The closed future

Many philosophers take for granted that there is a strong pre‐theoretical intuition that the future is open and that it is worth trying to make sense of that intuition in theoretical terms. In this paper, I give a characterisation of the ordinary intuition in terms of three elements: our sense of agency, the difference in normativity between memories and expectations and naïve understanding of causality. Those intuitions allow us to pin down certain desiderata that an account of openness should respect. Firstly, the fact that the future is open is not merely due to our epistemic situation (the fact that we do not know what the future will bring). Secondly, openness is not merely a matter of nomological indeterminism; even if indeterminism is part of what makes the future open, it cannot be the end of the story. Thirdly, openness requires more than ‘modal flexibility’ (i.e. the fact that the future could be different from what actually will be). I provide a minimal theory of openness, which respects those desiderata and which is based on the semantic notion of unsettledness and the metaphysical notion of indeterminacy. Roughly, the future is open if future‐tensed claims concerning contingent matters are such that their truth value is presently unsettled, and they are semantically unsettled because the future is metaphysically indeterminate. I then argue that this theory is compatible with what I call the closed future view. According to the latter, there is only one way in which things will go, although, given indeterminism, it is unsettled which way it is. I then consider an objection to my compatibility claim: if the open future claim is metaphysically substantive, there should be a way to differentiate it from the closed future scenario. I consider whether a friend of openness could rely on a dynamic metaphysics of time (such as presentism, or the growing block view) in order to differentiate their position from the closed future scenario. I argue that the appeal to a dynamic universe is ineffective.