Future Contingents, Supervaluationism, and Relative Truth

The problem of future contingents is one of the most ancient and debated puzzles in Western philosophy, and Supervaluationism is, today, one of the most prominent solutions to the problem. Recently, John MacFarlane has carried a well-known criticism to Supervaluationism (and all other standard approaches to future contingents) and put forward a new solution of the problem of future contingents, which is known as Double Time Reference Theory (DTRT). Here, we compare DTRT with Supervaluationist semantics, and we show that the success of MacFarlane’s criticism crucially depends on the expressivity of the language adopted. Once a reasonable expressive power is granted, however, MacFarlane’s criticism no longer applies.