Future contingents
I think they have truth-values; they are just unknown to us. Problem: this might seem to interfere with free will, via this sort of argument: if future contingents have truth values, then it was true in 5000 B.C. that I was going to type up this comment. If that was true in 5000 B.C., then I could not have made it false, because in general, one cannot change the past. Therefore, I could not have failed to type up this comment; so I lack free will in that respect.
There are at least two good responses to this. Response A: the truth of a proposition is not time-indexed. It is either true that p or false that p, not "true at a time". So "it was true in 5000 B.C. . . ." doesn't make sense. It's just true, timelessly, that I type up this message; that's not a fact about the past.
Response B: There are two kinds of "facts about the past", which we can call "hard facts about the past" and "soft facts about the past". The hard facts are fundamentally, irreducibly about the past. The soft facts about the past, by contrast, are ones that obtain solely in virtue of stuff that happens in the present or future (they are like Cambridge properties). It's true that one has no choice about the hard facts about the past. But it's not true that one has no choice about the soft facts about the past. Now, [its being true in 5000 B.C. that I was going to write this comment] is just a soft fact about the past. So I can have a choice about it now.
An analogy: You might think that I can't instantaneously affect things on the other side of the galaxy. But wait: I can cause a star on the other side of the galaxy to acquire the property "being 10,000 light years away from a person who is doing a handstand". That is "changing" the star in the same sense that I can "change" the past.
"If it is true right now that I will eat donuts next week, then there is something right now that makes that statement true. But, if I have free will, then nothing about the world right now makes that statement true."
Again, two responses:
A. There is no "true right now." That's a confusion. It can be true that x happens at t, or false that x happens at t. But it's not "true at t1" that x happens at t2; the first time index doesn't mean anything.
B. Alternately, if you want to say it can be true at t1 that x happens at t2, this would just mean that x happens at t2. I.e., this would be a soft fact about t1, a fact "about t1" that obtains solely in virtue of what happens at t2. So while there is nothing about the world at t1 that makes it true, there is something about the world at t2 that makes it true, and that's enough.
Can you explain what it means for a proposition to be true at a time? Note that the proposition already has a time index in it, and then you're saying that the *truth* of it is indexed to another time. Can you explain what that means?
I know what "It's true that a is F" means. I think it means, basically, that a is F. What about "It's true that a is F at t1"? This means that a is F at t1. What about "It's true at t2 that a is F at t1"? Um . . . a is F at t1 at t2?
Propositions are abstract objects, like universals. Like universals, they are not in time. Events and states of affairs take place at particular times (or during particular time intervals); abstract objects do not happen at times or during time intervals.
Truth is a relation between a proposition and some things in the world that the proposition is 'about'. Those things might themselves be in time.
So you could ask: if a relation obtains between a temporal thing and an atemporal thing, is the relation itself in time?
Hard to say. But if it is in time at all, its time coordinate must be that of the temporal relatum.
I, regrettably, do not understand the view that abstract objects *are* in time.
I think I sort of understand what it means to say that a number "exists". I don't understand what is meant if you add "today" or "at 6:00 GMT" after that. I'm not saying numbers exist at every time. I'm saying I don't know what "at such-and-such time" means when applied to a purely abstract object.
As far as I understand it, temporal modifiers such as "today" or "some time in the 1950's" apply to states or events that occur at particular times. It's just a category error to apply them to anything else. Abstract objects are not occurrences, so they don't have time coordinates.
