Question Does the law of bivalence demand that a proposition IS either true or false today? What if the truth or falsity of this proposition is a correspondence to a future event that has yet to occur?

Accepted:
March 9, 2008

Comments

I take it that by "bivalence", you mean the principle that every proposition is either true or false. And if we take that principle in unrestricted form---we really do mean every proposition---then, well, it's hard to see how it could fail to imply that the proposition expressed by "There will be a riot in London on 13 January 2076" is either true or false.

If you don't like that conclusion, then you have to abandon bivalence---or, perhaps, the claim that the sentence in question expresses a proposition, though that seems rather worse. But note that you do not have to abandon bivalence, so to speak, across the board. You might still think that every mathematical proposition is either true or false, or that every proposition about the past is either true or false, or.... Perhaps there is something special about the future here.

As you probably know, Michael Dummett argued that one way to understand debates over "realism" takes them to turn upon our attitude towards bivalence regarding propositions about the subject matter in question: So a view that gave up bivalence for statements about the future would be a form of "anti-realism" about the future.

Question Does the law of bivalence demand that a proposition IS either true or false today? What if the truth or falsity of this proposition is a correspondence to a future event that has yet to occur? Accepted:March 9, 2008

Question Does the law of bivalence demand that a proposition IS either true or false today? What if the truth or falsity of this proposition is a correspondence to a future event that has yet to occur?

Accepted:
March 9, 2008