The future, and what might have been

We show that five important elements of the ‘nomological package’— laws, counterfactuals, chances, dispositions, and counterfactuals—needn’t be a problem for the Growing-Block view. We begin with the framework given in Briggsand Forbes (in The real truth about the unreal future. Oxford studies in metaphysics. Oxford University Press, Oxford,2012), and, taking laws as primitive, we show that the Growing-Block view has the resources to provide an account of possibility, and a natural semantics for non-backtracking causal counterfactuals. We show how objective chances might ground a more fine-grained concept of feasibility, and furnished a places in the structure where causation and dispositions might fit. The Growing-Block view, thus understood, provides the resources to explain the close link between modality and tense, so that it predicts modal change as time passes.This account lets us capture not only what the future might hold for us, and also what might have been

The Advance of Florida\u27s Frontier as Determined From Post Office Openings

The geographical diffusion of human habitation throughout the United States has long interested social scientists. Unfortunately a paucity of detailed data has always hampered accurate cartographic representation of the advance of the frontier in the nation. Although the United States has conducted a decennial population census since 1790, meaningful cartographic displays of the advancing settlement frontier that might otherwise be derived from census data in the nineteenth century are obscured by changes in the number, area, and shape of counties. Florida provides an excellent example of such cartographic problems as well as one possible solution