Philosophers Claim Hope Is Impossible. New Paper Shows Why They’re Mistaken

Hope springs eternal? Not for many philosophers, but the solution may lie in specifying when a hope is truly satisfied.

Some philosophers believe hope creates unsolvable logical contradictions. Not hope for unlikely things like winning the lottery, but any hope at all. Hope for sunny weather tomorrow? Logically problematic. Hope that your friend enjoyed their vacation last week? Also problematic.

These arguments may sound silly (and depressing) at first, but they can be quite compelling. A real philosophical debate has led serious scholars to argue that under certain theories of truth and time, hoping for anything breaks down into paradoxes. Now, a paper by philosopher Jakub Węgrecki from Jagiellonian University in Poland argues these hope-suppressing theories are wrong.

Published in Acta Analytica, his research shows how to resolve these puzzles without abandoning the theories in question entirely.

The Problem With Hoping for Tomorrow

Here’s the puzzle. Philosophers disagree about when statements about the future become true. One camp, called semantic eternalists, believes the statement “It will rain tomorrow” is already either true or false right now, even though tomorrow hasn’t happened yet. This is a view about how language works and what propositions are, not just metaphysics. The other camp, temporalists, believes that statement only becomes true or false when tomorrow actually arrives.

This creates a weird problem when semantic eternalists try to explain how hope works. Let’s say a hypothetical woman named Amy is traveling to Vienna next week and hopes it will be sunny. Philosophers traditionally say a hope is satisfied when what you’re hoping for is true. So Amy’s hope should be satisfied when what she hopes (“it will be sunny in Vienna”) is true at that time.

But if semantic eternalists are right, and “It will be sunny in Vienna next week” is already true today, doesn’t that mean Amy’s hope is already satisfied before she even packs her bags? Stranger still, under that traditional rule, the future-tensed proposition stops coming out true at the moment the sunny day arrives. So her hope would stop being satisfied right when the sunny day shows up.

That’s completely backwards from how hope actually works.

There’s a second problem. Hope requires believing something might happen but also might not. You can’t genuinely hope for something if you’re certain it will happen, and you can’t hope for something you know is impossible. If statements about the future are already true or false, and if there’s a connection between truth and probability, what Węgrecki calls the Truth-Probability Connection (where true propositions must have 100% probability), doesn’t that eliminate the “maybe” that hope requires?

Some philosophers, including Berit Brogaard, have argued these puzzles show that semantic eternalism can’t accommodate hope as an object of our mental states. If your theory creates these contradictions, something has to give.

The Solution: Revising How Hope Gets Satisfied

Węgrecki argues the problems arise from a mistaken assumption about when hopes are satisfied. He proposes changing the rule itself.

Traditionally, philosophers said: a hope is satisfied when its content is true. Węgrecki argues that’s wrong for hopes about time. When Amy hopes for sunny weather in Vienna, she’s hoping for “There will be a time when it’s sunny in Vienna.” That statement might already be true in an eternal sense. But Węgrecki proposes that the hope isn’t satisfied by that eternal truth. Instead, the hope is satisfied at the specific future time when it’s actually sunny.

Consider a package delivery. The package might already be on the truck (the eternal truth that it’s coming), but you don’t get satisfaction until it arrives at your door (the actual moment when it’s there). Węgrecki is saying we need a new rule for when the hope counts as satisfied.

Before next week, the sunny time hasn’t happened yet, so the hope isn’t satisfied. When next week comes and it’s actually sunny, that’s when the hope is satisfied. The eternal truth “There exists a future sunny time” was always true, but the satisfaction of the hope depends on which time we’re at, not just on whether that eternal statement is true.

This approach fits naturally with what philosophers call the B-theory of time, where past, present, and future all exist in different temporal locations. Change happens because the world has different properties at different times, not because truth itself changes.

What About Probability?

For the probability problem, Węgrecki questions the Truth-Probability Connection itself: the assumption that if something is true, it must have a probability of 100%.

That assumption, he argues, confuses truth with settledness or inevitability. A statement about the future can be true without being locked in or predetermined. The actual future might be one way, even though other possible futures could have happened instead. If that’s the case, then true statements about the future can still have non-trivial probabilities in the relevant sense.

This might sound contradictory at first. How can something be true but uncertain? Węgrecki thinks the oddness is about how we communicate, not about what’s actually the case. When someone asserts “It will rain tomorrow,” they’re claiming to know it will rain. But if they know it will rain, they can’t also call it unlikely. That’s what makes certain statements sound weird, not any deep logical connection between truth and probability.

For hopes about the past (like hoping your friend had fun last week), Węgrecki suggests thinking about credence (your confidence level) rather than objective chance. What matters for hope isn’t whether the outcome is objectively open, but whether you’re genuinely uncertain about it. Amy can hope Mark had fun because her confidence isn’t settled at 100% or 0%, even if the fact itself is already determined.

Why Philosophers Care About Hope

This might seem like pointless academic hairsplitting. But these questions touch on fundamental issues about how we experience time and how our thoughts connect to reality.

The debate also links to bigger questions in physics. Does the future already exist somewhere, like a place we haven’t visited yet? Or does it come into being moment by moment? Semantic eternalism is often associated with the block universe view, where past, present, and future all exist in a four-dimensional spacetime.

Węgrecki’s paper shows that philosophers who believe truths are eternal don’t have to give up that view just because hope creates puzzles. Sometimes the solution isn’t to abandon your theory but to understand it more carefully. The problems arose from applying the wrong satisfaction rule to hopes, not from anything fundamentally broken about eternal truth.

There are still loose ends. Not every philosopher will accept Węgrecki’s controversial views about time and probability. And similar puzzles might arise for other emotions like desire, fear, or regret.

But for now, hope survives these philosophical challenges. Amy can hope for sunny weather in Vienna without breaking logic. The philosophers can keep debating while the rest of us just check the forecast.

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