the article titled 'Future contingent' as the
English singular naturally suggests the adjectival use. 'Future contingents' would be OK. As you say, the article should introduce what future contingents are before saying what the problem is.
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be considered to be true and false depending on the chosen timeline. When looking at the overall time tree, as long as the battle is fought at some point, along some timeline branch section, the statement "the battle was fought" is then true.
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grammatical moods seems to be extremely relevant to any interpretation of his comments, whereas whether or not
Aristotle commits the modal fallacy is irrelevant to discussion of it and how it relates to the paradox outlined by Aristotle.
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considerations, that Diodorus was a younger contemporary of Aristotle's than had previously been supposed, and hence if we respect Sorabji's constraint, we should conclude that the Master Argument was probably a response to Aristotle.
652:âSuppose that a sea-battle will not be fought tomorrow. Then it was also true yesterday (and the week before, and last year) that it will not be fought, since any true statement about what will be the case was also true in the past.â
698:?) opposed to a different version of the battle or a different battle altogether. The term "happened" also has issues regarding definition. Definitions are a problem even if a linear (i.e. non-branching) model of time is assumed.
268:. Even though the proposition is invariantly true, every day one enunciates the proposition, it refers to a slightly different proposition compared to the one enunciated the day before. Specifically, if I say
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You'll find a lot of odd reasoning in the ancient philosophers; probably because they learned philosophy from a few masters only, while we have access to the thoughts of thousands upon thousands (thanks,
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Hi Machine Elf 1735! I'm a newbie Wikipedian and math/physics undergrad, with a slight interest, but no training, in philosophy. I really appreciate the clarification, etc. Thanks. :-)
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on Knowledge. If you would like to support the project, please visit the project page, where you can get more details on how you can help, and where you can join the
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There are some logical calculi which can be used to model propositions that vary over time, should one need them. They are all twentieth-Century inventions, though.
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I'll look a bit more for natural examples. I agree that my first example is an ellipsis, though I managed to convince myself that it wasn't before posting.
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will be true. However this may be, Diodorus' attempt to prove that all possibilities will in time be realised still presumes that no one will question the
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661:? If so there is no paradox, as this merely relates to that specific day. I presume "not fought tomorrow" is instead taken to be a true statement on
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However, what he's actually talking about is that truth statements in classical logic are invariant over time. If the proposition that
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Really? It does not implies it. The battle could have been today and first statement still stays true. BUT! First statement says
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Does Aristotle deny bivalence, or is he denying excluded middle, or both? These options should be carefully separated.
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Purely logical considerations certainly make it unlikely that DI 9 was intended as a response to Diodorus.
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On your first example above, 'future contingent' is clearly elliptical for 'future contingent proposition'
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including some important articles from the literature. There are 20 occurrences in the singular form, but
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would indeed seem to imply that the battle is never fought, if the original assertion is true, classical
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Considering this universe, what sense makes the expression ("There's light" AND NOT("There's light"))?
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Of course if this whole things is not about "we cannot live in tomorow" because we live only in today.
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Any other combination between "Moment X" and "There's light"...; "The fact is empirically true"=FALSE
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That being said, the problem as stated has a fault even in classical logic, which lies in the use of
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Even then though, there is the question of how you define "the battle" (a given sequence or
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Well I won't die in a ditch for it. Interesting paper by the way - I will add it to the
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It's meant to refer to an unequivocal fact that obtains at some particular time. See
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contains "There are future contingents. But no future contingent is true." (p20). â
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There is actually more than one problem called this way (albeit they are related)
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the other, and hence that Sorabji's proposed constraint should be rejected.
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350:"Moment X"=TRUE; "There's light"=FALSE; "The fact is empirically true"=TRUE
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We are interested principally in the domain of the future contingent.
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days, past and future. If it is intended in this latter sense, then
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This doesn't seem to take into account branching time models of
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will be true, Diodorus now merely identifies it with what is
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By "not fought tomorrow" does this mean on a specific day
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Note that the last proposition is a future contingent.
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In Defence of the Thin Red Line: A Case for Ockhamism
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is widely used in the literature in such contexts as
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http://en.wikipedia.org/Talk:Contradiction#A_Question
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