Talking about the Future: Unsettled Truth and Assertion

International audiencePhilosophers have long been concerned with the issue of whether the notions of truth and falsity apply or not to future contingents, i.e. to statements that express future events that have not been determined yet and thus may not happen. While there are several frameworks that (arguably) provide a satisfactory account of the truth conditions of future tensed sentences, not much has been done when it comes to providing the assertability conditions for such statements. In other words, the question that concerns us is under which conditions one should assert that some event will happen, if our universe is indeterministic and its current state leaves it open whether the event at stake will indeed happen. The paper is consists of three sections. Sect. 1 explains the problem that future contingents raise for natural language semantics and introduces four frameworks that rely upon the idea of "branching time". These frameworks are compared and evaluated in sect. 2. Finally, sect. 3 discusses a puzzle that turns upon the assertability of future tensed sentences