Veritatis Gaudium: Multidisciplinary Journal of Postgraduate Studies

This paper examines the problem of future contingents, which asks how we ascribe truth values to contingent statements about the future, given that classical logic assumes that every statement is either true or false (the principle of bivalence). Aristotle's sea battle paradox in De Interpretatione was aware of this problem and suggested that such statements may be an exception to the principle of bivalence; later logical traditions largely ignored this view. This gave rise to the fatalistic argument, which claims that if future statements are already true or false, then the future is fixed and genuine contingency is impossible. Using conceptual and logical analysis, the paper reconstructs the fatalistic argument, explains Jan Łukasiewicz's three-valued logic as a response, and critically examines five major objections raised by Tomberlin, Quine, Prior, MacFarlane, Belnap and Green, and Barnes and Cameron. The aim is to determine whether the fatalistic argument is logically valid and whether Łukasiewicz's solution successfully avoids fatalism. In doing so, the paper explores Łukasiewicz’s three-valued logic (L3) as an alternative logic, identifies a limitation in the principle of bivalence, and thereby rejects universal bivalence. It also finds that the major objections do not decisively undermine L₃, as claimed. Instead, Łukasiewicz’s logic has the important advantage of rejecting some inference rules in classical logic, such as ex falso quodlibet. The study concludes that, despite criticisms, Łukasiewicz's three-valued logic remains one of the simplest and most philosophically convincing responses to Aristotle's problem.

Open Full Text (PDF)