Abstract
Take open‐future Humeanism to comprise the following four tenets: (T1) that truth
supervenes on a mosaic of local particular matters of fact (T2) that there are no necessary
connections between distinct existences (T3) that there is a dynamic present moment, and
(T4) that there are no future facts; that is, contingent propositions about the future obtain
truth values only when their referents are actualised (Tooley 1997). Prima facie this is a
deeply problematic metaphysic for the Humean, since given that the widely accepted
Humean conception (that of David Lewis 1986a) takes all truths (inclusive of nomological
truths) to supervene on an omnitemporal mosaic of local particular matters of fact, if there
are no future facts then the Humean can neither provide laws of nature, nor justify many
everyday inductive inferences (Hüttemann 2014). However, I argue that this eternalist
metaphysic is in tension with at least one of Hume’s central metaphysical claims concerning
causation e.g., that causal regularities may cease to hold at any time. In this paper I propose
and defend one possible open‐future Humean metaphysic which admits of ‘true‐to‐Hume’
causal and nomological facts. Furthermore, although I am happy to concede that induction is
problematic for the open‐future Humean, I demonstrate that it poses no greater threat to
the open‐future conception than it does to the popular Lewisian conception of natural law.