The Aporia of Future Directed Beliefs
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The Aporia of Future Directed Beliefs Daniel Rönnedal 1 Received: 5 December 2019 / Accepted: 1 September 2020/ # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract This paper discusses a new aporia, the aporia of future directed beliefs. This aporia contains three propositions: (1) It is possible that there is someone who is infallible that believes something about the future that is not historically settled, (2) it is necessary that someone is infallible if and only if it is necessary that everything she believes is true, and (3) it is necessary that all our beliefs are historically settled. Every claim in this set is intuitively plausible, and there are interesting arguments for or against each of them. Nevertheless, {(1), (2), (3)} entails a contradiction. Consequently, at least one of the sentences in this set must be false. I consider some possible solutions to the problem and discuss some arguments for and against these solutions. Five solutions, in particular, stand out. Three solutions reject (1), one solution rejects (2), and one solution rejects (3). No solution is without problems, and it is not obvious which one we should choose. Yet, we have to give up at least one sentence in {(1), (2), (3)}. This is the nature of an aporia. Keywords Aporia . Future directed beliefs . Infallibility . Historical necessity . The open
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1 Introduction Consider the following set of propositions: (1) It is possible that there is someone who is infallible that believes something about the future that is not historically settled. (2) It is necessary that someone is infallible if and only if it is necessary that everything she believes is true.
* Daniel Rönnedal [email protected]
1
Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
D. Rönnedal
(3) It is necessary that all our beliefs are historically settled (i.e., facts about what someone believes are historically settled). In other words, it is necessary that if an individual x believes that A, then it is historically settled that x believes that A. All these propositions are intuitively plausible, but together they entail a contradiction. This is the aporia of future directed beliefs. It is called the “aporia of future directed beliefs” because (1) talks about beliefs about the future. This puzzle should be interesting to anyone who philosophizes about the concepts of belief, infallibility, historical necessity, the open future, and similar concepts and about the relationships between such notions.1 To justify the claim that {(1), (2), (3)} is inconsistent but that the sentences in this set are intuitively plausible, we shall first say a few more words about (1)–(3) and express these propositions in symbols. “♦A” says that it is possible that A; “■A” says that it is necessary that A; “□A” says that it is historically settled that A; “◇A” says that it is historically possible (open) that A; “BcA” says that c believes that A; “FA” says that it will some time in the future be the case that A; and “Ic” says that c is infallible (“I” is a predicate). “BcA” represents a future direc
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