Future Contingents

Frequently, we make claims about the future, claims that we think could either be true or false, depending on how the future unfolds. For example:

(1) "There will be a sea battle tomorrow."

As John MacFarlane (2002) has noted, a certain puzzle unfolds when we consider what truth value to assign (1). The puzzle is motivated by two competing intuitions. One intuition we'll call the indeterminstic intuition, according to which (at the time of uttering (1)) we think the future is open, and multiple possible histories can unfold. The indeterministic intuition aligns with the way we speak of sentences like (1) at the time of utterance, which is to say it's neither true nor false; there neither has nor has not been a sea battle tomorrow (at the time of utterance). A conflicting intuition is that, (as MacFarlane notes) we can be tempted to reason as follows:

Jake asserted yesterday that there would be a sea battle today.
There is a sea battle today.
So Jake's assertion was true. (MacFarlane 2002: 325)

The sort of reasoning suggest that, when we take the retrospective view we are inclined to think that the utterance 'There will be a sea battle tomorrow' was true (rather than undetermined) at the time of utterance.
But this is directly at odds with the view that utterances of future contingents are neither true nor false at the time of utterance.

Against this background, it seems we have two different strategies of response. Firstly, we can assume what MacFarlane calls the absoluteness of utterance-truth: this assumption is that the truth of a given proposition is not relativised to a context of assessment. This is a widely held position. With the absoluteness of utterance truth in the background, we must argue that EITHER Jake's utterance has an indeterminate truth value OR that it has a truth value (the same truth value it had at the time of utterance). An alternative strategy is to reject the absoluteness of utterance truth and allow that the truth of utterances to be relativised to the context in which they are assessed. This would be a version of truth relativism. The idea would be, roughly, that when the context of assessment of the utterance 'there will be a sea battle tomorrow' was the time of utterance, the utterance is neither true nor false. But if the context of assessment of the utterance is the following day (in the middle of a sea battle, say) then the utterance counts as true. Which strategy do you think is the best?

References:

MacFarlane, John (2002). "Future Contingents and Relative Truth," in The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 53, No. 212.