ABSTRACT
The words reinforce the equivocation between what was uttered and the act of uttering it. If what was uttered was the sentence in the future simple sense, then it expresses the same proposition as, said at the same time as the event, or, said afterwards. There are many arguments for fatalism. They all depend on the interplay of utterances made on different occasions in different tenses, and how some of these are naturally described as being true. Three crucial ambiguities confuse people: the correct analysis of the future simple tense; the meaning of the word 'true'; and rules for rendering oratio recta into oratio obliqua and back again. A mere difference of temporal perspective makes all the difference to whether a proposition is true or false, or whether a modal operator commutes with negation; whereas it is generally held that a difference of time should make no difference.
