Presentism and the Problem of Singular Propositions about Non-Present Objects - Limitations of a Proposed Solution (original) (raw)
Related papers
On the Possibility of Presentism with Occurrents
Philosophia, 2021
This paper defends the possibility of admitting occurrents in a presentist ontology. Two ways of doing so are proposed, the first one involves Meinongian presentism. By using the notion of non-existent object and coherently modifying some mereo-logical principle, it is argued, the presentist can allow for occurrents. The second proposal involves ex-concrete objects. Ex-concrete objects, i.e. objects that are contingently not concrete, have been used by Linsky and Zalta (Philosophical Perspectives , 8 (Logic and Language), 431-458, 1994), Williamson (2002) in the modal metaphysics debate, by Orilia (Philosophical Studies, 173 (3), 589-607, 2016) in the presentism-eternalism debate, and by Longenecker (Synthese 195 (11), 5091-5111, 2018) in the debate about material constitution. I argue that, just by admitting ex-concrete objects, it is possible to have occurrents even for the presentist. Of course, in order to do so we must modify our definitions of occurrent and continuant. Nevertheless , I argue that my theory is metaphysically sound, at least for the presentist persuaded by the intuitive claim that there are occurrents, which otherwise she must reject.
DEFENDING PRESENTISM: A Reconciliation of Truth and Speech
For many, what makes Presentism such an attractive theory is its ability to appeal to our intuition of time as a flowing entity; that, in fact, our experience of time and the reality of time are compatible. For it seems that we all experience time as a succession of events, with one occurrence leading into another. However, this commonsensical theory has often ironically been criticized for violating one of the most obvious facts about the world: the notion that truth supervenes on being. The principle according to Baia is as follows: Necessarily, for any true proposition P, there exists something T such that T’s existence necessitates the truth of P.1 Where ‘T’ in this case refers to the truthmaker of proposition ‘P’. So if it is said that there is a large aquatic creature in Loch Ness, then, for the assertion to prove true, there must actually exist such a creature (the truthmaker of the assertion). In this paper, I will attempt to clarify the implications of the truthmaker intuition for the Presentist, as well as offer a hybrid solution that will allow Presentists to speak about non-present events and entities without rejecting the need for truthmakers.
Challenging the Grounding Objection to Presentism
The grounding objection to presentism rests on two premises: (i) every true proposition P has a truthmaker T, and (ii) some claims about the future and past are obviously true. However, if the future and past do not exist, there can be no truthmakers for future and past tensed expressions. Presentists tend not to challenge the premises of the objection. Instead they argue that the present contains all the truthmakers we need. Presentists should challenge the premises instead. First, finding truthmakers in the present only results in the postulation of implausible and/or ethereal entities that ultimately fail to solve the grounding objection. Second, no manifestly absurd consequences follow from accepting the lack of truth-values for tensed expressions. Third, the grounding objection does not just require the assumption that for every truth there is a truthmaker, but also that for every truthmaker there is a truth. I show how one can deny the latter without denying the former. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________
2004
* Apologies to Mark Hinchliff for stealing the title of his dissertation. (See Hinchliff, A Defense of Presentism. As it turns out, however, the version of Presentism defended here is different from the version defended by Hinchliff. See Section 3.1 below.) 1 More precisely, it is the view that, necessarily, it is always true that only present objects exist. At least, that is how I am using the name 'Presentism'. Quentin Smith has used the name to refer to a different view; see his Language and Time. Note that, unless otherwise indicated, what I mean by 'present' is temporally present, as opposed to spatially present.
A new grounding problem for presentism
Logic and Philosophy of Time, 2023
The presentist-if she wants her thesis to be consistent with venerable logical-semantic principles, namely, bivalence and excluded middle-must provide a convincing answer to the grounding problem. Given the idea-already present in classical antiquity-that truth supervenes on being, the grounding problem is used by the eternalist to accuse the presentist of not being in a position to offer an adequate ground for truths that concern the past or future. To address this problem, many thinkers evoke metaphysical doctrines regarding abstract object-a truth about Socrates does not include Socrates himself but only his essence or haecceity. Others seek present grounds for future or past truthsnomic presentism-while still others deny the semantic traditions in question or deny that truth supervenes on being. In this article, I present a new grounding problem to the presentist. Under the assumption that time is infinite, I claim that the presentist does not have at her disposal the foundations for truths that concern infinitely distant objects in the future. Moreover, I present a similar argument to refute 'temporalism', the thesis that at least some truths are temporally indexed. To conclude the argumentative phase, I evaluate the traditional presentist perspective that was advanced in some of the above responses to the typical versions of the problem.
Philosophia
Presentism, some say, is either the analytic triviality that the only things that exist now are ones that exist now or the obviously false claim that the only things that have ever existed or will are ones that exist now. I argue that the correct understanding of presentism is the latter and so understood the claim is not obviously false. To appreciate this one has to see presentism as strictly analogous to anti-Lewisean actualism. What this modal analogue makes evident is that singular tensed statements can have scope ambiguities and so can be thought of as true with the temporal operator represented by the tense read as having wide scope. Secondly, I argue that the analogy with the modal case also makes it clear that presentism must be understood as a thesis of the form: 'the only things that have ever existed or ever will exist stand in relation R to this (present) utterance', and is not a substantive topic for debate until relation R is characterized in non-temporal terms. However, despite the strict analogy, I argue that presentism may be a harder position to defend than actualism, since the truth-maker objection, properly interpreted, with Lewis, as based on a supervenience thesis, has more force as an objection to presentism since supervenience is itself a modal notion.
Toward the logic of tense and aspect in English
1978
Much of the recent work in linguistics has focused on the problem of giving a precise syntax for English. There is now an increasing awareness of the need for some kind of semantic theory. Some recent work of the logician Richard Montague has great promise in this regard. Montague's main goal was to give a completely successful analysis of logical consequence for ordinary language. He approached this end by giving such an analysis for what may be regarded as limited portions of English, or fragments of English. A fragment is a formal language in that it has a rigorous syntax and a model-theoretic semantics. The semantics provides a characterization of the notions of a true sentence (under a given interpretation) and of logical consequence. There are three papers by Montague where he presents such fragments: Montague [3], Montague [4], and Montague [6]. (Henceforth, we shall refer to these papers as EFL, UG, and PTQ, respectively.)