Scotus on future contingency

I mentioned in this post last year that I was working on Scotus' discussion of the problem of future contingents, in his Questions on the Perihermenias, and I said I would discuss it in the future. Alan Rhoda's post on 'alethic openness' has finally got me round to doing so. Alan writes:

For a proposition to be true, what it represents as being the case must
correspond to reality, to what is the case. Likewise, for a proposition to be
true now, what it represents as being the case must correspond to present
reality, to what is the case now. [my emphasis]

Scotus discusses a claim very similar to this in Book I of the Questions, qq 7-9. He disputes the claim apparently made by Rhoda above, namely that the truth of a proposition about the future must correspond in some way to 'present reality'. He writes:

It must be understood that a proposition about the future can be understood to
signify something in the future in two ways. So that the proposition about the
future signifies it to be true now that something in the future will have to be
true [verum esse habebit] (for example, that ‘you will be white at a’ signifies
it now to be in reality so that at time a you will be white). Or it can be
understood that it signifies now that you will be white then: not that it
signifies that it is now such that then you ought to be white, but that it
signifies now that then you will be white. For to signify it to be [the case]
now that you will be white at a, signifies more than to signify that you will be
white at a.

It rather hangs upon what Rhoda means by 'true now'. Scotus argues for something like a redundancy theory of future truth. A proposition that says that S will be P so is (now) true iff it will be P, and false if it will not be P. If you mean by 'is now true' something like 'something exists now in reality that makes the proposition true' then Scotus would disagree (and so probably would I). If you mean that 'now' simply indicates the present tense of the 'is' in 'is true', then this is harmless and trivially true.

I think Scotus puts this very neatly, and we do have to take seriously his claim that "to signify it to be [the case] now that you will be white at a, signifies more than to signify that you will be white at a."

See also my discussion of rain tomorrow.