Abstract
The assumption that the future is open makes well known problems for traditional semantics. According to a commonly held intuition, today's occurrence of the sentence ‘There will be a sea battle tomorrow’, while truth‐valueless today, will have a determinate truth‐value by tomorrow night. Yet given traditional semantics, sentences that are truth‐valueless now cannot later ‘become’ true. Relativistic semantics has been claimed to do a better job of accommodating intuitions about future contingents than non‐relativistic semantics does. However, intuitions about future contingents cannot by themselves give good reasons for shifting to a new paradigm, for despite the initial appearances, standard non‐relativistic semantics (plus an account of truth‐value gaps) can accommodate both intuitions about future contingents.
