There’s a certain sect of philosophers who believe that hope, the one thing to which we all cling to provide a little bit of light at the end of the dark and dreary tunnel that is existence, might be entirely illogical. And not just the big hopes, like hoping that an ill relative gets better, but the little ones, the day-to-day ones, like hoping they have your favorite cereal at the grocery store.
The problem starts with a debate about the future. One group, called semantic eternalists, argues that statements like “It will rain tomorrow” are already true or false right now, even if tomorrow hasn’t happened yet, because it is an eternal truth. There will eventually be rain; hoping for rain is a little ridiculous. It’s going to happen at some point; therefore, your hope has been satisfied. Another group says future statements only become true or false when the future actually arrives.
The problem with the eternalist’s argument is that if a statement is already true today, then someone who is hoping for, say, a little bit of sunshine this afternoon should already have their hope satisfied before the afternoon arrives. And then, once the sunniness arrives, the future-looking statement stops being true, so the hope would technically stop being satisfied right when it should feel fulfilled. That’s not how humans experience hope, though.
Hope requires uncertainty. You can’t hope for something you know will definitely happen, or something impossible. But if future statements are already true, and if truth means 100 percent probability, then the uncertainty hope depends on vanishes. Some philosophers have taken this as evidence that eternalism just can’t handle hope.
In a new paper published in Acta Analytica, detailed by StudyFinds, philosopher Jakub Węgrecki argues that the problem isn’t hope itself; it’s that some philosophers have been playing by rules that give hope a weird definition. He suggests that hopes about the future aren’t validated by eternal truths. He’s got a more practical view on an intangible concept: hopes are satisfied at the exact moment the hoped-for event actually occurs. If you hope for a sunny afternoon and then get a sunny afternoon, your hope has been fulfilled. No need for an abstract far off hypothetical sunny afternoon to justify your hope. You had all the practical justification you needed right in front of you.
Węgrecki’s take on the concept of hope is reassuring in that it takes the micro and macro desires that fill our imaginations throughout the day, giving us something to look forward to from one moment to the next, which gives it a direct, immediate sense of tangible payoff. The thing either happened or it didn’t. It’s the kind of practical view on imaginative thinking that we can all sink our teeth into. And all it took to get there was understanding that some of the rules people construct around concepts are maybe a little too complex for their own good.
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