A three-valued temporal logic for future contingents

Abstract

It is now recognized that Lukasiewicz’s three-valued logic cannot supply a satisfactory treatment of future contingents. The defense of Lukasiewicz’s three-valued logic can be found in the work of Prior. Inspired by Prior’s suggestions to future contingents, we propose a new three-valued temporal logic FCP, in which the interpretation of negation differs from Lukasiewicz’s negation. It is shown in the logic that contingent propositions have the indeterminate truth-value while logically true propositions like the law of excluded middle have the determinate truth-values. We discuss some features of the proposed logic in comparison with the other approaches to future contingents in the literature.