The Invisible Thin Red Line
Giuliano Torrengo
Centre for Philosophy of Time, University of Milan and Autonomous University of Barcelona, Barcelona
Search for more papers by this authorSamuele Iaquinto
Department of Philosophy and Educational Sciences, University of Turin, Italy
Search for more papers by this authorGiuliano Torrengo
Centre for Philosophy of Time, University of Milan and Autonomous University of Barcelona, Barcelona
Search for more papers by this authorSamuele Iaquinto
Department of Philosophy and Educational Sciences, University of Turin, Italy
Search for more papers by this authorAbstract
The aim of this paper is to argue that the adoption of an unrestricted principle of bivalence is compatible with a metaphysics that (i) denies that the future is real, (ii) adopts nomological indeterminism and (iii) exploits a branching structure to provide a semantics for future contingent claims. To this end, we elaborate what we call Flow Fragmentalism, a view inspired by Kit Fine's non-standard tense realism, according to which reality is divided up into maximally coherent collections of tensed facts. In this way, we show how to reconcile a genuinely A-theoretic branching time model with the idea that there is a branch corresponding to the thin red line, that is, the branch that will turn out to be the actual future history of the world.
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