Abstract
Intuitively, the future is open and the past fixed: there is something we can do about the future but not the past. Some metaphysicians believe that a proper metaphysics of time must vindicate this intuition. Whereas philosophers have focused on the future and the past, the status of the present remains relatively unexplored. Drawing on resources from action theory, I argue that there is something we can do about the present just like there is something we can do about the future. Hence, a proper metaphysics of the open future should allow for an open present as well. I argue that none of the major metaphysics of the open future currently available can accommodate an open present adequately. Finally, I’ll show that, surprisingly, the shrinking block metaphysics can.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Some philosophers deny that the intuition about temporal passage should be theorized as some kind of transition among the tenses. Instead, they conceive of temporal passage as the mere coming into being of an event at the very moment that it exists. They call this “absolute passage”. This view is committed to an unconventional notion of dynamism. Since temporal passage isn’t the focus of this essay, I won’t engage in the debate about absolute passage (see Fiocco 2014, 2007; Savitt 2002).
I first explain why there is something we can do about the future by openness (whatever that is) and then explain why there is nothing we can do about the past by the lack of openness as fixity. One might wonder: why don’t we first explain why there is nothing we can do about the past by fixity (whatever that is) and then explain why there is something we can do about the future by the lack of fixity? Here’s why. There is light and there is darkness. We first explain the light with the light source and then explain darkness with the lack of said light source. Generally, there is presence and there is absence. We explain the positive phenomena and then explain the negative phenomena in terms of the lack of what explains the positive phenomena. That’s why we should first explain why there is something we can do about the future and only then explain why there is nothing we can do about the past in terms of the lack of what explains our future-directed ability.
See Oaklander (2004: Part 3 B).
I stipulate “openness” to denote whatever makes being in the future special so that there is something we can do about the future and stipulate “fixity” to denote the past’s lack of this thing so that there is nothing we can do about the past. Some might be inclined to use “openness” and “fixity” to refer to the agential asymmetry itself, not something that explains it. The bottom line is that philosophers who work on this topic typically accept that the asymmetry calls for an explanation. It isn’t enough to acknowledge that something can be done about the future but not the past; we also want to understand how come the tenses entail such an asymmetry, i.e. its basis. Whether we use “openness” to label the fact that there is a tense-based agential asymmetry or use it to label the basis behind this fact is a mere verbal issue.
This brings our attention to the distinction between the intuitive datum about the open future and a metaphysical theory of the open future that accounts for the datum. One might say that the future consists of branches, or that future statements don’t have determinate truth-values, or that future times don’t exist. These are ways to offer a theoretical underpinning for the intuitive datum about the open future, i.e., the intuitive idea that there is something objective about the temporal reality that explains why there is something one can do about the future but not the past. It’s a mistake to present a theory as if it’s the datum itself. The indeterminacy of semantic values, for example, is a highly theoretical notion. It’s implausible to present it as a part of our intuitive datum.
There is a distinction between a consequence of an action and a result of an action. The latter is a part of the action; the former isn’t. See McCann (1974: 451–454). My argument works whether we formulate this proposal in terms of consequence or result.
I say backward causation technology instead of just backward causation because backward causation alone, which might already exist all the time at the fundamental level, isn’t enough to give us the possibility of backward agency. Only backward causation that we can capitalize as agents does.
Someone might also try to do something about the past by a petitionary prayer to God about the past (see C. S. Lewis 1947: 214). Unlike Geach (1999: chapter 7), I don’t think that’s absurd. But I don’t find atemporal agency intelligible. So, the only way I can make sense of it is to think of it as a prayer for God to travel back in time to do something about the past.
I don’t take myself to be saying anything non-standard here. In the open future literature, philosophers offer different theories about the open future and the fixed past. They all take the intuitive phenomenon seriously. Yet, none of them deny the possibility of time travel. It’s clear that the intuition is meant to be interpreted in a qualified manner.
Can trying simply be identical to intending? Arguably not. Trying is typically meant to be the last link between intention and action. Hence, trying and intending play different functional roles. Ruben (2016, 2013) argues that this last link is needed to help us intelligibly describe cases of late stage weakness of the will. In such cases, a person has the relevant desires, beliefs, intentions, etc. all ready to act, but chickens out in the last minute. Ginet (1990) would also argue that having an intention alone doesn’t have the “act-ish phenomenology” that accompanies our really trying to do something.
As Thalberg (1962: 54) rightly points out, examples of someone intending to do something she takes to be impossible cannot be paraphrased away as her merely intending to act as closely as she can to φ-ing (instead of intending to φ). Imagine a doctor desperately trying to revive a patient who she believes to be beyond saving. That’s different from a doctor who intends to simply act as close as she can to reviving a patient without actually saving the patient. This description is true of the intention of a doctor who is trying to fake saving a patient. Hence, the proposed paraphrase will fail to capture the content of the doctor’s desperate and good intention to try to do the impossible.
It isn’t self-evidently irrational to have inconsistent intentions. Kane’s (1999) libertarianism requires free, self-forming actions to consist in an agent intending competing options simultaneously.
I want to flag a deeper issue with rationality-based arguments like the one Bratman offers. Quite often, they involve a narrow vision of rationality that invites a knee jerk reaction against any appearance of inconsistency. But consider how we use mutually inconsistent scientific models to acquire understanding of a phenomenon. Doing so doesn’t assume that we can, even in principle, construct one comprehensive and consistent model for the phenomenon. See Weisberg (2007: 645) on multiple-models idealization. This should at least give us pause before we jump to any conclusion about the relation between irrationality and inconsistency. Even if a person intends to A and intends to not-A at the same time, without further argument, it isn’t obvious that the person is irrational.
The teleological “in order to” relation between an action and its by-acts isn’t necessarily causal (contra Danto 1963, 1965). Sometimes, a by-act indeed causes an action but, other times, the relation is a mereological or a realization relation instead. And nothing can be caused by a part of itself (see Ginet 1990: 16; also Amaya 2017).
One might be tempted to say that a trying just is having a feeling of trying. If so, trying cannot be an action. But Massin (2017) plausibly argues that tryings play functional roles that mere feelings cannot play (240).
That’s why I don’t think that Cameron’s view can claim credit for being flexible by allowing partial openness of the future (Cameron 2015: 197–198). One can’t claim bounty for catching someone unwanted.
One might wonder whether the claim that the openness of the future must be thorough contradicts my earlier claim that there is only something we can do about the future. There is no inconsistency. When I said not everything about the future is open to us, I meant not every conceivable course of the future is open to us. I’m quantifying over conceivable futures. By contrast, when I say here that, for any state-of-affairs s at a moment t, if t is in the future, s is open, I’m quantifying over states-of-affairs that are indeed in the future and talking about the openness that makes them special so that volition about them is possible. If we accept a branching future metaphysics, for instance, what’s indeed in the future are all and only the states-of-affairs in those future branches. If we accept a growing block, this thoroughness requirement quantifies over an empty set.
Similarly, a presentist doesn’t need to give up past truths. See Ingram (2018) for an approach that appeals to the thisnesses or haecceities of past objects.
Assuming that there are future contingent truths, Cameron (2015: 194–195) argues that it would be ad hoc for a growing block theorist to say that future contingent truths aren’t sensitive to ontology (i.e., there being future truths without future ontology). He argues that it’s ad hoc because such a theorist would be treating past truths and future truths differently. It’s a mistake to think that an account is ad hoc simply because it doesn’t treat a subject matter in a unified manner. In particular, it isn’t ad hoc to treat past truths and present truths differently as long as each of those treatments is motivated by general and not arbitrarily restricted principles. Growing block theorists are motivated to accept a dynamic reality. And it’s intuitively plausible to think that some but not all truths have truthmakers (e.g., arguably, negative existential truths have no truthmakers—of course truthmaker maximalists disagree, but that isn’t the point). It’s generally plausible to think that a truth has a truthmaker if the entity relevant to the truth exists. Given all these defeasible but independently motivated principles, it isn’t ad hoc at all for a growing block theorist to think that past truths are sensitive to ontology and future truths aren’t.
It’s worth separating what I’m trying to force the growing block theorists to say by (6)—(8) from Diekemper’s (2014) pastism, which says that the only events that exist are those that have been completed already, i.e., events in the past. Exactly how controversial pastism is depends on what counts as an event. For example, Diekemper accepts that a person can be in a conscious state in the present, so presumably, being in a conscious state isn’t considered an event for him (2014: 1101). Since a person has to exist to be in a conscious state, I suppose that, for Diekemper, that I exist isn’t an event that is temporally extended and pastism doesn’t entail my non-existence. So, there is a crucial difference between my claim that the growing block theory entails (8) and Diekemper’s claim that the theory entails pastism. Whatever reason one can gather to make pastism more palatable, that won’t be enough to make the rejection of I exist acceptable.
The indeterminacy/branching conception of openness is often assumed in the free will debate. For example, Fischer (1994) presents a principle he calls the Principle of the Fixity of the Past (FP):
For any action Y, agent S, and time t, if it is true that if S were to do Y at t, some fact about the past relative to t would not have been a fact, then S cannot at t do Y at t. (78)
FP isn’t obviously true. Arguably, a deterministic universe with a past that doesn’t lead to my doing Y at best entails that I will not do Y, not that I cannot do Y (see Holliday, 2012). Setting that aside, FP is invoked to construct an argument to show that determinism plus the lack of alternative past jointly rule out alternative future actions. By calling the principle the Principle of the Fixity of the Past, Fischer assumes and applies a branching conception of openness.
Here’s an analogy. To be interested in (a) is like being interested in the perceptual content when I’m looking at apples; to be interested in (b) is like being interested in the apples that I’m looking at.
I had a lot of help working on this paper. I was first introduced to the issue of the open present by a talk Joseph Diekemper gave in Amsterdam. And I began to appreciate the significance of the distinction between the topic of free will and the topic of the open future after listening in on Forbes Graeme talking about the distinction with someone at a conference in Winston-Salem. This project wouldn’t have existed without these two occasions. I want to thank many people for commenting on earlier drafts of this long paper: Matt Andler, Galen Barry, Ross Cameron, Jim Cargile, Jim Darcy, Matt Duncan, Peter Forrest, David Ingram, John Mahlan, Andrei Marasoiu, Nick Rimell, and Wai-Hung Wong. I’m grateful to Nick Rimell, Stacie Thyrion, and Wai-Hung Wong for their generous help in going through my writing line by line to clean up my English. The paper also benefited immensely from the extensive comments from the two anonymous reviewers of Philosophical Studies. Regrettably, there are still a few disagreements between me and one of the reviewers that we couldn’t fully resolve. But my exchange with them made this a much better paper. Finally, I’d like to thank the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater for giving me a course release in my first semester that allowed me to work on this project, and the Sweetspot Cafe in Whitewater for a wonderful environment where I did most of the research on this paper.
References
Adams, F., & Mele, A. (1992). The intention/volition debate. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 22(3), 323–337.
Amaya, S. (2017). Basic actions reloaded. Philosophy Compass, 12(9), 1–10.
Barnes, E. (2010). Ontic vagueness: A guide for the perplexed. Nous, 44(4), 607–627.
Barnes, E., & Cameron, R. (2009). The open future: Bivalence, determinism, and ontology. Philosophical Studies, 146(2), 291–309.
Barnes, E., & Cameron. (2011). Back to the open future. Philosophical Perspective, 25(1), 1–26.
Barnes, E., & Williams, R. (2011). A theory of metaphysical indeterminacy. Bennett & Zimmerman (eds.), 2011, 103–148.
Belnup, N., & Green, M. (1994). Indeterminism and the thin red line. Philosophical Perspectives, 8, 365–388.
Bennett, Karen & Zimmerman, Dean. (eds.) (2009). Oxford Studies in Metaphysics 5. OUP.
Bennett, Karen & Zimmerman, Dean (eds.) (2011). Oxford Studies in Metaphysics 6. OUP.
Bennett, Karen & Zimmerman, Dean (eds.) (2012). Oxford Studies in Metaphysics 7. OUP.
Black, M. (1952). The identity of indiscernibles. Mind, 61(242), 153–164.
Bogen, J., & Woodward, J. (1988). Saving the Phenomena. The Philosophical Review. XCVII, (3), 303–352.
Borghini, A., & Torrengo, G. (2013). The Metaphysics of the Thin Red Line. In: Correia & Iacona (Eds.), (pp. 105–126).
Bratman, M. (1984). Two faces of intention. The Philosophical Review, 93(3), 375–405.
Broad, C. D. (1938). Examination of McTaggart’s Philosophy. Cambridge University Press.
Briggs, R., & Forbes, G. (2012). The Real Truth about the Unreal Future. Bennett & Zimmerman. (eds.), 2012, 257–304.
Callender, Craig. (ed.) (2011). Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Time. Oxford University Press.
Cameron, Ross. (2015). The Moving Spotlight. OUP.
Casati, R., & Torrengo, G. (2011). The not so incredible shrinking future. Analysis, 71(2), 240–244.
Correia, Fabrice & Iacona, Andrea. (eds.) (2013). Around the Tree: Semantic and Metaphysical Issues Concerning Branching and the Open Future. Synthese Library 361. Springer.
Danto, A. (1963). What we can do. Journal of Philosophy, 60(15), 435–445.
Danto, A. (1965). Basic actions. American Philosophical Quarterly, 2(2), 141–148.
Diekemper, J. (2014). The existence of the past. Synthese, 191(6), 1085–1104.
Diekemper, J. (2007). B-Theory, fixity, and fatalism. Nous, 41(3), 429–452.
Eno, Robert. (trans.) (2015). The Analects of Confucius. Retrieved from http://www.indiana.edu/~p374/Analects_of_Confucius_(Eno-2015).pdf
Fiocco, M. O. (2014). In Becoming: Temporal, Absolute, and Atemporal. In: L. N. Oaklander (Ed.), Debates in the Metaphysics of Time (pp. 87–107). Bloomsbury Press.
Fiocco, M. O. (2007). Passage, becoming and the nature of temporal reality. Philosophia, 35, 1–21.
Fischer, J. M. (1994). The Metaphysics of Free Will. Blackwell.
Geach, P. (1999). God and the Soul. Augustines Press.
Ginet, C. (1990). On Action. Oxford University Press.
Hampshire, S. (1975). Freedom of The Individual. Princeton University Press.
Hampshire, S. (1959). Thought and Action. University of Notre Dame Press.
Hedman, C. (1970). Intending the impossible. Philosophy, 45(171), 33–38.
Holliday, W.(2012). “Freedom and the Fixity of the Past”. Philosophical Review 121(2): 179–207.
Holton, R. (2003). How is Strength of Will Possible? In C. Tappolet & S. Stroud (Eds.), Weakness of Will and Practical Irrationality (pp. 39–67). Oxford University Press.
Hudson, H. (2014). The Fall and Hypertime. Oxford University Press.
Ingram, D. (2018). Thisness Presentism: An Essay on Time, Truth, and Ontology. Routledge.
Kane, R. (1999). Responsibility, luck, and chance: Reflections on free will and indeterminism. The Journal of Philosophy, 96(5), 217–240.
Kant, I. (1991). Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose. In: Reiss (Ed.), (pp. 3–16).
Kutach, D. (2011). The Asymmetry of Influence. In Callender (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Time (pp. 247–275). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lewis, C. S. 1947. Miracles. The University Press Glasgow.
Lewis, D. (1979). Counterfactual dependence and time’s arrow. Nous, 13(4), 455–476.
Libet, B., Gleason, C., Wright, E., & Pearl, D. (1983). Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activity (Readiness Potential). Brain, 106, 623–642.
Ludwig, K. (1995). Trying the impossible: Reply to Adams. Journal of Philosophical Research, 20, 563–570.
Ludwig, K. (1992). Impossible doings. Philosophical Studies, 65(3), 257–281.
Markosian, Ned. (2014). “Time”. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time/
Massin, O. (2017). Towards a definition of efforts. Motivation Science, 3(3), 230–259.
McCann, H. (1974). Volition and basic action. The Philosophical Review, 83(4), 451–473.
McTaggart, J. E. (1908). The unreality of time. Mind, 17(68), 457–474.
Mele, Alfred. (2009). Effective Intentions: The Power of Conscious Will. Oxford University Press.
Mele, A. (2004). The illusion of conscious will and the causation of intentional actions. Philosophical Topics, 32(1/2), 193–213.
Mele, Alfred. (1995). Autonomous Agents: From Self-Control to Autonomy. Oxford University Press.
Mele, Alfred. 1992. Springs of Action: Understanding Intentional Behavior. Oxford University Press.
Oaklander, L. N. (1991). A defense of the new tenseless theory of time. Philosophical Quarterly, 41(162), 26–38.
Oaklander, L. Nathan. (ed.) (2004). The Ontology of Time. Prometheus Books.
Oaklander, L. Nathan. (ed.) (2014). Debates in the Metaphysics of Time. Bloomsbury Academic.
O’Brien, Lucy & Soteriou, Matthew. (eds.) (2009). Mental Actions. Oxford University Press.
O’Shaughnessy, B. (2009). Trying and Acting. In: L. O’Brien & M. Soteriou (Eds.), Mental Actions (pp. 163–171). Oxford University Press.
Mellor, D. H. (1998). Real Time II. Routledge.
Norton, J. (2015). The burning fuse model of unbecoming in time. Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, 52, 103–105.
Reiss, Hans. (ed.) (1991). Kant: Political Writings. Cambridge University Press.
Ruben, D.-H. (2016). A conditional theory of trying. Philosophical Studies, 173(1), 271–287.
Ruben, D.-H. (2013). Trying in some way. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 91(4), 719–733.
Savitt, S. (2002). On Absolute Becoming and the Myth of Passage. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 50, 153–167.
Smart, J. J. C. (1981). The reality of future. Philosophia, 10, 141–150.
Smith, N. (2011). Inconsistency in the A-theory. Philosophical Studies, 156(2), 231–247.
Suppes, P. (1966). Models of data. Studies in Logic and the Foundations of Mathematics, 44, 252–261.
Tappolet, Christine. & Stroud, Sarah. (eds.) (2003). Weakness of Will and Practical Irrationality. Oxford University Press.
Thalberg, I. (1962). Intending the impossible. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 40(1), 49–56.
Torre, S. (2011). The open future. Philosophy Compass, 6(5), 360–373.
Inwagen, V., & Peter. (2009). Changing the Past. In Bennett, K & Zimmerman. D. (eds.), 2009, 3–40.
Vihvelin, K. (2013). Causes, Laws, and Free Will: Why Determinism Doesn’t Matter. Oxford University Press.
Wasserman, R. (2018). Paradoxes of Time Travel. Oxford University Press.
Weisberg, M. (2007). Three kinds of idealization. The Journal of Philosophy, 104(12), 639–659.
Woodward, J. (1989). Data and phenomena. Synthese, 79(3), 393–472.
Woodward, J. (2010). Data, phenomena, signal, and noise. Philosophy of Science, 77(5), 792–803.
Woodward, J. (2011). Data and phenomena: A restatement and defense. Synthese, 182, 165–179.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Lam, D. The phenomenology and metaphysics of the open future. Philos Stud 178, 3895–3921 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-021-01630-3
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-021-01630-3